Which is the bigger priority? Ranking at the top of your prospects’ search results or mapping content that helps them move forward in their buyer journey?
Many marketers find themselves grappling with priorities when it comes to getting a content strategy off the ground. Luckily, as online marketing expert Lee Odden explains, when it comes to SEO and content marketing, it doesn’t have to be either/or.
Having lived through an acquisition, CEO of Spredfast Rod Favaron offers some valuable entrepreneur advice on handling the transition.
An acquisition is a huge undertaking. There are plenty of nooks and crannies that can go overlooked as you begin to merge with your new parent company, many of which can go unnoticed until it’s too late. Rod Favaron, President and CEO of Spredfast (an OpenView portfolio company), offers a bit of entrepreneur advice on the things he’d do differently if he had the chance.
Social media isn’t the black hole that many business leaders seem to think it is. Discover how to become a social rock star in as little as a few hours a week.
While social media adoption is certainly widespread by now, many business professionals still claim to be too busy to commit to personal social media branding activities.
Personal branding consultant Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future, says that for the most part, the excuse is just that — an excuse. The truth, Clark says, is that making time for social media and branding takes a lot less time than you might think.
Sales and business strategist Dave Brock explains how developing a more specific, personalized approach can lead to truly impactful insight selling.
Our customers are starved for ideas and insight. That’s why, the sales professional who calls offering insight is likely to be more welcomed than the sales person who just “shows up and throws up.” But we all know this.
There are hierarchies of insight, however, and it is critical to understand these and their varying degrees of impact in engaging the customer.
Innovation and intrapreneurship strategist Philippe De Ridder, co-founder of Board of Innovation, shares six personal innovation habits that will have a profound impact on your performance, happiness, and success as an entrepreneur.
I’ve recently discovered the power of forming daily habits to reach my goals, and I’m keen to share my experience and thoughts to get some discussion going. As a person active in innovation — as an innovation manager, consultant, R&D manager, business developer, product manager, or C-level leader — you’ve most likely set yourself personal goals around being more inspiring, up-to-date, convincing or creative. Have you also considered which daily habits you could form to reach those goals?
One of the most powerful entrepreneur lessons you can learn is discovering it’s the driving force behind your vision — not the vision itself — that’s truly important.
You might be surprised to find out that becoming recognized as a visionary has very little to do with actually coming up with a vision. Offering another one of their valuable entrepreneur lessons, Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits, co-authors of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Entrepreneur, point out that ideas alone don’t make great innovators.
The breathless mentality that fuels startups is ideal for a company’s early days, but it doesn’t age well. SEOmoz co-founder and CEO Rand Fishkin explains that as companies mature into the growth stage, that fast-paced approach can sometimes do more harm than good.
A Better Motto for Scalable Company Growth
As your company grows, so should your approach to leading it. In a recent interview with OpenView, Fishkin explained that changing his mindset around speed was the first major shift he had to make.
If you’re starting a company with an end game in mind, you’re probably doing yourself a disservice focusing on becoming a target for acquisition.
More often than not, a startup is founded with dreams of eventually becoming acquired. It’s a natural thought — most entrepreneurs fall asleep dreaming of a big payday. But according to Rod Favaron, President and CEO of enterprise social media software company Spredfast (an OpenView portfolio company), setting out specifically to make yourself a target for acquisition not only has a tendency of not leading to that result — it can also be a critical mistake.
With so many pieces of content for so many different buyers at every stage of the funnel, a complete content marketing strategy can also quickly become a confusing one. Learn how content mapping brings order to the chaos and can help you deliver the right content to the right prospect at the right time.
It’s no secret that the content marketing approach that works best is one that includes a personal touch. One recent study conducted by Marketing Sherpa saw a company increase B2B leads by 124% after incorporating buyer personas into their content marketing strategy.
Whether bootstrapping your way to hiring help, or navigating toward profitability under investors’ eyes, an entrepreneur’s path is often a long and lonely one. Dino Dogan, founder of blog amplification platform Triberr, talks about the lessons he’s learned firsthand while carving out a new space in social media for his company.
The story behind Triberr will sound familiar to many entrepreneurs: founder Dino Dogan saw a common problem without an easy solution. “I was doing SEO for a long time,” he says, but optimizing content “didn’t work for what I was trying to do.” Dogan wanted to build a community around his blog to include more than immediate friends who would comment on and share his posts, but that required “a lot of heavy lifting.”
Enter Triberr. Dogan’s social network “allows you to set up a blogging tribe” of like-minded writers who share each other’s work in a “streamlined, frictionless, no-heavy-lifting kind of way.” He recently spoke with OpenView to share how he’s learning from criticism, educating customers, and bootstrapping “a Facebook for bloggers.”
