Business Growth Blog

Determining what should be on your website, let alone how it should look and function, is not a task for the faint of heart. It's one of those projects that takes a lot of hard thinking and seems never to end (which it shouldn't - you should be continually working to drive better results from your site). However, there is one thing you can do to make it easier, save time, and ensure you're keeping up with - or surpassing - industry trends: a competitor analysis.

Here are 5 ways a competitor analysis can help you create a better website:

Back in the day, it wasn't such a challenge to figure out what to do for marketing. Phonebook, a mailer, maybe a trade show or two - oh, and don't forget - dial for dollars! But everything is different now that "Google has the answers to life," as I tell my kids (especially my 12-year-old son who always asks, "Why?" - "I have no idea, look it up!" I say).

Your prospects and customers are doing the same thing when they have questions - looking it up. This explosion of information on the Internet has opened up opportunities for businesses to get in front of their target buyers and gain market share, but it's also making sales and marketing increasingly complex. The most important thing business owners, CEO's, and other executives in charge of driving growth can do is to constantly stay in the know about the growing number of marketing strategies available. Otherwise, they may get left in the dust as their competition passes them by.

If you're not currently doing inbound marketing, take a moment to watch this short video and see if it's something you should consider as part of your upcoming growth initiatives.

One of the age old questions companies ask people is "how did you hear about us?"

That is one of the most important pieces of information you can gather. Unfortunately, many companies I talk to don't have a clear process for how to collect or leverage that data to drive important business decisions.

By effectively tracking lead source, you can fully evaluate where you get your best customers and how that impacts your business growth. Here's an example of how it can work:

Many organizations are turning to inbound marketing to help them increase awareness, get more meetings, and build a stronger sales pipeline. Here are some articles and resources that can help you deepen your understanding of inbound marketing, determine if it’s right for you, and start formulating a plan for your organization.

You know what they say: You have to spend money to make money. But finding the right marketing tactics to invest in can be tricky, and the consequences have a huge impact on an organization’s growth trajectory - either positively or negatively.

Here are 2 common ways businesses often lose money on their marketing investments. Avoid them like the plague!

I was watching The Profit the other day, and Marcus Lemonis said something that I also feel strongly about:

“If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business. If you can’t track what’s selling or not selling, you can’t do any forecasting to build inventory. You can’t even monitor trends or customer behavior. You have no shot at success.”

We're ultra busy, and taking extra time to input contact data is...annoying to say the least. Most of us just put the minimum amount of information into our contact database as fast as we can and go on our merry way.

That's all fine and dandy – until we want to send a message to a specific group of people, and we have no way to segment out contacts based on certain criteria. Or, we think we have a list of 3000 people, only to find out that only 200 of them have email addresses. Bummer!

The most important part of sales and marketing is to understand who is on our contact list (and who we want to be on the list). My team has spent a lot of time working with our clients to clean up their contacts and implement processes to collect and report on the data.

When we validate contact data, the 4 most important things we look for are:

The people "in your world" are the backbone of all your marketing and sales efforts. When developing any kind of business growth strategy, the first thing you want to hammer out is: who do you want to be your customer?

The ultimate goal of sales and marketing is to find these target prospects and get them into your contact database so you can continue communicating with them.

Unfortunately, most of us don't spend enough time "taking care" of our contacts. We throw them into our database willy-nilly with no strategic thought into who they really are, what we need to know about them, or how to organize them. They become just another meaningless contact in our database.

One of the first questions I ask my prospects is, "How many contacts do you have?" Interestingly, most of them don't really know. And if they can throw a number at me, they can't tell me much about the people on the list.

Don't let this happen to you! Below are the 2 most important types of contact reports you should be able to run. If your contacts aren't organized in a fashion that lets you run these reports, it's better to fix it now than to wait until you have an even bigger mess!

Sellers are on the front lines talking to prospects and customers all day long. They have deep company and industry expertise and know what messaging elicits the best responses. If anyone understands what information will resonate with your ideal buyer persona, it’s them.

But too often, sales and marketing are not aligned, and sellers aren’t at the table when it comes to developing the corporate content strategy or lending their experience and expertise to the content creation process. Here are some ideas about how to get your sales team engaged in creating useful blog articles that prospects and customers want to read:

Many organizations are turning to sales enablement to ensure that sellers have the tools, processes, and content they need to meet the new demands of savvy buyers armed to the teeth with information. Here are some articles and resources that can help you deepen your understanding of sales enablement, determine if it’s right for you, and start formulating a plan for your organization.