Marketing and Sales have been dating for years, and it’s no longer okay for them to have a casual relationship. If Marketing were my daughter and her boyfriend were Sales, then I’d have to put my foot down and say, “Enough dating…it’s time to get married!” Take a look at the current situation, and I think you will agree.

They Live Separately

When your relationship is casual, you maintain your own places. Marketing lives in a cute garden apartment, and Sales lives in a downtown loft. They don’t share anything, and they spend time separately. Marketing has girls’ night out and Sales has poker night with the guys. Their communication is sporadic at best, and it’s obvious they just aren’t on the same page.

They Don’t Share Finances

When Sales and Marketing are just in the dating phase, they don’t pool their money. They don’t share expenses, and they don’t leverage economies of scale. For instance, they both pay their own rent and utilities, and they don’t have any family memberships at the gym. Let’s face it: they are wasting a lot of money because they don’t work together. 

They Sound Different

While Marketing and Sales are just dating, they don’t sound as if they are on the same page. When I talk to Marketing, she tells me one story, and when I talk to Sales, I hear something completely different. Marketing is always interrupting me with her advertising speak, and Sales is constantly talking about “feature” this and “benefit” that. This is a big challenge for the people around them, especially the people they want to be close to: their prospects. - 5 Reasons Marketing and Sales Should Get Married

Who wouldn’t want to wake up one morning and see twice as many sales, visits or retweets? (Especially if you did nothing much different the day before.)

A growing crop of tools and best practices for automatically optimizing and increasing promotion of tweets, Facebook shares and blog posts is promising exactly that.

These new tools are so effective, existing apps have begun taking notice and integrating them into their features. Here’s a quick run-down before we get into the details:

1. BufferApp: Single-click, editable auto-sharing (Twitter, and soon available for Facebook updates) at whatever upcoming time slot is likely to get you the most clicks, retweets and likes.
2. BlogGlue: Have your latest blog post automatically shared on similar blogs as a “recommended” post.
3. Timer apps: Find the times your followers are most active in clicking links and retweeting posts.
4. Triberr: Create or join “tribes” of other users that share one another’s posts.
5. Ten Best Practices: If you find just one tip you haven’t been doing consistently, this section alone should increase your results.

Let’s start with one you can’t do without—the Buffer button. – 5 Ways To Double Your Social Media Results

For those of you who have ever been in an intro to marketing class, webinar, lecture, or training session, you know that the first lesson will include the term “target audience.” A target audience is a particular group of people within a business’ target market at which the business aims its marketing messages.

In one of my previous marketing class, I had to draft up an individual profile that would be representative of a certain brand’s target audience. I had to include the age-range of this consumer, where he lives, what he likes to do, what his profession is, and include a picture of what this consumer would look like.

This detailed description can provide your inbound marketing team with a clear vision of its target customers. In the practice of traditional marketing, this target audience was commonly reached by deciding what TV shows they watched to determine where to place TV advertisement, figuring out what kind of music they listened to determine which radio stations to focus radio commercials, and knowing what they enjoyed reading so print ads were published in the right newspapers or magazines. – 3 Improved Ways to Reach the Modern Target Audience