Nobody likes spam emails—that’s a fact! And this year, Google and Yahoo have made some changes in an effort to keep inboxes cleaner and keep consumers safe from malicious emails. If your business uses bulk emails (defined as 5000 or more emails in one day) to reach your target audience, it’s important to be aware of these changes. By following these standards, you can keep more of your emails out of spam folders and reach your potential customers’ inboxes as intended! These new changes include: ·      One-click unsubscribes ·      Lower spam thresholds ·      Three-part email authentication Let’s run through each change [...]

Likes, comments, reach, impressions… it’s nice to see the numbers rise on your business’s social media, but do you know what these metrics truly mean for you?Tracking the right social media metrics is essential for understanding what’s working and what needs to change to reach your ideal audience. Without this information, even the best social media strategy can fail. Not sure where to start? Let’s look at four top metrics to track on popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok:Metric 1: EngagementEngagement is the measure of how much people interact with a post. This helps you know how much your audience [...]

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly increasing across all industries, and marketing is no exception! Automating tasks, analyzing data, personalizing communication, providing strategy insights—AI can do it all. There are so many tools on the market, and new ones are being introduced constantly. Even if you’re eager to use AI to improve your marketing, you might not know where to start. Well, most businesses could use an extra hand in the areas of audience research, writing, and social media. These activities are all essential yet time-consuming, so they’re a good place to start utilizing AI! Let’s take a look at [...]

You probably know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization—but what does that really mean? SEO can be a complex and sometimes mysterious topic, but we’re here to help you understand the basics. Let’s talk about SEO: what it is, how it works, and why it’s important! What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is a set of strategies used to get more traffic to your website from search engines. SEO looks at the factors search engines use to rank websites and tries to improve them, with the goal of moving your website higher in the search results for relevant keywords and [...]

Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are metrics that you can use to evaluate business performance in a specific area. Good data is the basis for good digital marketing, so KPIs are essential to your success!But there are so many KPIs that you could choose to track—how do you know which KPIs to choose, or what to do if they’re off course? In this article, we’ll cover four essential KPIs for digital marketing, why they’re important, and practical ideas for driving improvement in each area. These four KPIs are organic traffic, cost-per-click (CPC) for paid campaigns, webpage conversion rates, and return on [...]

 Is your business on social media? If you ARE on social media, are you getting the results you need?Social media provides opportunities to connect with your ideal audience, increase brand awareness, and strengthen ties with existing customers—but you’re not likely to have much success without a solid plan. If you’re looking for help with your social media plan, you’ve come to the right place! In this article, we’ll run through the steps for creating a social media plan that helps you reach your business goals.Step 1: Consider your social media goals.First, spend some time thinking about what you want to accomplish [...]

Companies that communicate effectively will experience higher levels of success than their competitors. Whether it is explaining the value of your product or service to a client or training new skills or procedures to employees, leaders must constantly engage in effective communications in order to achieve desired outcomes. Despite the importance of communication efforts, oftentimes organizations fail to understand the true cost of failing to cover this important area of business operations. Consider just a couple of examples. According to a study reported in 2019 completed by Dynamic Signal, “80 percent of the U.S. workforce reports feeling stressed because of [...]

The use of the digital landscape is no longer just a component of our workplace.  For most organizations, it has BECOME our workplace.  It is where we organize, advertise, meet, collaborate, sell, store and exchange our products and services.  Given the realities of the covid-19 pandemic, most of our organizations would not survive without the wide use of technology, most of which has only been in existence for a relatively short time.  Now, every organization has the ability to put up a “storefront”, “marketplace”, “forum”, or other communications platform within a matter of hours and be immediately operational.While these advances are [...]

No doubt, these have been challenging times for all.  The shifting landscape of the way organizations operate and how they relate with their stakeholders combined with the uncertainty of when things might again return, “to normal” creates difficulties when planning. There is a tool that organizations of all types can utilize to help assess where they stand and how to plan a path forward.  This tool is known as a “S.W.O.T. analysis”.  The name “S.W.O.T.” as an acronym for the areas that an organization reviews in a focused assessment:  strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. WHY COMPLETE A S.W.O.T. ANALYSIS? S.W.O.T. [...]