Why Your Business Plan Needs to Include a Content Strategy

content strategy

The business world will always throw up unexpected roadblocks, so it’s great to be able to think on your feet, but adaptability can only get you so far. Without a solid business plan as your foundation, you’ll always be reactive — and it’s proactivity that you need to shape your destiny.

Read more

[INFOGRAPHIC] Why it Pays to be Emotional In Your Marketing

emotional marketing

We all know the adage, people do business with people they know, like and trust. Of those three items, likeability and trust are paramount for making a sale. It goes without saying that you should be knowledgable about whatever product or service you’re selling. So how do you get people to like and trust you? Two words: Emotional Marketing.

People want to know you care about them, that you’re not just a number on a sales report. People like to feel valued and respected. It’s human nature. That means the messages you share with them should come from the heart. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable. Admit when you make a mistake. Get real with people. Be sincere. It will pay off when you do.

SocialMediaToday.com shared an infographic that emphasizes the importance of engaging in emotional marketing, especially if you’re in the B2B space. Here are some compelling statistics that bear this out:

Read more

3 Good Reasons Why It’s Smart To Update Your Website

update your website

Do you update your website regularly? If not, you could lose out on business because your prices or product offerings are outdated. Let me tell you a story to illustrate the risk you take in letting things slide on your site for too long.

My husband and I recently listened to the audiobook, “The Startup of You” by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha. My husband was interested in this book because it offers advice on how to accelerate your career by managing it as if it were a start-up business.

Since Reid Hoffman is LinkedIn’s co-founder, it came as no surprise to me that the book offered strategies on how to use LinkedIn to build your network for career advancement. The authors mentioned that more resources could be found on the Startup of You website, so once I finished the book, I made a beeline for the site to see what else I could learn.

Read more

How to be a Local Hero on Google

Local SEO

Local SEO has become something of a buzzword over the last couple of years. And that’s not surprising. After all, there is little point in your local grocer ranking in first place in a national search – she needs locals to support her business after all.

SEO experts agree that it makes a lot more sense to focus on local SEO, especially as technology advances. Search engines are able to pinpoint a user’s location and show her relevant results in the same area. Technology is also changing the way we perform searches.

Voice search is already firmly establishing itself. Virtual assistants like Siri and Cortana are getting better at understanding what we say and are delivering more accurate results overall. This, of course, means that we have to change the way we run SEO campaigns.

Read more

Digital for Entrepreneurs: 5 Essential Tools for a One-Person Marketing Department

one person marketing department
By Jock Purtle
Just because you don’t have a big business, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a powerful marketing strategy. A lot of companies assume that their one-person marketing department stops them from doing much with their promotional messages. However, the truth is that you can have just as big of an impact on your followers, clients, and even potential business buyers with one person, as you could with an entire marketing team.

The key to attracting, informing and delighting your customers online isn’t having the right amount of workforce – it’s ensuring that you have the resources available to manage the marketing avenues available to you.

Here, we’re going to take a look at just five of the top tools that a one-person marketing team can use, to access all the potential of a gigantic advertising department.

Read more

Why it Pays to be Consistent with Your Digital Marketing

consistency in digital marketing

There are no true shortcuts to becoming great at something. You can’t wake up one day, having never painted a picture before in your life, and recreate the Mona Lisa. All great things require practice, patience, dedication, and hardwork.

The same is true when it comes to marketing for your business. You can’t expect the very first blog post you publish to go viral or instantly attract millions of followers your first day on social media. Especially in today’s world of digital marketing, there is no shortcut or “hack” for quick success. If you truly want long-term, sustainable growth, you need to take a consistent approach to your marketing.

Read more

How to Create a Perfect Landing Page for Your Business Website [Infographic]

landing page By Kristel Kinne

A landing page, as we all know, can be greatly beneficial to businesses, especially small businesses when it comes to capturing leads and increasing sales. However, for it to make an impact, it needs to have certain important elements in order for it to achieve a focused goal. As such, while an unoptimized landing page is one of the SEO mistakes, not incorporating important elements when creating a landing page is another mistake that you need to steer clear of.

A poorly designed landing page can be an expensive mistake that you can’t afford to make, especially if you are on a budget. Thus, to ensure that this doesn’t happen here is a complete guide on how to create a perfect landing page for your business website.

Read more

8 Common Writing Errors that You Need to Avoid [INFOGRAPHIC]

writing errors
Written communication skills are highly underestimated as a powerful tool within business in a whole host of industries and business sectors. This is especially true in today’s booming digital world and with digital communication becoming much quicker and terminology becoming shorter. No matter how professional you or your business comes across in person, you can also come across as unprofessional (and lazy) if yourself or anyone in your business is making any of these common writing errors, which are listed in the infographic below.

It’s vital for new business owners, entrepreneurs and start-up companies to get the smaller details right at the start, since it can make a world of difference when it comes to your company reputation and growing success. From big presentations, important business documents and your company branding to your social media, website content and employee communications, it really is important to pay attention to the little details.

Read more

How to Do Content Marketing when You don’t Feel Like it

procrastination and content marketingHave you ever had one of those days when you know you gotta “do content marketing,” but you just don’t feel like it?

I’ve been there.

Today, as a matter of fact!

Actually, it was more like SEO copywriting. My client wants me to write a page of content for his website to help with his google ranking, and as much as I knew it needed to get done, I just couldn’t get there. I wrote one sentence and surfed Facebook. Then I looked at my emails. Then I went downstairs to get a cup of tea.

Read more