Spitfire Inbound’s best blogs of 2017

2017 was a really great year for Spitfire Inbound, and our blog helped us get there. Apart from winning HubSpot Impact award in the Inbound Growth Story category (international), we were also voted one of the Top 100 Inbound Marketing Blogs & Websites for Marketers, and we graduated to HubSpot Gold!

As Spitfire’s strategic director and the Editor-in-Chief of Spitfire Inbound’s blog, I’ve loved the variety of topics my team tackled last year. From productivity, to skills development, sales enablement and even personal stories about our growth, here are our ten best performing posts from the year.

1. Stay Curious: How continuous skills development will motivate your staff - Create a culture of learning in your company and your employees will not only be enthusiastic knowledge seekers, but also bring enthusiasm and expertise to your day to day business.
2. How Spitfire Inbound integrated Suzuki South Africa's marketing campaigns to increase passenger vehicle sales by 21% in a declining market - In a dire economic year, in which South Africa was downgraded to junk status, the national economy rocked and the automotive industry in a serious decline, Suzuki Auto South Africa didn’t just maintain their market share. They exceeded it.
3. Why and how you should be doing Inbound PR - Inbound marketing, which uses pull marketing tactics to engage consumers, and PR - traditionally an outbound approach to marketing - seem poles apart on their strategies and techniques. Here’s why you need to take an inbound approach to your PR.
4. 9 international marketing lessons for South Africa - The South African audience is a unique one, but some global trends apply to our audience too.  Here are a few key lessons to learn from international marketers.
5. How the internet changed buyer behaviour - Buyers are becoming more sophisticated, and understanding consumer behaviour is the key to a successful marketing strategy.
6. My top articles of 2017 (so far) - Our content strategist, Samantha Steele, shares her top seven articles from around the web of 2017.
7. The Pomodoro technique will change the way you work - Save up to 23.3 hours per week using short, focused bursts of time to maximise your productivity. You’ll finally find the time to do all the things you love!
8. UPDATED | The importance of pitching up for sales - The first step to making a sale is to actually arrive. With today’s technology and communication tools it is very easy to hide behind a variety of impersonal, pre-designed, automated responses and offerings in the hope of landing a customer.
9. 3 applications of the Pareto Principle to boost your productivity - Discovered in 1906, the Pareto Principle continues to fascinate economists and mathematicians with the frequency of the 80/20 ratio in all areas of life.
10. Why we’re called ‘Spitfire Inbound’ - the little plane that changed the course of a war - It’s a question we get asked a lot - why is an inbound marketing company named after a World War II plane? When you think about the most powerful, agile airplane that ever existed the first thing that comes to mind probably isn’t the Spitfire – but it should be.

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