You’ve been working on a website development project for weeks. You finally set the site to live and sit back and bask in a job well done, a job completely complete. Well, not so fast. When your website goes live, you have ended one project, but started another. You’ve moved from the website development phase to the website maintenance phase.

In 2020, many brick-and-mortar businesses had to pivot. With their doors shut, they had to find another way to serve customers -- so they built an online store. Many brands launched eCommerce stores to help their business survive COVID-19 lockdowns.

Now, many brands are realizing that the opportunities of an online store can outlast COVID-19 closures. An online store can continue to create additional revenue, especially when you optimize and amplify it.

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.

Social media is an easy marketing effort for B2B brands to underestimate and overlook. While most brands know they need social media added to their marketing mix, they don’t always understand how useful it can be with the right strategy. Nor do they properly estimate the commitment it takes.

The truth about B2B social media is that it can be effective to bolster your brand, build trust and connect with your customers, if used in the right ways.

Your business is only as good as your brand’s reputation. When a customer is trying to decide whether to work with or buy from you, they will look to a variety of trust signals to tell them if it’s a good idea or not. So, how do you provide the trust signals that customers need to keep going down the path to work with you? It starts with reputation management.

Advertising is one component of a larger marketing strategy. It specifically refers to the tactics used to make customers aware of a business, product, or service. Advertising involves paying a third-party media or channel to promote your brand to their audience. Advertising exists in many forms, from traditional outlets (TV ads, newspaper ads, billboards, etc.) to digital platforms (display ads, search ads, social media ads, etc.).

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.

We know things won’t always go as planned, but that doesn’t mean we should throw planning out the window. In fact, it shows why planning can be so helpful, especially when it comes to making plans for your marketing. Planning is a way to get focused and organized. It allows you to look ahead and set goals around what you know and think will happen and allocate the resources needed to execute your plans. Planning can even allow you to be better prepared for the unknown.