5 Ways Mobile Marketing is Affecting Social Media
How often do you check social media on your phone? In fact, when was the last time you even got through an entire day without your i-enabled device or Android-powered gadget? If you’re like most people, it’s quite hard – if not impossible – to recall such a scenario. Living without mobile technology is unthinkable this day […]
Three Content Strategies for Responsive Web Design: Plan, Prioritize, Distill
For most marketers, the term “responsive web design” most likely conjures up images of web developers and wire frames. But it should bring to mind strings of sentences and chunks of text. Content is the engine that attracts leads to begin with, then drives them through the sales cycle. And responsive web design’s chief job […]
Hackers Stole Your Data? Here’s What to Do
THIS LAST JUNE 10, 2015 in the wake of 4 million people having their data stolen, we did a blog post that addressed a crisis of data and identity theft. From that time until August 11, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, another 124 data breaches have occurred (something like 2 each day) and […]
Sharing Customer Information Without Consent? The FTC Wants to Know
Can a company share my personal information? A company can share your personal information if allowed by privacy laws, their privacy policy, or with your consent. Laws like GDPR in the EU and CCPA in California limit data sharing without clear consent or a valid reason, such as fulfilling a service. Always review a company’s […]
Digital Debris: Why Data Needs an Expiration Date
I recently received a letter from a large health insurance company. Not my current provider, mind you. One that covered my health care many years ago. In fact, I almost recycled the envelope without reading it, since I assumed they were just trying to get my business back. However, I decided to open it on […]
Use the SMART Mnemonic to Identify Your Marketing Goals
Regardless of the new tools available to us, essential marketing strategies are still the same whether the tactic is traditional or digital. Our ability to attract, capture, nurture, convert and expand our customer base still relies on our ability to set, implement, and track marketing goals. Goal setting is a powerful process that helps you […]
Long Tail Keywords: Win at SEO and Acquire More Qualified Leads
Would you like a way to drastically reduce the amount of search engine optimization (SEO) work you have to do, remove most of your competition, and find traffic that converts 2.5 times better than the average searcher? Sure you would. And that means you need to know about long tail keywords. They are today’s secret […]
Get Found Faster: 10 Tips for Successful Local SEO
Local SEO is big business. According to comScore, 88 percent of smartphone users and 84% of tablet owners conduct local searches on a regular basis. That works out to about 70% of all Internet users performing local searches regularly. And there’s more to this than volume. Local searches are also more than twice as likely […]
Mobile Search Engine Optimization Best Practices
By now, we all know that mobile searchers outnumber desktop searchers. It may have been true once that you could assume that a mobile user looking for your products or services would also be looking on the desktop, but a 2014 study from comScore indicates that there is a growing percentage of websites with a sizable […]
How to Use Hashtags on Twitter With #Confidence
I tried to explain Twitter to my father over the Christmas holiday. He’s 78. He particularly wanted to know what a hashtag is. So I started talking about how the pound symbol always precedes a hashtag and he interrupted: “They’re like tags, right?” Hashtags are indeed like tags, and they’re used to identify the text […]
How to Know Which Hashtags to Use in Your Social Media Posts
So you’re all ready to launch a bunch of tweets to promote your newest piece of content. You’ve got a great headline, an awesome image, and a shortened URL. And now… the hashtags. But which hashtags? How many hashtags? Do you really even have to use hashtags? Let’s take a look at the basics of […]
What It Takes to Optimize Your Brand’s Organic Search Visibility
When did SEO become so complicated? It seems like only yesterday that a brand new company could launch a site, bake some bolded and italicized keywords into each page, prop up a few cookie-cutter articles on free blog platforms for instant backlinks, and watch the organic search traffic start rolling in. Back when SEO was […]
5 Warning Signs that You’re Working at a Dysfunctional Marketing Agency
The average marketing agency is anything but average. The combination of creativity, ego, and intense pressure can often result in some bizarre situations that are as far from ordinary as you can get. In my experience, the only time you’re likely to get a zanier group of people together is when you’re working on a […]
What’s Your Type? Personality Tests in the Workplace
People are different, and that’s a good thing. However, because we all convey and gather information in different ways, sometimes the lines of communication break down. It’s a big challenge in today’s workplace, where remote workers and virtual teams are becoming the norm. What can managers do to create functional – and harmonious – teams, […]
20 Social Media Terms for Non-Digital Natives
Here are 20 terms you’ll hear in everyday conversation when discussing social media.
Making the Connection: 7 Tips to Grow Your LinkedIn Network
It’s not easy to add connections on LinkedIn anymore. Everyone wants to protect their network – and with good reason. Many of us have been spammed by companies and sales professionals with a hard-sell approach. Decision makers and influencers realize that most of the people trying to connect with them are also looking to get […]
Advocacy Marketing Part 2: Building Your Plan in 5 Steps
Welcome to part deux of our 2-part series on advocacy marketing. In part 1 we answered two burning questions about the practice: What is advocacy marketing? and Why is it awesome? This installment will unpack the How (as in How is it done?) and provide some nuts and bolts that will help you build a […]
Advocacy Marketing Part 1: End-to-End Advantages You Can’t Ignore
If you’re not taking advantage of advocacy marketing (aka influencer marketing, referral marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing), you should give it serious consideration. Here are a few reasons: According to McKinsey & Company, word-of-mouth (WOM) is the primary factor behind 20%-50% of all purchasing decisions. A Zubrance white paper states that for every $1 a company invests […]
Understanding Cookies Part 2: A Guide for Marketers
Digital marketers are also online consumers, and most of us understand how cookies work. (Or at least, we know that they work, without worrying too much about the how.) And yet, we too can sometimes be taken by surprise at the level of behavioral targeting enabled by cookies. There’s nothing inherently wrong with cookies, and […]