Early in your career, especially if you are in marketing, it can be difficult to quantify ROI. However, if you have a marketing budget, chances are you will be asked to report on spend. Here's a super simple framework on how to approach measuring something like this: 

1. Make a Plan. Do not expend energy on a project without developing some way of tracking the performance of it. HubSpot is a great tool to do this, as it gives you detailed analytics on web pages, email campaigns, blogs, and even social media messages. That's just one tool, though: for hosting events, measure registrations and attendees. If you publish a blog, measure page views or leads generated. Launch a podcast? Look at number of downloads. Figure out how you want to measure your initiative, and bonus points if you can put a number to attribute to success. (i.e., I am going to aim for 10k podcast downloads before the end of the year) 
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2. Execute. This may sound obvious, but sometimes you can spend all your time planning and talking about what you COULD do without actually...doing anything. Even if it's something small to get started or to run a test, make sure you actually make something happen. It shows initiative, and regardless of success or failure, I guarantee you will learn something from it. 

3. Report on Results. Whatever you planned to measure, create a report of results. Did it perform how you expected? Why or why not? What did you learn to apply for next time? This will give you guidance for your next campaign, where you'll tweak your plan and start over again. Reporting on everything also is a good practice to get into as it will be easy to reference when needed (and you will need to report on performance eventually, whether at the end of the quarter or the year), but serve as a helpful way to update your resumé

The Bottom Line
Draft a plan, execute the campaign, then record your results. Share them with your boss (or the broader team, like colleagues or even the CEO). Not only does this quantify the value you bring to the organization, but can serve as valuable fodder for building up your LinkedIn profile or resumé.

For more tips, checkout this LinkedIn article I wrote a while back on how to be a rockstar at work based on a lecture I gave at Tufts University. 

​It's not the most glamorous of things to focus on for your local business, but SEO is critical to your online presence and can be key to new customers finding you.

​While SEO is a complex web of ever-changing technicalities and strategy, here's a quick breakdown of a few essentials so you have a broader understanding of what's important to focus on for your business: 







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​1) Your Website
It needs to be good. It needs to be optimized for mobile, easy to navigate, fast to load, and have all the SEO data that Google's heart desires. Test it out on your phone, or have one of those dang millenials pull it up for you: how does it look? Are you frustrated with the experience? If so, imagine how your customers feel.

Your website is the ultimate storefront for your business: it sets the tone on how you want to be perceived and acts as a tool for customers to access your services. Make sure you are clearly directing them to the most critical information about your business and get to the point - fast. Let's not forget all those critical SEO nuggets like header tags, page URLs, inbound links, and other website details that you'll need to make sure is targeted towards your intended customer - there are plenty of online tools available to you to help sort through the madness, if you so desire. 

1) Your Profiles: Think Social, and Google Listings
While social media has slowed down in the world of marketing "new shiny things", it's still important to have a complete presence on key social channels for your audience. That means knowing if your audience is primarily on LinkedIn or Facebook, and making sure all of the essential data on your company page is accurate and filled out. 

Google listings are also one of the absolute first things to pop up when users search a local business or service. Make sure to claim your Google Listing page, add important information like your website, store hours, your phone number / email, and accurate business description. 

Then if you are really on your marketing game and are blogging on a regular basis (which you are totally doing because of all the SEO goodness, right?) than you should link your social accounts to your blog so your latest content gets pushed out to social channels once published automatically. P.S., Let me know if you need help with this.

1) Your Reviews
We all have the customer trolls, but soliciting the good ones to write a review on your behalf will significantly increase your likelihood of showing up on local Google search results. This can be as simple as asking a happy customer, or offering a discount in exchange for a review. It's important to be proactive here, and some automation may help. The more (hopefully positive) reviews your prospects see, the more likely they will be to engage with you. And remember, if you ignore building this aspect of your online presence, an online presence will be created for you. Which end of that spectrum would you like to be on? 

Does all of the above make you sad to think about? Contact me for some budget-friendly local SEO options (so you can actually focus on, you know, your business).

While it's easy to whip up a "basics of lead gen" post, the fact is that there isn't anything basic about lead generation. It's typically job #1 of marketers: to provide leads - qualified leads - to the sales team to be able to sell. What I hope to outline here are the basics of approaching a lead gen task - particularly if you are a one-(wo)man show or if you know nothing about marketing.

Here are some tips to get you started on the right track: 

1. Understand Your Ideal Customer with Buyer Personas. While this is something that may change over time as your business and products evolve, you should have a good idea of who your customer is before you go about trying to find them. Do the research, starting with existing customers to build a profile of who you are looking for. Start with basic demographics like age, company size / type, job title. Then advance to more sophisticated understanding of their role in the business, their needs, and make sure that your company and products help solve their challenges. I could write a whole post on this process, but it helps to have a rough outline for you to get started. 
2. Start with a Goal. This can be tough for businesses - especially startups - to pin down, but try and determine the amount of leads you will need to meet your revenue goals. There's a bit of math involved with this one, and history of close rates definitely helps: essentially, you are trying to determine the number of Identify goals: looking at your typical sales funnel, what is the ideal # of leads will result in the $ amount of revenue you need to generate for the quarter? 
3. Please don't buy leads. Okay, so less of a personal opinion and more of a desperation to get rid of this terrible practice. Focus your cash and energies into creating the most value possible to attract prospects, instead of buying a list of people who don't know who you are and don't want to hear from you. This practice just needs to go away. Plus I'm sick of "Hi Ashley, How would you feel about getting access to thousands of executive email address lists..." emails. They irritate me and need to go away. . 
4. Run Campaigns. Again, could write a whole other post on this, but using your buyer personas as a guide, identify some channels where your ideal audience will be. Maybe they are on Twitter and you can reach them with paid ads. Or maybe investing in a sponsored content campaign with a leading publication makes sense. Align your goals, budget, and channels to determine the best place to invest. Hint: not everyone is "on social media". Let's make some educated guesses, shall we? 
5. Have a Communications Plan in Place. So you have leads coming in - awesome! Chances are, they may not buy right away. Or, as with B2C, they bought but you want to retain them as a customer. Make sure you have a coherent communications plan to keep these leads engaged, help them down the funnel, and keep them coming back.  
6. Closing the Loop: Analyze Your Results. With your original lead goal number in hand, after you have run your campaigns, revisit at the end of your quarter. In terms of volume, were you ambitious in your lead gen projections, or less so? How many of those leads were in fact qualified? What source did the most qualified leads come from? What was the Cost Per Lead (CPL) of each lead by source? Asking questions like this will help you start the process over again when you draft campaigns for the next quarter. I have to encourage you to also close the loop and speak with reps who received your leads: were they any good? Why or why not?
   
   

Hopefully this gave you a good premise to base your lead gen programs around. It's definitely a lot, and not something to be taken lightly. I'm secretly hoping that after reading this, you actually consider the above strategies and your customer before jumping on that too-good-to-be-true lead list up for sale. You're better than that. 

Overwhelmed? Contact me to help you with your lead generation initiatives. I've done all of the above and much more - and can work with you and your budget to just help you come up with a plan, or we can execute and analyze results together.