Blogging is no longer just for the hobbyist. These days, blogging is an invaluable tool for businesses to build authority, boost visibility, and facilitate customer engagement. Blogging can have a real, positive bottom-line impact—and business owners know it. They are flocking to the blog as a customer outreach tool like never before, bolstered by statistics like these recently published by Hubspot:
encompass blog
It wasn’t so long ago that Google displayed ads both at the top and on the right hand side of a search results page—but if you’ve been paying attention to searches over the past week, you know that this format has been altered. Google no longer displays PPC ads on the right side of the page, a change that may be worrisome to those who invest heavily in these ads. You may be wondering why Google has made this change—and what it ultimately means for your ad campaign?
With Obama winning the presidency with his aggressive and unprecedented use of digital and social media, 2016 will be a year that digital spending will increase dramatically. The digital advertising industry anticipates that digital pricing may go up in general, however, digital video will probably be the most affected because as TV inventory fills up, digital video is the next logical inventory source.
It’s not hard to see the value in social media when you have an audience of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of attentive fans, engaging with your content and sharing your branded material. But when you’re speaking to just a handful of people, social media can seem a little daunting, maybe even a little pointless. But of course, every business has to start somewhere, and bridging that gap—developing enough of a following for your social media presence to really matter—is imperative.
Marketing is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor—and frankly, anyone who tries to sell you on a uniform, blanket approach is probably someone you should be wary of. But if it’s not one-size-fits-all, it’s also not a la carte. You cannot simply pick and choose the marketing components you like best and expect them to have a meaningful impact. At the same time, you cannot use different tools inharmoniously and anticipate them to all have maximum effect. No, successful marketing is integrative. It looks different from one business to the next, but it always involves various moving pieces, made to work together toward the same goal.
In recent years, there’s been a lot of talk about the role of data and analytics within the marketing world. That can sound a little daunting, a little technical—but here’s what it all boils down to: When you spend money to send marketing content out into the world, you need some way of assessing whether or not it’s working. You need some way to measure your ROI. Only then can you make revisions and course corrections as necessary, ensuring your marketing efforts are lean and efficient.
It’s becoming harder and harder to find anyone who isn’t active on at least one social network—and like it or not, that has implications for your business. Companies need to go where their customers are, and more and more that means setting up shop on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any number of other social platforms. Social media presence was long a competitive advantage for business owners, but these days it is more or less a necessity.
Are all of your marketing efforts at odds with one another—or do they work together, seamlessly, machine-like, toward a common goal?
For far too many business owners, the answer is somewhere closer to the former than to the latter. That’s because it’s easy enough to have a website built, to throw up the occasional Facebook post, perhaps even to send out a company newsletter every so often. But developing a robust marketing blueprint—one that encompasses your website, your social media, paid ad campaigns, search engine optimization, and all the rest—is ultimately more time-intensive, painstaking, and difficult work.
You may be familiar with the old philosophical brainteaser: If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around, does it make a sound? Along similar lines, it’s important for marketing professionals and business owners to ponder: If you build the best website and write the most amazing content in the world, but nobody knows it exists, does it actually do any good for your business?
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Did you know that Google’s internal algorithms change hundreds of times each year? Search engines are not static, and so your search engine strategies can’t be, either.
That’s not to overstate the dynamic nature of search engine optimization (SEO). In many ways, the foundations of search are pretty solid. Google always wants to provide its client (i.e., the search engine user) with a great product (i.e., relevant search results). If you keep that in mind—producing content that’s high-quality, value-adding, and topical—you’re well on your way to SEO success.
