Marketing Answers Blog

Are you putting a lot of time into writing technical content for your website that no one is actually reading? This could be killing your business because you're probably spending a lot of time and money on this, yet no one cares. How can you find out if this is happening to you?

When you look at your website's bounce rate for the pages on your site that contain technical content, do you notice something? Statistically, technical pages have a higher bounce rate than those with non-technical content, and, in case you don't already know this, you should be aware that a high bounce rate means that your visitors tend to very quickly see enough of your content and have 'bounced' to some other place, away from your site.

I know of at least six groups of people that I used to work with at large US engineering corporations who banded together, pooled their resources and bit the bullet to start their own company. In most cases, they carved out a niche market for themselves, often in an area that they had become pidgeon-holed in back in their corporate careers. 

I spoke with a past colleague of mine recently who is in the process of venturing out and starting a new engineering business on his own . I know he has the skills to undertake this because he has been in the  business doing similar work for many years, and the large engineering corporation he last worked for is already sending business to his consultancy.

We were contracted earlier this year by Barry, the CEO of a software and consulting firm serving the banking and credit union sector with annual earnings around $5M currently ranking in the inc 5000. This CEO complained (apparently dumbfounded) that his marketing director had left him for his largest competitor 8 months prior and he needed someone to fill the gap while he continued to look for a replacement which he had not had any luck doing so far. 

How well is your marketing working? As CEO, partner, or perhaps even the owner of a relatively small engineering consultancy which you started after a tour through corporate America, have you followed traditional marketing tactics such as forking out quantities of money for a small booth at a trade show, creating expensive printed material and little rubber balls stuffed with sand to hand out?

Today, Inbound Marketing best practices can be found on the internet in many places. By now, you probably know that over 93% of buyers begin their journeys online which means that every company in existence should be spending time figuring out how to attract these buyers to their sites.

It's not completely clear why, but IT companies, for some reason, do not seem to promote themselves on line particularly well. This situation represents a great opportunity for IT first movers in marketing, because qualifying for keywords should be easier than in more congested verticals.

Traditionally, professional services companies have relied on old-school marketing methodologies centered around now minimally effective outbound approaches. When CEOs speak of the cost of customer acquisition and ROI specific to classical marketing they find they aren't happy and want to know how to market a professional services company more effectively. When we consider the ability of small to medium sized businesses (SMB) marketing departments to succeed in classical marketing approaches like radio, TV, and print advertising, it mostly comes down to money and a whole lot of money is not characteristically what SMBs possess.

Many, if not most, software as a service companies (SaaS) publish their pricing online. Is this a great idea for these busnesses, and does it make sense for the rest of us to mimmick the practice? Here, we've done it both ways and as you might expect this is a pretty controversial subject, particularly for B2B organizations that provide services which vary in price depending on the scope of the work. In the past, I have been among those who become frustrated when unable to locate a pricing table on a website that has something that I am interested in. Should I take it as a clear sign that I won't be able to afford whatever it is they're selling, and desert the site? 

This post investigates and presents the top 10 pros and cons of publishing company rates online.

Over the years Linked In has morphed from a great networking tool into an incredible prospecting machine - if you know how to use it. Following are key, best approaches to promoting yourself and your company on LinkedIn, and tips on how to prospect for business using this powerful tool.