The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends spending 7 to 8 percent of your gross revenue for marketing and advertising if you’re doing less than $5 million a year in sales. Whether you're spending thousands or millions on marketing every year, at the end of the day, the opinion of your customers and clients worth more.

When your goal is to have a prospect to take action on a landing page, whether it’s to schedule an appointment or fill out a download form for an eBook, it’s not enough to say “It’s great!” You have to offer up some proof. A single business review can lift conversions by 10 percent.

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.

I often get asked by executives who are seeking to grow their business, “Should I be deploying inbound or outbound marketing tactics?’ My answer almost every time is, “Yes.”

I’ve recently learned that nothing makes a room fall silent more quickly than asking a group of sales managers, “Who here is in charge of lead generation?” Typically, the person in charge of lead generation is the same person who is in charge of setting appointments, finding needs, coming up with solutions, building proposals, making presentations, getting the contracts signed, ensuring that the contracts are fulfilled, and picking up the checks: the salesperson. 

We recently had a client do a complete overhaul of their website. New templates, new copy, new CTA buttons, new sitemap—a complete redesign. As anyone who has been through one of these major re-designs knows, it takes a lot of prepping, planning and time to execute a brand new website. When it was all over the client said to me, “I feel like I just gave birth.” She was so proud of all of the months of hard work and the constant emails and edits and approvals that she was gleaming as if looking at a new baby. Now, anyone who has given actual birth would probably laugh in her face (maybe even throw a punch), but we did see the correlation between putting all of your energy into something and getting a really great result.

And as many mothers in the past have said after giving birth, “I’m never doing that again!”… you would be surprised as to how many go on to have a second, third, fourth, and maybe even a fifth child. The same thing will happen with your website—you are most likely going to redesign that website many more times over the years.

This brings us to our own personal experience, as we have done many website redesigns for clients. She was right! Website redesigns are exhausting and take a lot of energy to complete, but they are well worth it. We also realized, just like raising a child and teaching them to grow, we also need to help our websites grow!

Here are 5 ways to keep your website growing and working for your business: 

1. Give each page of your website the attention it deserves.

You built your website so that prospects would find you, get convinced they need your products and/or services, and call for a consultation, sign up for your marketing, or make a purchase, right? The goal of your website is to generate leads. What if you could optimize your site so that it was more effective at cranking out leads for you? That’s what conversion rate optimization (CRO) is all about.

People believe all kinds of crazy things. And just because people believe something, doesn’t mean it's true. SEO has more than its share of untrue beliefs, and these myths keep good sites from ranking well because the owners of the sites don’t know better.

It’s no secret that attracting prospects, generating sales leads, and building a robust sales pipeline are essential in the success of any business. What seems to be a secret to many, though, is how these objectives can be accomplished. Many organizations continue to struggle to execute lead generation strategies that produce consistent results. There is really no magic bullet to lead generation. But there are some fundamentals that are often ignored that will get consistent results when applied as a cohesive strategy.

Good journalism can teach us a thing or two about creating blog posts. Journalists and inbound marketers who are dedicated to their craft have something in common: they commit to doing the things that engage their readers. 

Here are five lessons from journalism that companies can apply to their blog writing to increase engagement—and get better results.

For a long time, we recommended hosting all your content on your own website — after all, you own your content, and you want people spending time on your website, not someone else's. But the way people consume content and look for information online is changing, and marketers need to change along with it.