Ready to improve your recruiting strategy? Need to build a new development initiative? Trying to increase student enrollment?

Maybe it's time to take a deeper look at your marketing. Maybe it's time for "inbound marketing"!

If you work in higher education, you are always trying to get the attention of your current students, attract the right future students, cater to your alumni and build relationships with parents. Of all the ways you can do this — from newsletters to special events — "Inbound Marketing" is possibly the most powerful way to kickstart your audience into action.

Inbound marketing...what's that?  

For starters, inbound marketing is about three important things:

1. Being the right answer to a person's questions.
2. Capturing consumers along their buyer's journey so they return to you again and again for more information and better solutions.
3. Delighting your current students, parents, donors, faculty and others through online and social marketing.

Are you ready for Inbound Marketing?

Your growth has slowed. Stalled. Possibly even gone in the wrong direction. Maybe it's the competition, the economy or consumers' changing tastes. You probably feel like you need a superman solution!!

But maybe, just maybe, it's your culture.

Are you ready to take a hard look at how you get things done? (or not done?)

All over the country, I lead workshops on culture change for companies that are experiencing slow growth, or no growth, and are seeking a way forward. Culture is vitally important to the success of a firm, yet many leaders ignore or simply don't understand the role of corporate culture. As I listen to these bewildered CEOs, I've realized that many of them are facing similar challenges. Here are some examples:

Data as storytelling has the power to bring about great change, most critically in the healthcare field. But in order to understand facts, the brain needs to visualize them. Therefore the ability to convert cold, hard numbers into a compelling story that can, for instance, improve the patient experience or reduce operating costs, has enormous value, as I write in my latest article for Hospital Impact.

As I point out, because the brain is a pattern-making machine it is not happy unless it can convert data in a visual way into a meaningful story that resonates with what it knows already. This “data visualization” is something we’re working on with several of our clients at Simon Associates Management Consultants, and it’s proving to be quite a challenge.

So that you, too, can learn how to make your data come alive, enabling you to “see, feel and think” about it differently—which is when real, lasting change can occur—I share some approaches that have worked for these clients.

In my new book “On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights,” I share a story about a client, Laclede Chain, that was “on the brink.” Stuck or stalled, however you describe it, Laclede had grown and captured market share but then reached a position in the market where it had to rethink its business model.

Despite the fact that the post-recession market recovery is now entering its eighth year, we at SAMC are getting calls from across the U.S. and Canada from companies that are once again facing that “stall point.” They rebounded well from the 2008 Great Recession but aren’t quite sure why, and now are watching sales slow, clients defect to other companies, and buying processes change. Once again, like Laclede, they have to reinvent their businesses. And once again, they aren’t quite sure how.

Can Corporate Anthropology Help Reinvent a Company?