When you've poured your time and money into creating a marketing strategy, you want to make sure your message resonates with your target audience and potential customers. This is where communication generally comes in; unfortunately, the skills required to communicate have rendered it something of a lost art. If you cannot communicate your message to your audience, they will become confused and even averse to you and your company.

Technology has fundamentally changed the way we work and live. Recently, technology has been integral to how we do business. Business leaders in the past needed their employees in one physical place to operate. Technology now allows business owners and employees to communicate easily across time zones and from remote locations.

Ugh. It's that time of year again. Time to pull together a marketing plan for next year. With today's competitive marketplace and innovative marketing tech, it's easy to get overwhelmed when planning for the next 12 months and beyond. If only there were an easy, practical method for laying out a marketing plan for 2021. But wait—maybe there is.

A goal, without a plan, is just a wish and true success always starts with a plan. And nothing helps to achieve those goals more than a strategic sales plan. A well-defined sales strategy is your path to meaningful, sustainable growth. Get it right and watch your company’s growth trajectory go up. Go without one and risk seeing your business flame out.

These days, when buyers begin the process of making a purchase, they tend to start with the same first step: a Google search. Even if they aren't sure what product or service they may be looking for, they will seek to educate themselves by going online and researching the topic. In fact, Google found that 90% of B2B prospects conduct online searches to research future business purchases. It's easy to see why having a presence in industry-related Google searches is so important for today's businesses. But how do you get your business to rank in those searches? And how can you continually improve in those rankings? The answer: SEO.

Damon Gasaway II is CEO and co-owner of La Porte, Indiana-based CNC machining shop Winn Machine. Alongside his wife Dina, Damon takes great pride in owning an ISO-9001 certified machine shop and is devoted to maintaining their high quality machining standards. The Winn Machine team is also committed to improving their community in any way they can, including involvement in training programs with local high schools.

In the world of sales and marketing, there is no shortage of data to analyze. We understand that many would-be marketers are hesitant to look at data in the first place, because data has a way of exposing the flaws in the pretty pictures and cool copy that most marketing firms specialize in delivering. But for those vigilant marketers who want to actually measure results and optimize their efforts, the question remains: what metrics should I be tracking?

Every company has information that they need to communicate to other businesses or consumers and yet may not always have access to a professional graphic designer. Whether it’s due to time or money limitations often companies turn to a non-designer to step in and be the hero who saves the day by designing an effective flyer, brochure, webpage, or any number of promotional materials. The results however are typically sub-optimal.

The world is full of websites. Some websites are clearly better than others, but how do we evaluate the quality of a website? Obviously, there are a number of characteristics that we can use to evaluate a site. The way it looks, the visual elements, the user experience, the story it tries to tell. And as I am sure most of you know first-hand, we can invest a lot of time and money into developing websites that look amazing, engage visitors, and tell our story in a meaningful way. But is your website generating quality leads for your organization? Because if it's not, it is very hard to determine the return on investment that you made in your website.

Do you have a blog? If not, you should seriously consider starting one. By creating and maintaining a blog for your organization, you can publish insightful articles and position yourself as an authority in your industry. Blogging can also help you boost traffic, brand awareness, credibility, conversions, and revenue. But writing quality blog posts isn't easy. And even if you do write blog posts, it can be challenging to leverage them in a way that has a tangible benefit your company.