How much should we spend? This is one of the most common questions in marketing. As brands put together strategies for how they can reach more customers and grow their business, they often don’t know how to set an exact budget.

As we get ready to wrap up 2021, we’re also wrapping up our Inbound Takeaways Series. Here is the best advice from our favorite Inbound speakers and how you can use their lessons to drive more success for both you and your brand in 2022.

After an insightful marketing conference hosted by HubSpot in September, this is Part 2 of our 3 Part series of actionable takeaways. We started last month with Content Strategy Priorities, followed by this handy comparison of inbound and account-based marketing, and will conclude next month with some leadership inspiration.

If you want to improve your marketing, don’t jump right into launching more tactics. Don’t simply create more content, send more emails, or spend more on ads. Instead, take a step back and focus on your strategy. Create an updated marketing strategy to guide your next steps.

Branding is something that organizations usually focus on at the inception of their business. Logo, icons, imagery, taglines, and messaging are all priorities at the launch of a business, and then they are often deprioritized as time goes on. But, branding should remain an ongoing task. Here are a few reasons why an organization might need to rethink their branding strategy and reposition their brand.

If you want to continually attract your ideal audience and encourage them to take a step toward working with you, you need an effective lead generation strategy. And, that doesn’t mean simply adding a contact form to your website.

To effectively and consistently generate quality leads, you need a variety of elements that help you reach the right audience and encourage them to take action.

To build a fully functional lead generation strategy, use these eleven elements of an effective lead generation strategy.

As our team reflected on this year, a common observation of success surfaced -- consistency. When we align well with clients, we find we are receiving valuable feedback from their teams to keep our processes moving along in a timely manner. We find marketing efforts to feel fluid, with room for creative adjustments based on frequent collection of new data points. While many factors can lead to ineffective marketing, consistency can be attributed to great marketing.

Marketing isn’t black and white. There isn’t one strategy that works for every brand, nor is there one plan that produces the exact same results for every industry. Marketing is an uncertain science that requires testing, review, and optimization to improve its effectiveness -- which is why marketing analytics are so important to review, interpret and use to make adjustments to your strategy, messaging, and tactics.

There’s a lot of marketing advice that tells you what to do to succeed. There are endless lists of things you can do to improve your strategies and boost your marketing effectiveness. But, you can still struggle to succeed even while following all the best marketing advice. Here are a few things that will cause you to fail at marketing.

A marketing strategy is like a living, breathing entity. It’s continually changing and adjusting to the environment. It needs room to grow and evolve, and it can’t do that if you just set it and forget it. When you ignore your marketing strategy, it can quickly grow stale. Changes in customers, demand, markets, competitors, and culture happen. If your marketing stays the same during these external changes, it can become outdated, out-of-touch, and ineffective.