NthView

This is a great list from the people over at Hubspot.


"When it comes to optimizing and improving your marketing programs, many marketers tend to think they need to go through these radical undertakings that completely overhaul their entire marketing strategy. While major change can sometimes be good, a lot of times, marketers overlook the little things they can do to incrementally improve their marketing results."


Your Master List of Low-Hanging Marketing Fruit

The truth is while they refer to it as a list of low hanging fruit I suspect that most businesses are probably only carrying out 5-10 of the items on the list, which makes this much more of a total marketing plan if one can fully implement these items.

Thanks, Ed

How to Conduct Competitive Analysis to Step Up Your Content Strategy

How does a startup attract successful people who are already involved in other ventures? | LinkedIn:

I think it really comes down to a nurturing process. What I mean by that is a startup should think about the people they are going to need, programmers, sales, marketers etc. and then they should start early by connecting with those people via local meetups, social media and Linkedin.

For those that they are able to connect with (it may be a whole pool in each category) they should follow any blogs that they are writing, retweet, comment, and share any interesting things they see those people talking about and hopefully that will lead to a degree of familiarity, which may make it easy to approach them at some time in the future.

This of course is a drip feed process, if you need someone right away this nurturing process isn't going to work, but if you start early getting people interested in what you are doing and being interested in what they are doing then you will find that it is a pretty good way of finding good people when it's your turn to grow.

Thanks,

Ed

"When you go to a tech meetup, tech party, or read tech headlines, it’s easy to get swept away into thinking things are soaring for a number of startups. Company xyz now has a zillion users, another company just went viral, overnight sensation, etc."

Bijan Sabet • Patience & Persistence

I've always liked Bijan's take on things both from an investor as well as an entrepreneur's view. He really hits the nail on the head here with some realities; many companies we consider successful today really struggled for long periods before they became well known and that growth is not always an upward trend. I myself love attending local tech events and love hearing about the success of startup companies and each time I do I keep thinking wow! am I doing enough with marketing and business development to make sure we come out on top? and then we buckle down and increase our efforts.

So, any company that is out there definitely needs to be attending the local tech events (which most are as seen in the local Boston attendance) and you need to look for those companies that are having success and talk to them, see what they are doing and learn from their marketing and customer acquisition process. It may be hard to get info from a direct competitor but you can keep an eye out along the edges of what they are doing, however, you can look at all other companies and see what you can apply from their activities. All companies have to promote their products (marketing) and find new customers (sales) and develop customers use of the product (customer service) etc. So, look, listen, learn, and apply.

Thanks,

Ed

Why Marketing Automation is not Inbound Marketing | Business 2 Community