JUMP START Blog and Online Community

While the delivery may change with time and technology, there will never be a suitable replacement for "word of mouth". Nothing will ever help your business grow the way that personal recommendations can. The same is true for negative feedback, as well. One poor mention of your business can have a significant impact on your bottom line. 

Expressing all of the various nuances of your brand consistently across all channels is essential to developing brand awareness.  Before you can do that, though, you need to determine your brand's voice. How will you say the things you need to say? 

You know it, and I know it: the holidays are made up of about 20% tradition and 80% marketing. Reminding your customers what you have and why they need it requires extensive planning, flexibility, and commitment. To put it plainly, there's no time for rest when there are prospective customers waiting to be charmed.

Planning is a universally essential and neglected task. Across every industry and at every level of organizational structure, there are the "bad seeds" who seem to have skipped school the day that planning was taught. Initially, it never really appears to be a problem. The issue will absolutely creep up on the guilty non-planners, though, regardless of their role. Marketers, too, are extremely susceptible to the pitfalls of failing to plan properly. There's a reason that marketing professionals carry on about marketing strategies, editorial calendars, buyer personas, and so forth. While none of it is fun, it's all part of the very necessary planning process.

Okay, the days of pulling the wool over the eyes of the consumer are over. There’s not a soul alive today who believes that social media is about anything other than marketing. Sharing with friends is secondary, and our society has come to accept it… embrace it, even. Marketers and business owners who pretend otherwise are terribly behind the times. 

We hear a lot about how businesses can benefit from lead scoring.  In fact, some marketing automation platforms go so far as to say it’s a “must” for any inbound marketing program.  However, our friends at Hubspot tell us that there are certain instances where lead scoring is actually a waste of a marketer’s time, and we tend to agree.

In the world of inbound marketing, we approach the marketing process in terms of four primary components: attract, convert, close, and delight.  In that first stage, it’s all about getting your business in front of the right audience. Attracting a well-targeted audience is critical; otherwise, you’re wasting your time and energy.

The majority of marketers today will tell you that content marketing is nothing without a plan. That may be a bit of an overstatement, but the underlying concept really hits home.  Creating a solid plan for your marketing initiatives gives you a much better shot at success, and a detailed content marketing strategy should be a part of that plan.

The term “marketing automation” is well on its way to becoming a marketing industry buzzword, and rightfully so.  At this point, if you are an entrepreneur or business owner of any kind, you’ve surely heard the phrase used a time or two. So, by now, you must be wondering what all the fuss is about.

There’s no denying that marketing a small business can be a challenge during any time of the year.  There are certain times, however, when that challenge seems almost insurmountable.  The holidays are a notoriously busy time for businesses and marketers, and it’s so easy for your message to be lost in all the noise. Another crazy time for marketing happens to be right around the corner:  back to school season.