Modern Digital Presence and Lead Generation for Executive Coaching Business

Modern Digital Presence and Lead Generation for Executive Coaching Business

by | May 1, 2020 | Case Studies

Modern Digital Presence and Lead Generation for Executive Coaching Business

Business Challenge Summary

Our client runs an executive coaching business that grew through professional referrals but had little online presence, including an outdated website and an inactive LinkedIn profile. This partner wanted to improve her digital presence to target local executives experiencing significant career barriers within a 25-mile radius.

She needed strategic marketing advice to questions like 1) where to focus her efforts 2) what immediate tasks to perform and how, and 3) which marketing tactics to try, would help grow her business. Along with strategic clarity,, our client also knew that she needed help to effectively execute those tactics on a consistent basis, both digitally and non-digitally.

However, she did not have the time or expertise to undertake these endeavors on her own, so she turned to &Marketing for support.

&Marketing’s Approach

Based on our client’s desire for a ‘flexible, yet affordable’ approach, &Marketing employed a program of monthly execution support, including both coaching and digital marketing execution, and augmented those projects as needed. The program included the following deliverables:

  • Clear, focused messaging on three distinct target audiences
  • New website, including branding
  • Data analysis and reporting to show what is working and what is not
  • Social media upgrade and posting calendar
  • Content calendar (one blog post per month)
  • Quarterly email newsletter (including links to blog posts and calls to action)
  • Senior-level advice and coaching

Results

As our client partner’s outsourced marketing department, our team was able to create a modern website with clear messaging, along with defined service offerings and thought leadership content that improved SEO for local search results. We also refresh and activated a LinkedIn profile that establishes a distinct and professional brand voice. Finally, we implemented more accurate tracking of website engagement metrics and launched her first quarterly newsletter.

These deliverables resulted in:

  • Regular content creation and distribution to attract and retain customers
  • A near 50% increase in web traffic due to a modern digital presence
  • 5 leads generated from quarterly newsletter and organic search

I couldn’t find the right marketing people to help me meet a goal I’ve had for years. I am happy to say I have a new, modern website and am consistently communicating digitally to my former clients and partners to grow my business!”

Modern Website & LinkedIn Presence

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Content Strategy, Execution & Distribution

Lead Generation: 5 Leads After First Newsletter

Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?

We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.

About the Authors:

Marketing Manager Dexter Burgess takes the lead on implementing new tactics and promoting change through data-driven strategies. Dex works hard at client relations through consistent communication and positive feedback, never settling until the customer is understood and happy.

About &Marketing:

&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.

Horrible Bosses Are The Worst, But What Can We Learn From Them?

Horrible Bosses Are The Worst, But What Can We Learn From Them?

by | Mar 31, 2020 | Insights

Horrible Bosses Are The Worst, But What Can We Learn From Them?

Written By Dexter Burgess

On

A boss can make or break a job. A bad one can make your work life unbearable, but a good one is just…the best. For many of us, much of our time is spent working, so having a boss you like and respect goes a long way. 

A podcast called “Caffeinated Convos & Horrible Bosses” dives deep into this topic. It’s hosted by Lauren Williams, Chief Boss Lady of Harmony HR Experts, and features a new guest each week, where they share stories of their best and worst bosses — and all that we can learn from both. 

In her third episode, Lauren speaks with our very own Rajat Kapur, Founder and Managing Director at &Marketing. While it can be entertaining to hear about other people’s horror stories, the episode also serves as a lesson for all of us on how we can apply these stories to our own situation. For example, when Raj was going through a tough time with a bad boss early in his career, a mentor told him, “Take it with you.  Make sure you never forget the way you feel right now with the poor management and leadership. Then, when you’re the boss, do better.” How profound is that? What a way to make lemonade when life gives you lemons.  

We encourage you to give the episode a listen and think about:

  • What you can learn from your bad boss?

  • What NOT to do if you supervise other people? 

Check out the full episode here!

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

7 Reasons Your Businss Needs A Referral Program

7 Reasons Your Businss Needs A Referral Program

by | Jan 23, 2020 | Business & Marketing Strategy, Insights

7 Reasons Your Businss Needs A Referral Program

Written By Dexter Burgess

On

In the midst of the corona-virus pandemic, companies— as they should be— are focused on taking care of their most important audiences: their employees and existing customers. Lead generation has taken a backseat, as leaders look to either preserve this budget for when things settle, or reallocate it to more pressing areas. This is the right move, as most lead gen communications would be neither socially nor financially responsible at the current moment, unless your product or service is a critical necessity during this crisis. Anything else may feel exploitative, and right now we only need empathy.

Despite this, we don’t recommend that growing businesses pause all marketing activity. Why? Because although human health is of utmost priority right now, we recognize that for many of you, the health of your business is also at stake. When this terrible turn of events does begin to turn around, you may feel as though you’re starting at square one, scrambling to make up ground as quickly as possible. You’ll likely increase your spend on lead generation, but you’ll be pitted against a more competitive landscape than usual, as many others will have the same idea. By keeping some marketing activities turned on, you will lessen this effect.

So, which marketing activities do you focus on right now? In this post, we’ve outlined three foundational marketing tactics to execute or maintain during a crisis. When you do reactivate your lead gen and the world rights itself, your business will be in a better position for success.

1. Take a look under the hood…of your website and complete an SEO audit

Conducting a semi-regular SEO audit of your website is a marketing best practice, but it often falls through the cracks. The real world gets in the way, and marketers are pulled in a variety of different directions. We also often face clients or organizational higher-ups who find it difficult to understand the value of SEO, since results aren’t immediate. Prioritizing SEO is important, though, because it enables your website to rank for certain keywords related to your offering. In other words, when a prospective customer types a related keyword or phrase into Google, your website will appear within the first few pages of results. SEO ensures your target audience is always able to find you through an organic search, using your most relevant keywords.

Before running the audit, you should first check out your SEO Score, which you can do for free. This will give you the opportunity to understand just how much work you have to do. It also allows you to compare yourself against competitors and set realistic expectations for what you can achieve going forward with your site. 

After you’ve obtained your SEO score, it’s time for the audit. The good news is that there are plenty of great tools online to help you do it, including, but not limited to:

Once you’ve used one of these tools to complete your SEO audit, you should receive an output document that provides areas for improvement. The below screenshot is a sample audit for &Marketing, using SEMRush.

 As you can see, this sample company has a little bit of work to do. From this page, we can identify the most pressing issues and develop a strategy to make improvements. Obviously, there are a few technical aspects to solve for, such as site speed, but there are things that are easy to do that don’t involve back-end manipulation.

Update Keyword Research

First, do keyword research to determine the gaps within organic rankings and where competitors are outranking you for high value terms. If you find you’re not ranking for certain keywords but should be, tweak your website copy to ensure it includes those words or phrases (but avoid keyword stuffing!). 

Install an SEO Plug-in

Second, implement an SEO plug-in. If you’re on WordPress, we recommend Yoast SEO, as it shows us if your pages are green (SEO is great!), yellow (opportunity to optimize SEO) or red (SEO needs some work!). This helps optimize each page of your site.

Enhance Your Site’s Security

Finally, as we look to the future, there are changes on the horizon. Privacy and accessibility issues are poised to become more prominent and have the potential for legal action. Check your state and federal guidelines – including those of your main audiences (hello GDPR!) – to see what you might need to add or amend. We recommend the WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool to ensure all of your forms are secure and that they have cookie policies and bars installed. You can even add a browser extension, which provides you an overview of issues, so you can nip them in the bud before they become a legal issue. 

Once you’ve optimized your site, it takes a good three to six months to see major changes organically. Since your lead generation is on the back-burner right now, you can use this time to get your SEO and website up to speed (pun intended).

For further information about SEO audits, aHREFs wrote this great piece!

2. Generate Content 

As you optimize your site for SEO, the updated keyword research will show you which keywords or phrases your audience has searched for when they’ve found your website, as well as any other keywords that are relevant to your industry or used by competitors. These keywords provide inspiration for creating content that will both resonate with your audience and begin to climb its way up Google organically. Content will also fuel your lead gen efforts later on, so it’s good to get prepared now if you have the time.

Given that many businesses are slowing down and thought leadership and professional development events have been cancelled or postponed, your audience may be spending more time online to consume content, sharpen their skills, and take advice from thought leaders. 

Creating digital content around keywords and topics with high search volume is an excellent way to educate your target audience on topics they care about. Important to note, though, that during this time of crisis, you want to be sensitive with the content you produce. For example, you could consider how the pandemic impacts your industry, customers, and prospects, and create a point-of-view blog post with advice on how to navigate the current situation. You could even poll your audience via email or social media asking, “What do you want to hear from us right now?” There’s a way to bring value to your audience, without being promotional or exploitative. 

If you already have consistent content in place, then you could instead use this time to assess your content’s performance so far and determine any changes you should make to optimize your strategy in the coming months. For example, at &Marketing, we regularly use a Business Intelligence & Analytics platform to dig deep into our audience and the terms and phrases they use online. Through this, we can keep a pulse on what they’re searching for, optimize our content to reach them organically, and identify topics that will convert and drive leads. We’re also able to precisely measure the value of each piece of content so that we can make changes as needed. 

3. Optimize your current marketing strategy with Business Intelligence & Analytics

As you optimize your site for SEO, the updated keyword research will show you which keywords or phrases your audience has searched for when they’ve found your website, as well as any other keywords that are relevant to your industry or used by competitors. These keywords provide inspiration for creating content that will both resonate with your audience and begin to climb its way up Google organically. Content will also fuel your lead gen efforts later on, so it’s good to get prepared now if you have the time.

Given that many businesses are slowing down and thought leadership and professional development events have been cancelled or postponed, your audience may be spending more time online to consume content, sharpen their skills, and take advice from thought leaders. 

Creating digital content around keywords and topics with high search volume is an excellent way to educate your target audience on topics they care about. Important to note, though, that during this time of crisis, you want to be sensitive with the content you produce. For example, you could consider how the pandemic impacts your industry, customers, and prospects, and create a point-of-view blog post with advice on how to navigate the current situation. You could even poll your audience via email or social media asking, “What do you want to hear from us right now?” There’s a way to bring value to your audience, without being promotional or exploitative. 

If you already have consistent content in place, then you could instead use this time to assess your content’s performance so far and determine any changes you should make to optimize your strategy in the coming months. For example, at &Marketing, we regularly use a Business Intelligence & Analytics platform to dig deep into our audience and the terms and phrases they use online. Through this, we can keep a pulse on what they’re searching for, optimize our content to reach them organically, and identify topics that will convert and drive leads. We’re also able to precisely measure the value of each piece of content so that we can make changes as needed.

BI is particularly valuable for growing businesses, as it:

  • Enhances cross-functional marketing strategies
  • Identifies cost savings within digital campaigns
  • Provides insights needed to create a strategic road map for growth
  • Identifies target audiences
  • Equips sales teams with warmer leads
  • Provides intel for potential expansion areas
  • Improves customer and client acquisition/retention through insights from sales and audience geographic

In Summary

We hope this post has provided valuable guidance for you as you work to navigate the unknowns of our current climate and prepare your business for the coming weeks and months ahead. Like most effective business tactics, the activities we’ve recommended here (doing an SEO audit, building your content library, and conducting an in-depth analysis) will require some level of time and resources.  If you, like many companies, have halted paid advertising and lead generation, redirecting your focus to these marketing fundamentals may help ensure that you’re set-up for success once the storm passes. 

We wish you, your team, and your business good health! 🧡

About the Author

As a Marketing Director at &Marketing, Paul Ferguson uses his 16 years of B2B marketing experience to help clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies backed by data, to effectively reach client’s desired audiences. Paul graduated from La Salle University with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and a double minor in Marketing and Business Administration. Visit Paul’s LinkedIn.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

How Market Intelligence Insights Improve Marketing Strategy

How Market Intelligence Insights Improve Marketing Strategy

by | Nov 20, 2019 | Business Intelligence & Analytics, Insights

How Market Intelligence Insights Improve Marketing Strategy

Written By Dexter Burgess

On

Market Intelligence can address a wide range of business problems, such as improving a company’s marketing strategy during a period of changing or intensifying competition, setting a more effective pricing strategy, or determining whether to expand into new markets. The information available to companies to help solve any given business problem is often uncoordinated and unsystematic. As a result, companies suffer from unreliable, incomplete, and often contradictory information when assessing these business problems.

“There is nothing more necessary than good intelligence to frustrate a designing enemy and nothing requires greater pains to obtain.”

— George Washington

 

What is Market Intelligence?

At the very core, a market intel is an external understanding that was not previously possessed. The purpose of market intelligence is to generate insight, new understanding, and implications to support strategy choice and action. Insights help a business create a common understanding of both current and likely future competitive situations and provide early warning of market threats and opportunities.

The ultimate goal of market intelligence is to inform decision making and action. In addition to an understanding of the external operating environment, strategic action necessitates a deep understanding of an organization’s internal strategy to determine competitive context and opportunities. It is this combined, internal and external view that enables insight to outwit and outmaneuver your competition

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
— Mark Twain

How are Insights Developed?

Market insights are developed through a process of data collection, synthesis, and analysis. Analytic methodologies and frameworks are often used for organizing, evaluating, and interpreting information. These tools focus on data gathering and analysis, and while they make it easier to spot trends and structure thinking, in and of themselves, they do NOT generate insights. The steps for developing insights include:

  1. Determine and articulate the business issue
  2. Human and published, internal and external information collection and synthesis
  3. Data analysis to identify insights – trends, patterns, and discontinuities
  4. Identification of implication through discussion of insights in context of the business strategy, current position, and capabilities
  5. Create the story and communicate to generate action

Business issues will vary depending on your unique market dynamics; e.g. speed of change, consolidation, level of disruption, new entrants, shifting consumer demands, new technology/product offerings, etc. Critical business issues are often overlooked as an organization’s focus too frequently rests on more tactical questions such as looking for details behind the latest news headline or competitor announcement. While perhaps nice to know, those tactical questions don’t provide the level of actionable insights that can be gained from identifying an underlying business issue. Understanding the root of the intelligence need is one of the first and most critical steps to developing actionable insights.

“Communications without intelligence is noise; intelligence without communications is irrelevant.”
— Gen. Alfred Gray

What is the Value of Market Intelligence?

First and foremost, market intelligence provides a business with a common and informed understanding of both its current and likely future competitive marketplace. Having this basis of common understanding creates a heightened level of market acumen across an organization, aiding it to foster strategies to out-think and out-perform competitors. Market intelligence informs decision making and action.

Additionally, having an improved understanding of your business’ operating environment also heightens awareness of and protection of your own proprietary information assets. This resulting counterintelligence mindset helps an organization in the discovery and ability to neutralize competitors’ intelligence activities.

“The greatest derangement of mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.”
— Louis Pasteur

 

Implications for Businesses

While every business needs market insight, businesses often struggle to commit the resources, time, and ongoing investment necessary to build a comprehensive market intelligence program. The developmental process for starting up an internal intelligence program averages 1-2 years; it takes another 3-4 years before that program is fully optimized and truly part of a company’s culture.

Intelligence is an investment, its expensive. That doesn’t mean; however, that it’s out of reach for any businesses. Creating internal networks or virtual teams to track and benchmark critical metrics for your business is a good place to start. Identification of 1-3 critical business issues the network can work to address, with or without the support of external consulting services, can provide a foundation from which to build improved information collection, sharing and insight across an organization.

“If you think intelligence is expensive, try ignorance.”
— David Jimenez

 

Want to learn more about how market intelligence could directly impact your company’s ability to generate insights and inform decision making? Contact an expert at &Marketing for a free consultation.

 

Contact &Marketing

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

The Basics Of Marketing Automation

The Basics Of Marketing Automation

by | Apr 30, 2019 | Business & Marketing Strategy, Insights

The Basics Of Marketing Automation

Written By Dexter Burgess

On

Marketing automation tools have revolutionized the marketing industry and caused marketing leaders to reconsider their marketing technology software. Despite the variety of tools available to the modern day Marketer, 27% of companies still feel like they are “new” to marketing automation.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to the software tools and platforms available to marketers that simplify everyday tasks, like sending emails and scheduling social media blasts, to generating more leads and optimizing ROI. Let’s break down the difference between the associated tools versus platforms.

Marketing automation tools are fairly limited in their capabilities, often offering just one marketing automation for one service, such as email. For the most part, marketing automation tools are low cost and require little time to kickstart.

Platforms that perform marketing automation allows marketers to optimize their spend and sales teams to nurture highly engaged leads by providing insights on specific campaigns. A marketing automation platform combines the functionality of several marketing automation tools into a unified platform for both marketing and sales teams. With centralized data, teams are able to work together to maximize marketing budgets, nurture leads, create accurate projections and pipelines, and streamline execution.

Why Automation is Important

Marketing automation allows sales and marketing teams to work together to determine the most effective sales and marketing approach by using centralized data to optimize ROI and nurture highly engaged leads. Furthermore, comprehensive marketing automation platforms are able to automate marketing tasks based on the provided data (ex: email when lead score reaches 16), giving sales teams the time to focus and nurture leads who are showing engagement presently.

Marketing Automation Tools

Several marketing automation tools, such as Mailchimp and Hootsuite, are free and able to be implemented immediately to begin streamlining specific marketing processes. Mailchimp is a great way to start building a database of contacts and nurturing leads through automated emails. Similarly, Hootsuite enables teams to schedule social media posts across all platforms, combining cross network analytics into one place. Marketing automation tools greatly benefit smaller organizations looking to grow due to low cost and ease of use.

What is the Best Marketing Automation Software?

Though niche software provides unique features, it does not combine all marketing functions in one place, which is a service bigger companies might be looking for. Currently, several marketing automation platforms are being used by marketers and sales teams, including Pardot, Hubspot, Marketo, and SharpSpring. Though similar in functionality, these marketing automation platforms have differences that business decision-makers need to consider.

  • Pardot is a marketing automation platform that specializes in B2B marketing automation and is intended to directly integrate with a company’s existing SalesForce software. It is a sales focused platform that offers campaign reporting, email automation, revenue reporting and landing pages.

  • Hubspot is a marketing-focused automation platform that also serves as a one-stop-shop for businesses to manage both CRM and marketing execution. Hubspot includes sales tools such as creating lists, segmenting contacts and adding sales notes, and showing a history of how that contact has interacted with your marketing. Similarly, marketers are able to execute email and social media marketing campaigns, A/B test landing pages, and automate a variety of other marketing tasks.

  • Marketo is a standard marketing automation platform that offers tools including email marketing, landing page creation, lead scoring and more. Marketo offers enterprise-level solutions, with direct integrations to major CRMs, Dynamics and SugarCRM.

  • SharpSpring is an all-in-one sales and marketing automation platform that combines the functions of a typical CRM and everyday marketing execution. The software includes tools to execute email and social media marketing, analyze campaign performance, nurture leads, and report on revenue.

How to Get Started

Depending on resources and strategy, organizations may only need an email automation tool or other similar marketing automation tools to achieve their goals. Most automation services will offer free trials or demos on their website where companies are able to learn more and test the tool and get started easily and quickly.

On the other hand, the above-mentioned marketing automation platforms require a monthly commitment and take time to set up and learn for everyday use. It can be challenging and complex to navigate this decision, as well as implement and set up automation rules. In fact, in most cases when implementing Pardot or Sharpspring, it is highly encouraged to work with consultants to ensure a smooth integration.  Learn more about our SharpSpring partnership by reading below.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR SHARPSPRING PARTNERSHIP

&Marketing is a partner of SharpSpring, working together to provide small and medium size businesses with an all-in-one marketing automation platform. To help business owners understand the basics, &Marketing offers a free downloadable guide with tips to improve your lead generation and nurturing campaign. Download the marketing automation guide below.

DOWNLOAD MY MARKETING AUTOMATION GUIDE

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.