The end of the year is considered the “busy” season for marketers all across the land. The end of Q3 and beginning of Q4 are especially marked by trying to meet KPIs for those big initiatives of the past year while planning for the next calendar year that’s peeking at you from around the corner. After the laptops are shut, the turkey is in the oven, and the egg nog is poured, giving your marketing (and your hard-working marketers) a complete break is an easy thing to do. 

Alright, folks, gather 'round. It's storytime, and today's tale is about a classic underdog matchup: scrappy small to mid-sized businesses versus those mysterious, artsy, and expensive creative agencies.

Alright folks, let's have a heart-to-heart. You know, the kind where we sip overpriced coffee, gaze out a window dramatically and confess deep truths. Today's truth? You don't know your customers as well as you think you do. Gasp! I know, it's a shocker. But before you throw your latte at the screen and accuse me of being a heartless cynic, let me explain.

It takes a village to create content. It's an extensive process, from strategizing and creating to designing and distributing. And for smaller marketing teams–that workload can be a real uphill battle, especially if you’re trying to be consistent.

As the CEO of a growing company, you know your industry inside and out. You've got the technical terms down pat, and you're fluent in the unique language of your business. But when it comes to finding your next fractional CMO, does that mean they need to be an industry insider, too?

In this blog, we’ll discuss how to get your ducks in a row before launching your account-based marketing campaign. But even before you do that, you need to make sure your overarching marketing strategy is prepared to handle the heavy lift that ABM can be.

We recently attended the Houston Business Marketing Alliance 'Lunch and Learn,' where a panel of industry leaders discussed the harmonization of sales and marketing efforts.

BlueByrd swiftly revitalized a professional services company's go-to-market strategy, leveraging thorough discovery phases and workshops to identify unique market opportunities and streamline product offerings.

The #1 reason salespeople can’t close deals, according to buyers, is because the salesperson is not trusted or respected. In many interactions, buyers can easily sense a predetermined agenda from salespeople, leading to increased pressure and distance from the finish line. Finding a balance between the sales agenda and the buyer’s needs is crucial to foster authentic connections and bring that sale to closed won.

Reflection time is our favorite! This year has brought a whole host of new learnings for BlueByrd, as you can imagine for a business in year 4. Our team has expanded, been moved around, pushed the limits, said “no” to the things that don’t make sense, and has had tremendous growth. We’re so proud of our team for embracing change and learning new skills to support our clients in the best way possible.

We recently attended HubSpot's 2023 INBOUND Conference, where top marketing experts discussed current trends and the shifts in the marketing and sales landscapes. We're excited to share our key takeaways with you!

Welcome to Q4, y'all! The end of the year is approaching fast, and it's time to look at your marketing budget distribution (or the lack thereof). Here are a few suggestions on how companies should allocate their marketing budgets for 2024.

To ensure a confident return on investment, companies should use scorecards as essential tools to track the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. These scorecards help detect trends, identify areas that need improvement, and provide a clear measure of whether marketing strategies are working.

In the fast-paced world of marketing, success is often attributed to groundbreaking strategies and innovative techniques. However, as James Clear masterfully explains in his book Atomic Habits it's the small, repetitive actions that create lasting change. In this blog, we'll draw inspiration from Clear’s wisdom to delve into the significance of creating positive marketing habits while shedding light on the detrimental effects of negative ones.

I recently moved to Denver, Colorado for work, and those who know me know that was a blessing. I love the outdoors. Hiking, kayaking, biking, you name it. I particularly love the mountains; they have some big ones in Colorado. With my glorious view from the top, I couldn't help but see some similarities between mountain climbing and business. I know this is a well-explored analogy, but let’s go further than the cheesy posters in corporate office break rooms.

It’s busy out there. The landscape is rapidly evolving, and businesses are constantly seeking ways to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and enhance productivity. For marketers– we’re in luck! There just so happens to be a $4.62 Billion market dedicated solely to these concerns. So what exactly is “marketing automation?” What are the benefits of using it? Why is using it so important? We’re glad you asked. Let’s dive into a few key benefits of leveraging marketing automation software and how it affects a company’s overall marketing system.

Despite the unpredictability of marketing, there are several things that businesses can do to increase their chances of success. Here are some tips that will help you navigate the uncertainty of marketing.

You should be aware of every place your customers like to hang out and be able to meet them there. Simply put, if you’re not where they are, you’ve already lost. Taking a multi-channel approach allows you to reach more of your potential customers and engage with them more frequently.

The launch of ChatGPT and development of similar platforms has changed the face of marketing, and content creation may never be the same. Reluctance to accept the potential of ChatGPT and its future iterations may leave some marketers behind, but embracing it also places us in the position of being guides for ethical and legal implications related to its use.

Positioning outlines why your product is unique in comparison to market alternatives, and messaging describes to your target segments what you’ll do to deliver on the promises made in your positioning statement. It is a powerful one-two punch, and you need to be able to communicate yours before you start spending money on tactics.

Properly understood, the job of a marketing department is to drive revenue for the company. Some marketers do so by building and maintaining a brand, others focus on generating new leads, and others still focus on enabling sales to close more quickly and consistently. A good company with a mature marketing department does all of these things, even if they focus on some areas more than others. But there’s one area of revenue generation where the marketing department is often relegated to a passive participant or even outright excluded: pricing.

Companies everywhere are looking to reduce customer churn, or the rate at which a customer stops purchasing with a company during a set period of time. In other words: losing customers. This can be caused by various factors including product quality, price increases, poor customer experience, and reduced perception of product/service value, among others.

Congratulations! We have officially made it to the end of the year. Are you tired? Or do you feel accomplished? We hope it’s the latter! The BlueByrd team has been hard at work this year working with B2C and B2B companies in healthcare, oil & gas, chemicals, manufacturing, leadership development, software, financial services, robotics, and senior living industries. We doubled in headcount and revenue this year and we couldn’t be more proud or thankful to our partners and clients for choosing to work with us. Cheers to another amazing year in 2023!

It’s no secret that organic reach has declined over the years. This has caused marketers all over the world to do everything in their power to raise their marketing budgets to cover the cost of paid efforts. However, growing a company’s social media presence organically isn’t unheard of, nor is it impossible to achieve. It just requires time and consistency.

We recently worked with a client that was undergoing a management change with a new CEO, COO, and CIO. The company had been incredibly successful, but the new CEO wanted to take the firm to even greater heights.

Everyone who’s been around the block a time or two in the business world has a good understanding of how consultants of any kind spend their days, right? They’re the ones who charge into companies with a metaphorical baseball bat, break strategies apart only to scatter the pieces, and care less about their bad reputation than Joan Jett. Or in the words of author Martin Kiln when writing about management consultants in particular, they “steal your watch and then tell you the time.” Ouch.

When a product is discounted to the point it is basically being given away, the product then has little perceived value in the marketplace. In fact, a deeply discounted price sends the message that there’s no reason to pay a fair price and certainly not a premium price. I’m not talking about occasional promotions or small discounts used as marketing tactics, rather I’m talking about pricing your product too low.

One of BlueByrd’s core offerings is providing Fractional Chief Marketing Officers to our clients, and we often get asked, “What should I expect from my Fractional CMO?” Many of our clients have never had a CMO or even high-level marketing expertise inside their organizations, so it is a valid question.

The brand. It’s one of those things everyone believes they understand but finds difficult to put into words. ‍“Of course I know what my brand is. Just don’t ask me to explain it.” Things that are about individual perception are like that.

If you thought this was a blog about a ’90s boy band, well … you should probably say, “Bye bye bye.” But just like NSYNC had to work tirelessly on harmony to achieve worldwide fame, we must be intentional in the workplace to build harmony within our team.

A lot of times when organizations engage with us, they ask us what they need to do to grow. And they start by listing off several marketing tactics – email marketing, LinkedIn advertising, retargeting, Google ads, SEO – the list goes on.

Learn why talking to strangers is the perfect strategy if you want your company to grow.

Marketing consultants share their thoughts on a very fast-paced year

Taking a more intentional and strategic approach to grow existing accounts and to land new ones that leverage an integrated sales and marketing effort is called account-based marketing, or ABM. ABM helps you grow existing accounts, and it can help you get new accounts.

What the heck is a TAM and why should you care? When clients are rolling out new products or services, it can be hard for them to estimate their full market potential.

Who’s your biggest competitor? If you are like most people, you quickly envisioned the bad guys across town who provide similar products or services to yours.

We routinely do voice of customer research for our clients, and we almost always uncover new findings that their salespeople were not aware of.

Different fractional CMOs charge different amounts. It also depends on how much of their time you will need. Here’s the longer answer.

That’s a question we hear a lot before we kick off projects with clients who have not done a lot of marketing in the past.

We were doing a competitive analysis for one of our clients the other day, and some of their competitors’ websites were bad. I mean really bad.

If your revenue is flat, it may be because your sales and marketing efforts are flat.

The love-hate relationship between sales and marketing.

Sound crazy? It happens all the time. In my role as a Fractional CMO, I often am in the position of replacing a predecessor who was recently let go, so I have witnessed this phenomenon many times.

Did any of you feel nice and comfortable all year long? Yeah, we didn’t either. Congratulations: that meant we all grew last year.

Effective ways to turn your content into conversions

Prison Rules: To do something or play a sport by being physically aggressive and otherwise trying to win at all costs.

Successful mergers and acquisitions depend on understanding what you are really getting in the deal.

Three steps to coming up with a great name

Over my lifetime, Mom gave me some great advice. Of all of the advice she gave me, Mom was really off base when it came to sales tips.

Prepare yourself. What you are about to read will give you real takeaways and give your sales team the boost it needs to start social selling.

Social selling emerged around 6 years ago and still many companies haven't heard of it or adopted it. Why is social selling important for you to know?

When we meet with customers about a website design, their first question is almost always the same: “What will our home page look like?” Their faces fall, but we have to tell them that it’s not the top priority.

Naturally I couldn’t put every one of my lessons learned in my first year of business into one blog post, so here is the second part with the final five of my “top ten”—sort of inspired by David Letterman you might say.

COVID-19 has led to an unprecedented business impact. While I have never seen anything like this, I have been helping clients navigate economic downturns for decades.

It’s been a little over a year since I started BlueByrd Strategic Sales and Marketing, and it’s safe to say that I’ve learned a lot since then. As I began reflecting on all the things that have happened, I thought why not share?

Like all things that mature, we can chart a company’s growth in stages. In this case, there are three evident transitions as the months and years roll on. A company begins with the product it wants to sell, and then starts to sell it.

What is your marketing budget? Getting this answer out of people today is tough. You might have better luck asking them about their voting history.

Here’s something that may surprise you: Companies often severely underprice their products. What factors influence this?

I work with many companies going through mergers and acquisitions. And I see rigorous processes in several areas. Companies work on the deal for a long time, looking at the economics using different models to determine the best price to pay.

Companies spend a lot of money on tradeshows. A lot. And some get value from this spend, but most don’t. How do I know? Well, let me ask you if you’ve ever seen this at a tradeshow: There’s a 10 x 10 booth...

Recently a client confided in me that they had been working with an agency, spent quite a bit of money, and in return received some different marketing tactics for their spend.

Often times when people think marketing, they aren’t really thinking about marketing. I’ll explain—first, by telling you what marketing is not.

While methods of selling, buying, and consuming behaviors have changed over the past century, few in the know could hardly argue that fundamental human desire and motivations have not.

Websites generally fall under the good, the bad, and the glamorous. I won’t go into the “good” website (where is the fun in that?), but I will tell you that the “bad” and the “glamorous” are usually not that dissimilar.

It’s a question people ask me a lot. CMO is the acronym for Chief Marketing Officer. The idea behind creating the CMO position was to give a marketing person a seat at the table in the C-Suite. It’s a tumultuous position.

Flying the Coop: “What, you are leaving Pennebaker?” That is a question I’ve been hearing quite a lot these days. I have to say that it was a very hard choice to walk away from Pennebaker.