We hope you had a great Christmas and are enjoying this holiday season with family and friends. As we draw closer to the New Year, we are taking some time to reflect on 2018 and the success we've seen our clients achieve. 

Blogging is a mighty strategy when done correct, and it's a goal of ours to provide our clients and visitors top-notch, quality content to teach them and guide them to success. We've searched for the most popular blogs of 2018, and we've curated these lists that will publish each day this week to bring you some of the most educational and informative content from the year. Check out these top blogs on content strategy from 2018, and let them guide your content marketing efforts in 2019! 

Today, we're taking a break from our normally-programmed blog schedule to bring you a holiday message from the LeadG2 and CSS family. Click the link to watch this special message created just for you by our team!

Developing a solid inbound marketing and content strategy is something that most companies struggle with. In fact, a study from Ascend2 and its research partners revealed that 46% of the marketing, sales, and business professionals surveyed around the world said that the lack of an effective strategy and the creation of content are the most challenging obstacles to reaching the next level of inbound marketing performance. LeadG2 uses a 7-Step Lead Generation Process to help our clients navigate and embrace an inbound marketing culture.

Most organizations do a pretty good job of tracking basic marketing KPIs – top of the funnel performance metrics like webpage visits, session lengths, bounce rates, and lead conversions. Those are early indicators. They tell us if our marketing is accomplishing its most basic function – attract an audience and generate leads. 

Your marketing, however, should accomplish much more. Ultimately, isn’t the role of marketing to help drive revenue?

Many organizations have built barriers between the various functions of their business. Even groups that rely on and support each other’s goals (like Sales and Marketing) are “siloed” in their own worlds and rarely communicate. Breaking down those walls and aligning goals and expectations can be challenging, but there are tremendous benefits as well.

Attempting to tackle your entire content marketing to-do list in one day could be overwhelming. Actually, it would be VERY overwhelming. But if you can commit to doing one thing each day over the next 12 days leading up to Christmas, you'll be on the road to improving your overall content marketing efforts that will have you ringing in the New Year on the right foot!

A good theatrical performance can transport you to different places and times, and it can help you experience situations that you’ve never encountered before. It can change the way think and feel and provide a whole new way of looking at a situation. Brian Stokes Mitchell, Tony Award Winning Actor, says, “That's the magic of art and the magic of theatre: it has the power to transform an audience, an individual, or en masse, to transform them and give them an epiphanal experience that changes their life, opens their hearts and their minds, and the way they think.”

You have a blog. Great. Are you analyzing it? Are you tracking its performance? Do you know if your efforts are paying off? Time is money, and if you're spending time on a blog for your company, that's money. And if you're investing dollars in your blog, you'll definitely want to know if it's paying off!

If you are tracking blog analytics, what are you tracking? Traffic? Great. That's good. But you know what's great and drives sales? Conversions! Here are 5 tips to optimize your blog content so that it helps to increase conversion rates and get more qualified leads.

For many businesses, the primary person that is focused on in both marketing and sales efforts is the key decision maker at a company (or even in a household). It’s easy for us to think about the person who has the most power to say “yes” because that’s what we’re looking for in the first place. However, if we are not also keeping in mind the people who can say “no,” then we could be missing opportunities and hurting our overall efforts.

The Difference Between Decision Makers and Decision Influencers

Let’s start with defining the difference between these two: 

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., and we're reflecting on the good things in our lives and enjoying time with family and friends. We're taking this opportunity to share a very important blog post to brag on our team, our culture, and our clients. 

THANKFUL

We're thankful for our team. Bright minds, big hearts, caring souls. The people at LeadG2 and The Center for Sales Strategy work day-in and day-out to deliver the best work for our clients. These people take innovation and dedication to the next level when they are working, then dive head first into family time, community activities, and pursuing their passions when they aren't. At their desks, they bring our products and services to life... they ARE our company. Away from their desks, they are half-marathoners, band members, kid-wranglers, artists, life coaches, and just awesome humans.