What can you give to the person who already has everything? Secret (Source) Santa think we have the answer. It is not necessarily what you may imagine (socks, wine, golf clubs etc) but things that are a lot more useful. 

Whack-a-mole sales strategy definition: A transactional phase. To be reactive to tasks and activities to the extent you often go to work with the mind set of not structuring your day/week but instead resigned to the fact that you will be fielding, questions, enquiries and problems all day, week or month.   

Is your current website looking old and tired?

Is it failing to deliver leads and your potential customers are going to your rivals instead?

It sounds like it may be time for you to get a new website. Before you embark on your project, read our top tips for getting it right: 

Your time in a working day is precious and you’ll want to maximise this and work as efficiently as possible. If you feel that your business isn’t growing quickly enough and recognise the signs below, then it’s time to take action!

A customer deciding to leave you is never nice, but it happens. They had their reasons and chose to move away from you and whatever product, service or relationship you had. Perhaps it had been coming for a while, maybe it was out of the blue, but how do you react and what should you do? 

Increasingly people are using mobile phones as their go-to device for searching online. In the UK alone nearly 40% use this as their preferred option. So, if you’re not optimised, you could be losing almost half of your potential traffic! 

It sounds obvious that sales and marketing in any business should be working together as they share the same common goal, which is revenue growth. However, there is usually conflict between the two departments instead of unity. Often sales blame marketing for poor lead quality and marketing feels that sales don’t make the most of the leads they’ve supplied.

Marketing strategy usually starts with determining what it is your customers want. But do you really know who your customers are?  

For maximum return on investment, your plans need to be based on what your potential buyers are actively searching for and need help and information on. Otherwise your ideal customers will inevitably end up being attracted to one of your competitors rather than to your business.  

In our recent blog Want to create a frictionless business? we shared with you some of the top insights from Inbound 2018 that we attended in Boston.  

One of the key learnings from the event was that for businesses to flourish and grow, the focus has to be on delighting customers. This will deliver your biggest return on investment and ensuring you incorporate wow moments will be vital for success going forward. 

You are likely to be familiar with the terms inbound and outbound marketing but may be unsure which is the best for your business and how to allocate your budget and resources proportionately. 

Both forms of marketing are used to drive customers to your door, but they do it in very different ways. 

Secret Source Marketing were lucky enough to attend Inbound 2018 in Boston USA, listening and meeting some of the finest brains in business. We picked up some extremely valuable insights that you might like to consider when going for growth.  

Many professionals would recoil in horror at the idea of spelling mistakes being used deliberately as a marketing device but it does happen. Most people would ignore the mistake and quickly move on, but there are enough grammar perfectionists out there who will blog about it and discuss it, for it to be a worthwhile ploy for some. 

It can be easy when planning content to become fixated with getting as many blogs, articles, whitepapers, ebooks etc out to market. Business owners, commercial or sales leaders often have a number in mind which usually includes high volume that warrants the resources and costs. However, this can sometimes come at the cost of quality and by bombarding the marketplace you risk turning off your audience.

So what's the answer? We have listed 4 best practice tips to follow so you can have both the volume you need without compromising quality.

Whatever the size or nature of your business, there are lots of moving parts. You still need to keep engaged with your marketplace; the people who don’t know you, nurturing prospects, retaining clients and incentivising business partners.  

Marketing automation systems, used by millions of companies globally, manage tasks such as e-mails and social media updates, ensuring tailored, relevant messaging and are proven to professionalise the process, save time and provide valuable insights. 

It’s easy to understand why companies in a high growth mode or are large enough to fund and run such a system would consider the investment this involves. However, start-ups and companies who need to re-evaluate their marketplace are also increasingly turning to automation systems to help with their strategy. 

In May, organisations across Europe and beyond were frantically trying to get their houses in order before the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force. Whilst an important step-change for data protection, it overshadowed the long-standing Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation (PECR).  

With contingent workers (freelancers, independent contractors and consultants) on the rise in many industries, there has been a shift that allows businesses to draft in specialist skills where it would have been otherwise too expensive or unjustifiable to hire a full time employee.

Assigning budget to marketing activity has often been seen as laborious, un-scientific and seemingly arbituary. Whilst spend for other business areas such as HR and IT can see return on investment almost immediately, marketing spend is a dark art. Whilst no two businesses are the same, our combined experience in B2B organisations of over 50 years has shown some trends in how marketing budgets are managed. 

If you're trying to transition away from spreadsheets, have outgrown your current CRM or are just plain fed up with your existing system, then it’s time to look at alternative solutions!

Lead generation for software companies has been turned on its head. Emails and cold calling are less effective and while there's still a place for events that deliver qualified sales leads, your buyers are online and it's where your rivals are and where you need to be.

Increase sales qualified leads by 50% in your software company

Lead generation for software companies can be unpredictable. If you need more leads to feed the sales engine, read on. SaaS products have driven the proliferation of new entrants into the market which means your buyers no longer have a shortlist of providers and instead start their search online for software solutions.

Consumer habits are changing ... drastically. That's the driving force behind inbound, after all. What your customers want today is different than what they wanted 10 years ago. That means we must change the way we market and sell to match the way people actually want to shop and buy.

As the countdown begins towards year-end, CEOs, Sales Leaders and Financial Directors are in a furious race to ensure that in-year targets are achieved by their sales and marketing teams. There are two key challenges that business leaders are facing to achieve this objective; not enough momentum, and not enough of the right leads.

To get on the shortlist, you will be competing against other organisations offering a product or service that is very much comparable to yours on the exterior.

As a business leader, the importance of the impending changes to data protection regulation will be no surprise. The digital economy is growing and so is the need for international consistency around data protection laws, safeguarding individuals’ personal information.

With experience using marketing automation platforms, our Source In methodology ensures our clients achieve results: 

The changing behaviours of people mean that traditional marketing campaigns such as cold calls, cold emails and snail mail are being tuned out. This disruption in marketing means that customers are opting to seek out the information we need ourselves.

Imagery plays an important role in design, but the cost of some stock imagery sites has created a barrier. Moreover, affordable stock photography can result in cliched and tacky images.

Thankfully, there is an increasing number of websites offering beautiful photography for free. This is made possible as they use images that are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under creative commons public domain dedication.

Appearing in organic searches, reviews are increasingly important to your search rankings. Not only does it appear that Google is giving greater weighting to businesses that are receiving reviews, it seems that star ratings from third party review sites are taken into consideration.

Everyday, YouTube videos generate billions of views of hundreds of millions of hours of footage. This doesn't include videos hosted on other platforms.

With such a large audience, can you afford not to use video in your marketing activities?