Leighton Ventures

1. Keywords – Target the keywords that your target market uses.
2. Content – It’s got to be great, unique, linkworthy, fresh, keyword-focused content.
3. Links -No links? No rankings.
4. Site Structure – It’s essential to get the technical details right (redirects, HTML templates, URLs, internal linking structure).

Selling vs. Effective Marketing

Confusion on this issue will always exist. That’s why so many companies have marketing departments and sales departments.

The only reason you need both is because the marketing department is doing such a lousy job differentiating the business and products, the sales department has to hit the streets and do the educating for them. That’s why selling can be such a tough job.

Source: Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch

Au contraire to Neil Patel’s post Want to be successful? Learn how to sell!, I believe effective marketing is much more valuable to an individual and business’ success. Neil’s post outlines some of the characteristics of a great sales person. All of which I would consider short term success, besides customers become warn out from a sales person’s antics. You should simply just need closers.

Indeed sales are always being made and persistence does pay off, but launching, testing, monitoring, and tweaking effective marketing tactics is much more fruitful to companies and the sales are just the results from your marketing efforts. This includes all of the following benefits of an effective marketing program: product / service communication, good customer service, happy customers, empowered referral sources, and challenged employees.

Nowadays, companies should focus on precise marketing strategies and tactics to implement and test. Yes, that sounds obvious. However, there is no better time than now to start planting marketing seeds and capture market share.

If your marketing department isn’t clever and effective, don’t bring in sales people or business developers for a short term solution to drum up some business. Look to hire a more creative marketing person that can more effectively market your business, products, and services. Marketing can turn your pipeline into a never ending “closing machine”.