During our user testing, many people asked Where should I start? 

There are a few different places to start, depending on your situation.  Are you: 

• Looking for a solution to an immediate marketing challenge?
• Seeking to add management structure to an existing marketing project?
• Interested in expanding your expertise in a specific area?
• Ready to move your entire marketing management into our marketing platform?
• Seeking to train your team in a specific area?

Let’s tackle the first scenario in this post and address the others one at a time in later posts. 

Solutions for Immediate Marketing Challenges 

To find a solution to an immediate challenge, there are two sections to visit in Growth Panel: the Plan Creator and the Library. 

Is yours a high-level challenge? Examples of high-level challenges could be: 

• I need to start marketing my business on the Internet.
• We need to generate more qualified leads.
• There’s friction among our sales and marketing teams. How can we resolve this?
• How can we start measuring our marketing ROI? 

For higher-level challenges like these, visit the Plan Creator and design a plan based on your business needs. The software allows you to generate marketing plans that tie together multiple business subjects into a single work plan, in as few as three steps.  Select your challenge, refine it in Step Two, and then customize your results for your finished product. 

These plans can get very detailed and can cover weeks to months of work. 

Visit the Library for Specific Results 

If you’re looking for a more specific solution, visit the Library. The Library gives you access to specific marketing content organized by business subject. 

First, choose your subject from the navigation panel on the left. 

Selecting a subject will send you to the default exercise view. Exercises are guided best practices that deliver base content to help you execute the specific steps described in the exercise titles. Browse the exercises listed under a particular subject to find what you need, or use the Search function. 

The right-hand navigation takes you to other information panels within your designated subject. Click on the diploma icon to visit the Extended Library to see additional articles, tools or exercises the Growth Panel administrator has loaded into your account. 

If you haven’t yet found what you’re looking for, check out external resources the Growth Panel admin has loaded into the Links panel. Click on the link icon to find an assortment of recommended books, tools, articles and reference websites. 

For a textual overview of the subject, click on the information icon to visit the Description section. 

Next Steps  

Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, it’s time to get to work! In the next post I’ll show you how to create a marketing project to add structure around your marketing activities.

Tags: getting started, Product Tips, Training

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Product Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.