Every business wants to make connect more to its customers and increase its chances of gaining new customers. “Bing Places for Business is a free service that allows you to add or claim your business listing on Bing and be found by millions of Bing users searching online” Bing. It is simply another outlet for businesses to connect with Internet users and is an excellent opportunity to gain more customers.
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We all want to generate more leads, prospects and sales, right? Whether you are a manufacturer, rural tourism promoter, service provider or non-profit, you are all looking for more leads, prospects and sales. Your sale may be a donation or an actual exchange of money for goods/services. The bottom line is, you want to generate more leads and prospects that convert to sales.
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We cannot stress enough the importance of data to any marketing initiative. The more data you have the more you understand where your efforts succeeded and failed and you have amazing data to build your future strategies on what you know instead of just shooting from the hip. We're going to assume that you already have Google Analytics installed on your website, which is good, but now you have the power to know more. It's now time for anyone with a website to get started with Google Universal Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
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This morning I came across a lengthy article that I would categorize as a MUST READ for any small business or organization with a website and a desire to have your web presence produce results for you. The article, which is a borderline manifesto entitle, 'One Trick Ponies Get Shot And other stories: Digital marketing strategy done right', speaks at length about what a true digital marketing strategy is, and is not. It speaks to many marketing fundamentals that a lot of small businesses just don't know. I would go so far as to say many medium sized businesses don't know these fundamentals. At least that has been our experience. 8 Properties of a GOOD Marketing Strategy http://www.portent.com/onetrick/#chapter2 This section hits on what so many businesses miss with their website redesign or implementation of the various web marketing tactics, overarching business objectives. The Marketing Stack: Organizing Your Strategy http://www.portent.com/onetrick/#chapter3 This section does a ...
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With all this talk of content marketing and landing pages, an obvious question might be, "What do I do when someone opts-in or downloads a piece of content from my site?". Great questions! It's a question that will likely be a bit different from one company to another, but here's a basic list of tasks: 1 - DO NOT CALL THEM UP AND TRY TO SELL THEM Did you hear me scream that? I hope. I don't want the engaged website visitor getting a restraining order against you. You're welcome. Aggressive sales people may think that simply visiting your website makes a person a qualified lead that the sales team should pursue. They aren't. If someone downloads a resource from your website, it simply shows that the web visitor has now engaged with your content. They may open it, and decide that it wasn't what they thought it was. They may love it. Hopefully the latter is true and they tell everyone they know that would benefit from the content to go get it (via email, social media, etc...). The main ...
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I can admit that we sometimes use terms and phrases on our blog that you may not totally get. Guilty! For that reason, I want to be sure that you are super clear on what Content Marketing really is. Defined by the Content Marketing Institute:
Read moreNot everyone can be a web marketing rock star, right? Sure they can, when the right things are in place. Chances are good that you probably have a website and may even be doing some sort of marketing such as SEO, PPC, maybe social media...but what are you missing? Are your marketing efforts just not hitting the mark? There are probably a few things you are probably missing.
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As a business or organization leader, you would probably love to get more traffic to your website, right? Wouldn't it be even better if that increased traffic lead to sales, leads and conversions? Of course it would! For some of you this may seem like a very distant and hard to reach goal, but it's not and we're going to give you the knowledge to make it happen.
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Question. When you think about establishing a content marketing strategy, do you equate that to a large investment of time and energy? I think any time you include the word strategy with a task, most people automatically envision a huge project involving hours of documentation, research and policies. While that can certainly be the case for some strategies, your content strategy doesn't need to be that complex. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably wrong. Your content marketing strategy can be as simple as a basic list of items that anyone creating content for your organization has access to and understands. By knowing and committing to this list, you'll be light years ahead of many of your competitors. Here's a Simple Content Marketing Kickoff List: Make the decision that content marketing is a must, not a should. Identify your internal content marketing team and kick off the efforts on the right foot. Understand fully why your clients buy from you and how you help solve their ...
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Every website design and marketing project should have a project timeline associated with it. A good project timeline will help everyone reach predetermined goals and expectations. Without discussing and solidifying time-frames, it is too easy for a project to become extended beyond the original expectation whether at the fault of the agency or the client. What can you do about avoiding project delays with a timeline? Establish a good project timeline!
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If you are executing digital marketing, congratulations! You are most likely already one step ahead of your competition, and making strides to meaningfully connect with prospects online. But, how do you know if you’re seeing continual success year over year, and improving your metrics?
Without the tools in place to analyze and benchmark your efforts, it is impossible to scale your online marketing and ensure continuous success.
