Strategic Planning

Why You Should Benchmark Internal Metrics

May 11, 2012

Benchmarking establishes a reference point so you can gauge the success or failure of marketing and service strategies even when there isn’t an obvious cause and effect. We naturally want to know how our results compare to our competition and try to benchmark against them. It’s impossible to create realistic and accurate comparisons to other [...]

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Why Benchmarking against Competitors doesn’t Work

May 7, 2012

One statement in “The Numbers that Really Matter to Your Business” got a lot of attention because people didn’t agree with it. I wrote, “There is simply no way to compare metrics from different companies and deliver realistic results.” Responses varied from simply stating that the reader disagreed to explanations as to why I don’t [...]

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Customer Retention: The First Pillar of Social Media

April 25, 2012

Keeping customers actively buying products and services is a key component of every marketing and service strategy. The longer people remain in the buying funnel, the greater their lifetime value and contribution to corporate profitability. People can easily shift loyalties with a click of a button in our global marketplace. This makes it much harder [...]

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How to Find the Marketing Rules that Work for Your Business

December 21, 2011

There is a certain safety in following the rules. When a marketing path has been tested, there are few surprises or unexpected challenges. Mediocre entrepreneurs can create successful companies by following the steps of the innovators who have gone ahead. Odds are that the copycat businesses won’t last more than a few decades without a [...]

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Positioning Your Company for Growth in 2012

December 13, 2011

Where will your company be this time next year? Will you be celebrating record profits or planning a bankruptcy strategy? The answer depends on what you do now to prepare for tomorrow. Business as usual doesn’t exist anymore. Our marketplace has changed from a multichannel environment to a maze of channels and platforms that distract [...]

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