Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Social Content Marketing

Search social channels for relative product content. Search and social help us to get in front of audiences we may not currently be engaging with on other channels. We also use social to help test and tweak our messaging on a more rapid basis. Email helps us stay in contact with our database on a regular cadence.

Friday, October 14, 2016

Syndicate Positive Reviews and Shared Thank Yous

Sometimes the best type of content marketing is a syndicating a 4 or 5 star review or thank you email or letter.  When your get a great review, share it on social media and your site.  Also, send out handwritten thank you cards to all new customers. Nearly 70% of the time, the cards get shared on social media, and referrals are up by 23% as a result. I know it is a simple thing, but it’s a win-win for both the business and its customers.

Friday, October 7, 2016

Increase Traffic Through Re-Tweets

Since Twitter announced inline images, you should start experimenting with this change by adding images to a lot of the tweets from our @xxxx Twitter account and have noticed a big difference in the engagement we’re getting. To get a better idea of what a difference inline images has made, I took the last 100 Tweets including a link from our @xxxx account (not including any Retweets) and compared the averages of the tweets with and without images included.

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Content Marketing Builds Brand Loyalty

Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on owning media, not renting it. Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.

Friday, September 30, 2016

Content Marketing Writing Tips

We all have tried to come up with the perfect feature story.  You can’t force good writing. Try different conditions, influences, and times of day for writing. Find the conditions that are most conducive to your creativity. If you can’t manage, you can always turn to freelancers to help you produce the content that your audience is hungry to find.

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Thank You Letter as Content Marketing

Sometimes the best type of content marketing is a genuine thank you email or letter. At When I Work, the team sends out handwritten thank you cards to all new customers. Nearly 70% of the time, the cards get shared on social media, and referrals are up by 23% as a result. It’s such a simple thing, but it’s a win-win for both the business and its customers.

Monday, September 26, 2016

Expanding your Content Marketing Reach

For new ways to create content marketing, repurpose old content in a new way to bring something fresh to users who may not have seen it. In the end, the repurposed content needs to provide some level of unique value to people, or it’s not worth doing.  Also, syndicate your content on blogs and all social media to reach a new audience and drive referral traffic back to your site.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Generate Thousands of Clickable Ideas for Your Content

As a content marketer, you need to be able to generate an unending stream of interesting, unique, and valuable content ideas. Let’s face it, that’s a big task!
So to make sure you have what it takes, this chapter offers seven practical tactics for creating your own idea-generation system, so you can easily come up with all the ideas you need.  Learn more about content marketing here - https://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-content-marketing/

Friday, August 26, 2016

The Theory Behind Content Marketing

The theory behind content marketing is quite straightforward: people like good content, so why not use it as an advertising vehicle? Why not feed them all that good stuff to read and watch but lace it with a subtle plug? It’s not a new trick but the fragmentation of media and lowering of barriers to entry means a lot more people are doing it than before. As with social media it’s not the theory that’s controversial, it’s the execution. Smaller brands that might be much better off taking out a full-page ad and shouting BUY OUR STUFF have diverted money into what they think is a subtler, cleverer, more subliminal and more lasting medium to deliver “The Message."

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Content Marketing - What it Means for Your Business.

Content marketing means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you. But what does content marketing actually mean for your business? What makes it different from what you already do to sell your products and services?  In the next few posts we will explore this.  Stay tuned! 

Friday, August 19, 2016

What to do with Keywords for SEO

Now that you have your keywords strategy down – let’s put it to good use. Looking at your keyword list, you will probably notice that you could group together similar keywords to form categories. Does your website have a page for each category listed from your list? It should. You don’t need hundreds of pages for your website – but your pages should target the primary aspects of your business. Your list of keywords is the starting point. As a best practice, your website should have no less than 6 pages, and be no longer than it needs to be . Looking again at your keyword list, make sure the primary keyword for a page is used as close to the front of the opening sentence of the website as possible and consider highlighting your keywords as bold. Same goes for the administrative elements of the website called the META – the part people cannot see, but search engines can.

Sunday, August 14, 2016

What's the footer have to do with SEO?

The footer is completely underused, the area at the bottom of your website (footer) holds tremendous usability and SEO value. First off - if you have a lot of html code in the header of your website - validation codes are most common – you can move it here. Doing so will reduce the amount of html coding that search engines have to read as they load your page making your page load faster - and the speed that a website page opens is an SEO element that affects ranking. Fast is good. Additionally, adding things like your contact information here will make it easy for people to connect with you - no matter what page of your website they are on. This is especially true on mobile devices. Have multiple locations - consider using a split footer where one side is for the local or satellite business - the other for the main location.

Friday, August 12, 2016

SEO Tips - Linking

Have other websites link to you. This is really, really important, when it comes to SEO. The bummer is that it’s not something you can necessarily control. Other than creating excellent content, the only thing you can do is ask (which occasionally works). My counsel is to spend the time you would trying to convince somebody to link to you on just writing great content. And, start guest posting on other blogs. Regardless of what you do, know that inbound links are essential to SEO.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Getting your Google+ Page Set!

A link to your Google My Business page is no longer available for searchers, but most of the info for your local business card (including your address, phone number, images, street view, etc.) is still taken mostly from that page. So, claim your Google My Business listing if you haven't done it yet, and do your best to fill out the important details:
  • 1. Add a long, unique description that's formatted correctly and includes links.
  • 2. Choose the correct categories for your business.
  • 3. Upload a high-resolution profile image and cover photo.
  • 4. Upload as many photos as possible.
  • 5. Add a local phone number to your listing.
  • 6. Add your business address that's consistent with the address on your website and local directories.

What's Old is New

In case it wasn’t clear already, links dominated the quantitative analysis of local SEO ranking factors. When it comes to Local SEO in 2016, if you are not invested in links and your website, and instead focus predominantly on traditional Local SEO areas like Google My Business and citations then you are going to be at a competitive disadvantage. This may seem obvious to many Local SEOs, but when trying to justify large budgets the anecdotal evidence of a Local SEO practitioner won’t always get the check cut. We have been there, and so likely have you.
Now don’t misunderstand, in markets and verticals with less competition you can likely do fine with just the basics… For now. However, given this study it seems like Google is working on expanding the scope of what it takes to rank in local search.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

More Words = More Local Rankings?

Several website signals showed a strong likelihood of influencing Google My Business performance. Keyword Usage and Words on Page, very traditional organic ranking signals, show that, despite claims that Google is moving to new and more sophisticated ranking methods, keyword usage and user engagement still matter. While we’ll always recommend relevant, well-written location pages, it may be that just piling on more words could be enough to push you up. Size matters…

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Optimizing Voice Search

Apple has Siri, Microsoft has Cortana… and soon, Google will have Google Home. Voice search is here… and it’s here to stay. Already, 60% of consumers are using voice search, according to the Local Search Association. The challenge for national brands that market locally is to adapt your SEO strategies to capture the unique intent behind voice searches. The words and phrases spoken by consumers are different than the keywords they type. And it’s up to local search marketers to ensure that their location data is clean, optimized, and accessible to these new search engine technologies.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Google+ Review

mark stahl
a week ago
Fantastic Philosophy to cultivating understanding and implementing this "must have" piece of your business in today's virtual marketplace. I found Marshall to be an excellent source of experiential knowledge and willingness to coach not to mention his attention to detail and follow thru to completion. The team of mentors dedicated to your marketing cause is not short of working working with superheros each with their unique and powerful skill set dedicated to you and your business goals. They are beyond recommendation !!!

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Why PR and Content Marketing is More Effective

People are turning to digital media options more and more each day. Also, with ad blockers in almost all of our devices, banners and other ad assets are not being seen. PR is received as editorial - seen as a newsworthy way to inform readers of new products in the industry. So, when you’re deciding where to allocate your marketing budget this year, steer clear of the stuff that ad blockers target, and start thinking content and PR. You can make sales by adding valuable information to your audience, informing prospects of new products, and selling – and your customers will love you for being less annoying than those other guys.

Mutliple Locations and Local SEO

One pattern we often see is that larger and seemingly more authoritative businesses do not perform as well in local search as they should. And having multiple locations amplifies the need for solid local SEO foundations. A common issue we come across is the lack of a well-optimized and well-performing landing page for local businesses. We must tick our SEO boxes here, but we must also maximize the leads generated from these pages — to do this, we have to look at the intersection of lead generation and local SEO.

New Local SEO Rules from Google

At first glance the new Google update seems to make life only harder for local businesses, in reality there may now be MORE exposure opportunity for MORE businesses. The top-3 local results are in rotation — depending on the searcher's physical location. In the in-house test lately for the past few days compared local results for "Plumbers in Seattle", each time browsing Google using 10 different Seattle IP addresses.  In each of the locations we were getting at least slightly different results, which showed that 2 searchers standing just several miles away from each other will probably see different local packs in Google.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Email Marketing Building Trust

Email marketing is a fantastic way to provide specialized content to people with whom you’ve already built relationships. Consider offering a advanced order opportunity for a new product, exclusive only to email recipients. Or, offer a sneak peek at the new product before it's released to the market. This will help to nurture and reward your existing relationships and continue building on the trust you’ve already earned.
Additionally, you may set up an email drip campaign that sends messages on a regular schedule at timed intervals to keep your product or service top-of-mind with your customers, and also to keep the sales funnel flowing.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Local SEO vs Organic SEO

Local SEO is a lot different from your average SEO campaign, and the local search results are changing more rapidly than any other. There are various ranking factors within local SEO campaigns. One of the things to note here is that while there are a few slightly different factors compared to the usual SEO campaign (i.e. External Loc. Signals and My Business Signals), links and on-page SEO factors still play a huge part. The only difference is that the type of links you’ll want to focus on will be a lot different. Let's talk you through some of the techniques that you can implement to get results from your local SEO campaigns in future posts
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