Bay Area Inbound Marketing Blog

A lot of companies want to understand exactly what we can do for them to increase revenue quickly.

This article is a detailed statement of work or proposal for services we generally perform for startups to mid-size tech companies to increase their bottom line revenue in just three to six months. We use the marketing they have already have in place, then plug in our expertise to do the pieces whereever we see a potential for increase via inbound marketing best practices.

 Typically, we make a significant impact on revenue in just three months. 

It seems like I keep reading that every blog article should be perfection and should generate a lot of buzz or it's not worth writing. 

Let me just set the record straight. That is a load of horse manure. The author of that kind of blogging advice simply doesn't understand the reason for blogging or anything about SEO. They haven't seen blogging as a strategy be tremendously successful for increasing revenue; I have.

Blog articles aren't press releases that need to be perfected nor do you need to hire an agency to get them picked up to obtain reach, although it never hurts to have more people working on promoting one article.

Being a Marketing Consultant is like living every day in the Tom Cruise movie: "Live, Die, Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow". First, you get very good at seeing the problems coming and executing tactically, then you become better at strategy and cut through all the unnecessary steps to reach your goal of increasing revenue quickly.

 Maybe it is just me, but I really think Marketing Consultants are a different breed. Having worked at the same company, Proxim, for five years and now at the opposite end of the spectrum, I often consult for three to six months at a time for tech companies, I notice a lot of differences in how I have to prioritize and communicate with clients. 

There are pluses and minuses for being a marketing consultant from the employee's point of view. As consultants we get paid more per hour, work less hours, and don't have to deal with office politics. We care about one thing and one thing only, increasing revenue for clients quickly. To do that, we have to sharpen our skills on our own dime and time. We get paid for results and we get asked back only when we produce them. Below I break it down for you in greater detail.

007 has nothing on me or any other marketing consultant. Don't believe me? Let's compare "To Do" lists:

After a few quick growing pains of learning Windows 8, I thoroughly loved my Lenovo Yoga for the last two years. I am a content marketer, so I put an abnormal amount of miles on my machine. So why did I buy a MacBook Air this time? Here I outline the factors that led me to buy the MacBook Air as well as the downsides I feel there are on my new machine. 

Managing people can be a challenge. We all have our own management styles. I developed the management tips below by copying some great leaders, through management training, and 15 years of managing people.

It can be a tremendous amount of work to do a weekly demo webinar series, I've done them many times, so I definitely know. The upside is, once you put them in place, you are done and they continue to drive revenue effectively for 3 months or 2 years if you are Palo Alto Networks and keep the same webinar series running for that long.

Metrics are an important part of making any company successful. They let you measure the Return on Investment (ROI) for a given marketing channel, and tell you if it is time to spend more to continue to increase market share; They can identify what percentage of contribution is made by sales and marketing to capturing new accounts and bottom-line revenue. They tell you what it costs your company to get, keep, and lose an account.

I need some help. I can't make this thing work. I have hired more people, we've put in more equipment, but we're still hitting a bottleneck. I bet a lot of people have the same problem. My buddy Tony says he has the same problem over at his company. I'll google it and see how to improve things. You can find a fix for anything now on the web.

As a demand generation marketing consultant, I've been fortunate to work at twice as many tech startups in the last five years, as I did in my first 10 years in technology Sales and Marketing. And I've learned from some of the best and the brightest how to increase market share quickly with a smaller budget and microphone.

It comes down to Pareto's Law: When working on a cost-per-lead model, 20% of your company's marketing activity will bring you 80% of your qualified leads and revenue; Therefore, 80% of your marketing budget can realistically be slashed with little or no effect. This is great news for startups who are working with tight budgets to begin with.