A pragmatic approach to driving clarity, focusing resources and delivering desired results.

There are lots of online marketing services firms out there, but not all of them have earned their stripes doing what you do as a business owner or marketing executive. We have.

My name is Mary Planding and I’m the founder of the Inbound Marketing Squad.

Your job is demanding, the stock exchange volatile, and the competition relentless. In a publicly held company, the financial pressures and government regulations are complex. In a privately held company, the responsibility to grow and keep your company healthy—a weighty responsibility.

So when you need a partner to help tame the marketing challenges you’re charged with, you want to be sure you’re hiring the very best resources your money can buy.

Clients refer us. A lot.

The bulk of our business comes from client recommendations and word-of-mouth referrals. ‘Nuf said.

We’ve been on the front line with sales.

Early in my career, I went into sales to overcome my then excruciatingly painful shyness. I’ve sold software, hardware and services all over the U.S. and Europe to IT execs, high tech VARs and OEMs. In fact, among all our squad members, we figure we’ve flown out of every U.S. airport there is (or maybe it just feels like it), logging millions of sales miles. So we respect a road warrior’s mindset and her needs and can anticipate what a sales VP and CEO expects from marketing.  That translates into helping you create the most effective inbound marketing strategies, content and tools to support your sales force and keep buyers moving through the sales funnel.

We see the big picture.

Because your challenges are bigger than just coming up with persuasive copy and nice-looking graphics. As business owners and former marketing execs at Apple, National Semiconductor (among others), we know you move at warp 10 trying to keep up with all the strategic changes in the business. From revenues to regulations, from manufacturing to IT systems—everything about your business impacts marketing. You need a trusted resource to keep up with you, anticipate problems and their solutions. We do that, every day for our clients. Which means you get the help you need, with no hassle, fast.

We walk our talk.

It’s easy to give advice and recommendations when your job isn’t the one on the line. We don’t do that. We’ve got lots of failures as well as successes under our belts and frankly, we have an abiding respect for failure and have the scars to prove it. We loathe it. We only make recommendations based on what we’ve observed has worked for other clients, or what current research is showing could work for you. We share how we know what we know so you can make smarter decisions.

 While we’re strategic marketing nerds, we love creating rich online content.

We love all the intricacies of branding and marketing, the excitement, the constant challenge of solving strategic or urgent problems.The satisfaction we get from coming up with the right combination of words, images and sounds that persuade people to act thrills us. So you get strategies and content that hits a target audience’s sweet spot for a home run.

We love making technical solutions and concepts easy to understand.

Clients often say we should have been engineers. Because unlike many creative marketers intimidated or bored by technical solutions, we listen raptly to engineers and product managers. There’s nothing we find more rewarding than creating  effective content vehicles  to elegantly articulate technical solutions that both inform and subtly convince decision makers to buy them.