Directive Blogs

A marketing strategy is the building block of a marketing plan. It lays out a clear, well-defined big picture plan to attract customers to your business by specifying long-term objectives, actions to be taken, and marketing tactics used to achieve marketing goals. B2B marketers often struggle to develop successful marketing strategies. 40% of the least effective marketers have no defined marketing strategy, and 56% of B2B marketers in the United States find it difficult to build their brand through the strategies they create.

Marketing collateral is a collection of media that is used to support the sales of a company’s products or services. The primary purpose of marketing collateral is to showcase your business’ products and services in an informational but attractive way, while at the same time expanding your credibility. The collateral you use should support your overall marketing efforts.

In order to effectively market any businessmit is important to have a pretty in-depth understanding of the business as it stands. However, this is often easier said than done. That being said, there is a helpful framework you can use to greatly simplify the process and ensure that you accomplish this level of understanding: the five C’s of marketing.

Continuing our discussion from our previous blog, ”Marketing Guide Part 1 of 4: Your Marketing Budget”, let's discuss the basics of what your marketing should entail.

Hopefully, you aren't joining us mid-conversation, but if you are, make sure you get caught up first by reading our blogs "Marketing Guide Part 1 of 4: Your Marketing Budget" and "Marketing Guide Part 2 of 4: The Bare Essentials" before continuing on.

In this four-part blog series, we’re going to talk about what it takes to market and grow your SMB. Throughout this series, we’re going to cover the following topics:

Knowing which services your business should market can seem like a guessing game, but it doesn’t have to be. If you understand and take advantage of market trends, you can tailor your marketing strategy to target your audience, drive traffic to your site, and convert leads.

Marketing has two umbrella classification that most methods fall under, inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Here are five inbound marketing methods that we recommend using to market your business!

Marketing your business may seem like a huge endeavor, or that you need to be a marketing mastermind to actually effectively market your business, but that is not true. If done right, marketing can be done without any stress or hassle. Where do you start? With a plan of course!

So, you have a brand new website that offers some pretty outstanding products/services, and now you have the expectation that it is going to sell, sell, sell. Great products, after all, are the best marketing you can have. Let me tell you first so you don’t have to hear it from someone else…that is not enough.

The world is ever-changing and the marketing world isn’t exempted from that steady change. To keep your marketing up-to-date, we’ve summarized five digital marketing trends that will be key in 2020. Let's look ahead!

Valentine’s Day is a day famous for love, expressions of affection, and chocolate. As such, it may not be obviously apparent how the holiday lends itself to marketing your business to other businesses. However, there is potential for the holiday of love to stir up some action for your company.

Whenever a major holiday is coming up, you’re likely confronted with multiple reminders of it in your daily lives. You may see commercials on TV, receive emails from companies, get flyers in the mail. You’ll see specialized packaging for brands you buy every day that reflects the upcoming holiday. It makes sense why companies are doing this - holidays celebrated by the general population give a business an excuse to get in contact with the consumer. And, this often leads to an uptick in sales.

You can do the same for your small business. The key to succeeding with holiday marketing is framing your marketing correctly in terms of your language and the imagery you use.