by Marketing Manager | Article Marketing, Content Marketing, How To's & Info you can use, Internet Marketing, Marketing Tips, Social Media
In this day and age, effective online advertising can be the difference between surviving and thriving for small businesses. With the sheer number of people that use the internet and the tools available to target them by factors like age, interests, location, and more, businesses that don’t pay much attention to advertising online risk severely limiting their growth. As a business owner who probably doesn’t have much experience running ad campaigns online, where do you start? One recommendation that you will get from just about every blog and self-proclaimed ad guru is Facebook Ads. It’s not a bad recommendation. With more than a billion users across the globe, Facebook dominates the online advertising landscape. Millions of businesses rely on Facebook to generate leads and increase sales. The company offers exceptional targeting features and related ad tools that help advertisers create powerful campaigns. However, advertising costs on Facebook have continued to rise over the years. Recent surveys have shown that many marketers are now worried that they could ultimately be priced out of Facebook Ads. Many small businesses operate on a shoestring budget as it is, so it becomes difficult for them to risk a substantial amount on expensive ads. The key to a profitable campaign is to test as many variations of the ad as possible to gather data and then optimize to scale up. This economies of scale model won’t work for businesses that only have a limited budget to spend on one single campaign. Fortunately, there are many other advertising networks that can be just as suitable for a small business....
by Marketing Manager | Article Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Tips, Video Marketing, Videos
As 2020 winds down in the next couple months there are still a lot of questions that we can’t answer. How soon until there’s a vaccine to Covid-19? When will the pandemic end? When will we return to business as usual? For small business owners, that last question looms large. With COVID cases spiking across the country and the probability that we’ll be back to only essential businesses opening their doors to the public, it’s crucial to take a long view of the marketing landscape. Because there are so many unanswered questions, the marketing trends for 2021 have a slightly different focus than might be the case in a typical year. Here’s what’s on the horizon. Focus on Customer Retention I’ve talked a lot before about how much less it costs to retain customers than to win new customers. In 2021, it’s going to make a lot of sense to put your marketing budget into customer retention. Holding steady in a global crisis qualifies as a win. Social media and email are the best tools you have available to drive customer retention. By encouraging existing customers to follow you on Facebook or subscribe to your list, you’re gaining the ability to stay in touch with them. You can offer special deals, keep them informed, and remind them of why they chose your product or service in the first place. Product and Service Availability as a Priority We’ve all experienced issues with product availability as well as with delayed deliveries due to the pandemic. The key to customer retention is ensuring that your customers have access to your products and...
by Marketing Manager | Article Marketing, Blog, Blogging, Content, Content Creation, Content Marketing
Ad campaigns are still effective, but the truth is they’re not as effective as content marketing. Bill Gates proclaimed “Content is king” back in 1996 and his words have proven to be remarkably prescient. Web users expect top-notch content from the companies they follow. Easier said than done, right? Well… maybe. There are lots of great tactics you can use to create the kind of content that your followers want. If you handle it properly, the content you post on your website and social media can turn casual visitors into leads and leads into customers. Here are 7 content marketing tactics that you should steal. #1: Content Diversification What kind of content are you creating? If you’re only creating blog posts or Instagram stories, then you may be missing out on marketing opportunities by not diversifying your content. The bottom line is that there are three types of content: written, audio, and video. Using all three will help you reach the widest possible audience. A good example is Daniel Moyer Photography in Philadelphia. In addition to a compelling website with tons of photographs of happy couples, Daniel also posts videos on Facebook, has a blog on his website, and co-hosts a wedding planning podcast called Put a Ring on It. #2: Specialized Topics Blogging is a marketing basic for many small businesses. However, if you’re posting only broad topic content that’s available elsewhere, you might be losing visitors who are in search of something unique and compelling. Keep in mind that a highly specialized topic may be more universal than you think. Likewise, a focused post can help bring...
by Stefanie Blackburn | Article Marketing, Blogging, Content Curation, Content Marketing
In today’s world of bite-sized social posts, it may be tempting to believe that long-form content is dead. Nothing could be further from the truth, and if you aren’t creating longer content, you are missing a lot of great benefits from your content marketing. Yes, producing 3000-4000 words for a post involves a lot of work – research, writing, editing – that may seem like overkill in an era of decreasing attention spans. But the reality is that long-form content has a lot of benefits that make the investment worth the effort. 5 reasons why you should publish long-form content Here are five reasons why you should still be creating long-form content for your business. 1. Increased viewing time The amount of time a visitor spends on your site is an important metric for a variety of reasons, from increased engagement of your visitors to better quality and relevance scores in search engines and advertising platforms. Longer content can increase the average time on site – It takes about eight minutes for a person to read through an 1800-word long post. It can also increase the likelihood that readers will engage with other content of yours as well. 2. Greater position of authority The ability to produce long content generally means that you have more information that can be useful for your readers, positioning you as an authority. Of course, it can’t simply be long for the sake of being long – it needs to be high-quality and demonstrate that you put in the effort to create content worthy of your reader’s time. 3. Higher quality conversions Making your...
