Our latest update adds an expanded marketing content search feature. You can already search within each subject in the Library, and with the new search option, you can now search the entire exercise library from a single query.

From any screen in the Library, click on the new Exercise Search link in the upper right.

Enter your search criteria in the search box and your results will display in the panel to the right. You can download exercises here, modify the description and title, update with a new default and view the exercise subject.

This search feature indexes all exercise titles and descriptions, including any you’ve customized. Here I’ve changed Build Your House List to Growth Panel House List. The changes appear right in the search results, and when I search again for Growth Panel, my change is displayed.

This is helpful because this exercise is accessible from the Direct Mail section, but Email Marketing content also refers to it but doesn’t contain it, as we don’t list duplicate exercises in multiple subjects.

As you customize the exercises and descriptions, make sure to update the titles and descriptions with succinct details to make the search function more powerful.

Welcome to our new brand! 

Growth Panel is software-as-a-service (SaaS) that blends a career’s worth of marketing content with online project management. It’s a marketing platform that enables users to generate marketing solutions, add their own expertise to make it their own, and organize and manage their marketing activities.

How do we describe our space? We’re calling it Intelligent Marketing Management. Growth Panel delivers a ton of marketing content focused on marketing planning, execution, and results–all blended into an online project management application. 

We didn’t seem to fit into any of the existing slots: We’re not MRM, EMM, MOM, marketing analytics, planning, marketing automation or plain old project management. (Aren’t those acronyms terrible?) 

Since our application is completely new and different, we wanted our brand to capture the essence of what we deliver for companies and marketing consultants.

It’s a control panel for company growth. Thus, Growth Panel was born. 

The Journey 

It’s been a long journey getting to this point. We started as a group of domain experts–sales, marketing and SME executives–creating marketing structure for our SME clients (small to mid-size entities, typically under $100 MM in revenue). We quickly realized the value of our internal content and tools and transitioned them to the web for others to access. 

We added software expertise to our team, worked with our customers, and put together everything we learned to complete the transition.  Now we’re a unique SaaS offering that addresses a major pain point for most SMEs. 

Marketing Consultants

Marketers and consultants have previously used our marketing content and tools to develop marketing strategies and plans, execute tasks and grow their expertise, whether it’s for their own company or their consulting practice clients. 

Since we allow our users to put their own brand on our content and tools, consultants use it as infrastructure for their practice, whether they’re facilitating strategy, expanding tactical marketing offerings, or handling marketing planning for client companies. 

There aren’t many offerings in the marketplace that give consultants such generous rights. 

Marketing Departments

For SMEs, the value and return can be just as great. Marketing is challenging and often misunderstood. Most SMEs don’t have the bandwidth or resources to select the right marketing activities or effectively execute for successful results.  SME marketers generally have expertise in only a handful of areas, which often limits their selection of strategies and tactics. 

With Growth Panel, SMEs can access a complete array of marketing intelligence to choose the right marketing strategy and tactics, with tools their team can use for better execution. There’s nothing similar at a comparable cost. The alternatives include countless years of study and expensive training, increased headcount, or both. 

Check out our tour! We’re looking forward to continuing to help marketing teams and consultants add intelligence to their marketing management to achieve better business results!

As many of you know, we’ve almost completed our new application. 

Instead of simply adding new functionality onto our existing app and improving key features, we decided to build a completely new app from the ground up. One reason was technological–we needed to unify the backend components of our existing site.

But the main reason was that we wanted to take some of our high-value functionality (our plan creator) and integrate it into the way our users work. Instead of “adding on,” we went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. 

The upside of this approach was our ability to reference all of the customer intelligence we’ve gained over the last 2 years and apply it during our build. We had a blank canvas. Instead of making minor improvements and adding bits and pieces, we rebuilt the high-value functionality into a new app and eliminated the low value features.

The downside was that it was time-consuming and challenging.

Internally we called it our “v3.0,” but during initial customer testing, we realized we had a “problem”–our new application had outgrown our existing brand.  In our existing v2.0, most of the value we deliver is from our content. We serve it up from our site and have some nice software widgets for managing goals and campaign metrics. 

But our v3.0 is a full blown web-app, meshing online project management, document management and collaboration into our existing marketing process and content. 

Since we have a completely different offering, we need a new brand. It was crystal clear after one of our distributors said “Jim, this is a completely different offering. It’s much more than the M.O. brand.” 

So instead of simply birthing our new app, we’re birthing an entire new product offering.  As much as I didn’t want to undertake this additional workload, it’s the right thing to do, and the right time to rename and rebrand. 

The new app is just about done, so we’re moving on to the rest of the list: 

• New name
• New logo
• New corporate identity
• New positioning
• New brand strategy
• New messaging
• New website
• New sales tools & literature
• New campaigns

The long project just got longer, but with this much effort already expended, it makes sense to get it right…