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The Competitive Advantage

tag: strategy

October 17, 2023

Strategy or Tactics? Yes, it really does matter!

If I were to ask you, “How are you going to achieve your revenue goals next year?,” how would you answer? You might say something like:

  • “We’re going to expand into a new vertical industry.”
  • “We’re going to launch a new service line.”
  • “We’re going to implement a key account program for our biggest clients.”

Those are all great answers. And those are all marketing strategies. And yet, when most [non-marketing] professionals are asked about marketing, they respond with answers like “email” or “social media” or “advertising.” Those are all marketing tactics.

Strategies are the WHAT. Tactics are the HOW.

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October 10, 2023

Busy Q4? DO NOT Stop Marketing!

Here’s why and here’s what to do about it…

The fourth quarter of the year is often a very busy time for our industry as research buyers need to spend their research budgets by December 31st… or risk losing some of those dollars the following year. And as the firms in our industry (MR agencies, panel companies, etc.) get very busy supporting those buyers, they too often ignore other elements of their business… especially marketing. Big mistake. Big. Huge.

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June 28, 2023

Lessons Learned After Writing 500+ Blog Posts

This is post number 533 on our blog, and with the exception of two guest posts, they’re all mine. And all of them written since I founded Harpeth Marketing in 2012. In those 11+ years, I’ve learned a few things about blogging and content marketing that I thought might be of value…

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June 6, 2023

The 3 C’s Strategy… Point Your Marketing in the Right Direction

Tactics without a strategy is just ‘noise.’

I’ve been working with a client recently, helping them to create their first-ever marketing plan (yeah, I know, it’s odd timing, but their fiscal year starts in July). As we were getting into it, they said things like “We want to do a quarterly newsletter” and “We want to post on LinkedIn every week.”

To which I responded, “That’s great! Why?”

And I got a blank stare in return. Then I said, “What do you want to post about every week?” The stare continued.

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March 29, 2023

Want to Win Your Clients’ Trust? Change 1 Word in Your Vocabulary.

I was having a conversation with a client last week – the president and his senior staff. We were talking about their business objectives for the year and the kinds of marketing and sales efforts they would need to achieve them.

As I was laying out a number of strategies and tactics that could help them reach their goals, the president interrupted me, and said, “Steve, don’t tell us what we could be doing… tell us what we should be doing.”

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March 21, 2023

The Case for Being a ‘Specialist’

Take a look around our industry… most research firms are generalists. They provide a variety of services to a variety of different kinds of clients. In fact, it’s kind of difficult to find one that is legitimately a specialist in any one area.

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February 14, 2023

The Biggest Challenges to Revenue Generation

At the Insights Association’s CEO Summit last month, one of the presentations highlighted the results from a survey that the association conducted of its members. And one of the topics was on growing revenue. Ahhh… music to my ears.

In the presentation, they reported on the top three obstacles to growing revenue:

  1. Getting qualified leads
  2. Recruiting more effective sales professionals
  3. The cyclical nature of the seller-door model

And while it’s hard to argue with the results of the survey – and I’m glad to see that these firms recognize these issues – what’s interesting is that I don’t see very much being done to address them!

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December 28, 2022

The Top 10 Blog Posts of 2022

Over the past year, our blog posts were read thousands of times. To all of you who stopped by to take a peek… thank you. We hope you found the articles to be interesting, helpful and maybe even a little inspirational.

Secondly, our blog now houses more than 500 articles on sales and marketing (this is actually #521), all related to growing your business in our industry. And the fact is, if you keep reading them… we’ll keep writing them.

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