For the past two years or so, we all have been operating in a strange work environment. Many of us have experienced trying to work full-time virtual, part-time in the office, and even full-time in the office. For each of us, it has been good, bad, or none of the above, as post-pandemic work styles range from virtual to in-person to hybrid to pick your own style, causing business leaders to hide or run for cover...or in some cases, listen carefully for new solutions.

All the press are celebrating the agreement by The United States Soccer Federation to align the Women's and Men's Soccer teams' pay and distribution of prize monies. It is time, isn't it?

The Federation has reached landmark collective-bargaining agreements with its men's and women's national teams. The terms create pay parity, aligning the men's and women's teams’ pay and creating a unique mechanism to share the prize money coming from their respective World Cup competitions. This deal recognizes that regardless of sex, people are people, and they should be paid for performance, not for gender.

Like it or not, the future of remote work is upon us. All of us need to become more facile at communicating electronically and doing it wisely. In your own business, this might mean you need to prepare a new way of communicating. And, you can't wing it the way you might have done with in-person meetings. Agendas are necessary, and you need to understand new ways of engaging people virtually. But, there have always been meetings. So why the need to change now? Why are new tools even more important today than ever before?

There are so many new platforms emerging and agencies promoting themselves as inbound experts that it has become challenging for companies to evaluate the different options available to them. For all transparency we are HubSpot certified partners and have been using their platform for our own company and our clients since 2014. Long enough to have learned what works really well, what we might wish worked differently, and how we might feel recommending HubSpot to our clients. In all candor, it is an amazing platform.

In a recent post, I was sharing with you some thoughts about Nintendo's Blue Ocean Strategy of targeting girls, which opened up a huge untapped market of nonusers for that company. Similarly, Disney created its new MagicBand wristbands in hopes of growing their base of frequent users and attracting nonusers by making it easier to enjoy its theme parks.

Something caught my eye several weeks ago! I was thumbing through google.com/finance and an October 26, 2016 Fortune.com article came across my iPhone entitled: “Forget the corner office. Some CEOs are discovering they get more from their troops when they have no office.”

For the second consecutive year, I attended the HubSpot Inbound 2015 conference in Boston last month. So why inbound? As you know if you’ve been reading our blogs, at Simon Associates we have been talking about inbound marketing for the last two years. And as you can probably tell, we feel it is absolutely critical to the success of your marketing program. We have initiated inbound marketing with all of our clients, showing them how providing content is the best way to attract and nurture customers. And it’s working!

On Oct. 10, 2015,  at the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development (SHSMD) conference in the District of Columbia, I presented a workshop with Mark Clark, Healthgrades Vice President of Strategic Development, called: “Your Data Wants To Talk—How Can You Hear It?”

The focus of our presentation was the enormous challenges hospital marketers are facing as they grapple with how to turn an abundance of data into smarter marketing strategies.

Afterwards I wrote a blog about the intersection of data and storytelling and what it means to healthcare providers, which has just been published in FierceHealthcare and which I'll touch on here.

Healthcare providers now realize they cannot continue to market just patient-centric, high quality care as their brand differentiator!

In my three previous blogs, I explained how digital or inbound marketing is the best way to turn strangers into customers, then promoters, of your business. I showed you how to use the inbound methodology to convert people who are searching for you into leads, and then how to transform those leads into customers (close the deal). Now it’s time for the last, and arguably most important, step in the inbound marketing journey: Delight.

“Delight” is the glue that keeps a customer stuck to your brand, your solutions

By now you’re probably well aware of HubSpot’s graph that illustrates the four parts of a successful inbound marketing strategy: 1) Attract, 2) Convert, 3) Close and 4) Delight.