JUMP START Blog and Online Community

...and perhaps more importantly, why should you care? 

Around this same time last year, our Founder and Managing Director, Lisa Kirschner, wrote about email brevity and how keeping your messages short and sweet will benefit your business in the long run. As you surely know, today's digital environment is evolving on what seems to be a minute-by-minute basis. So, it's worth asking if email brevity is still the way to go.  Are email recipients looking for more "meat" in your messages now that our calendars have rolled over into a new year? The answer is "that depends". 

Building a presence on Instagram is a great way to introduce your brand to a new audience. This concept is easy for most business owners to grasp. This is a very fresh and engaging platform, especially when compared to social networks like Facebook or Linkedin, which have been around for more than a decade. The part that is difficult for most is how and where to begin. Here are a few tips to get you on your way to #instafame:

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. 

Hubspot CMO Mike Volpe (@mvolpe) recently released a fantastic Slideshare presentation about building and managing a powerful marketing team. This presentation is dead-on and offers some valuable advice about important factors that you should consider when recruiting, hiring, interviewing and running a results-focused group of marketers.

Are you afraid to give away too much information to your site visitors and followers? Don't be!

According to Hubspot, that's one of the top three fears that stop people from embracing the inbound methodology. But don't let this hold you back, since educating your visitors is one of the MOST important things you can do gain a following and attract people to your brand.

Other top concerns, says Hubspot, include changing an existing sales process or sharing sales and revenue data with marketing teams (who, ironically, are typically expected to increase sales and revenue).

Read this spooooooky post from Hubspot to learn more about why people are afraid to utilize Hubspot and inbound—and what you can do to overcome these fears and get a better ROI on your marketing:

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/scary-fears-to-overcome