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.

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.

For businesses, Twitter can have a number of useful functions: Driving website traffic, promoting recent blog posts, building brand visibility, and cultivating a reputation for thought leadership, among other things. These are all noble and worthwhile goals for your company Twitter account, yet none of them are really attainable unless the Twitter account is followed and engaged with. In other words, people need to not only read your tweets but also retweet them to others.

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:

There was a time when TV advertising was the crown jewel in any marketing campaign—when airing a national commercial spot was arguably the most effective use of any company’s advertising dollars. Of course, the Internet has complicated things, if not changed them outright—and in 2016, the political election cycle could change things even further.

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?

Social media marketing keeps you on your toes. It changes pretty regularly, with one network gaining in prominence while another falls out of fashion; just ask yourself how many companies use SnapChat today compared to a year ago, or Instagram compared to five years ago; while you’re at it, ask how many companies maintain a presence on MySpace, or for that matter Google+. And it’s not just that niche networks rise and fall.

When Google first launched its Webmaster Tools panel, some years ago now, it was met with a decidedly lackluster response. Though Webmaster Tools was fine in theory—providing information about particular keywords and connecting them to real leads—it never actually panned out the way it was supposed to. Simply put, the keyword research Google provided was never particularly good, and there were much better tools on the market that did the same thing more effectively.

In our last blog post, we provided some background into the Google Search Analytics Report—a handy set of data that we recommend to anyone looking to better understand their website performance and search engine optimization success. What we said at the time, was that Search Analytics can actually provide some useful direction for your content marketing campaign. In particular, there are three ways in which it can be helpful; it allows you to:

In a recent post, we explained a significant strategy change that the enCOMPASS team has been advocating for all our TV clients. This year, we’re recommending that those who’ve been investing their marketing dollars in TV commercials shift some of that money (as much as 50 percent) to pre-roll advertising—essentially, the little clips that run before a video begins online.