Connor Manion

In our video blog series, Minds of MINDSCAPE, a member of our team will share a few words of wisdom about their particular area of expertise.more

In a world where the average shopper can have Amazon deliver anything to their house in under two days, life is rough for a smaller e-commerce site. I mean, how are you supposed to compete with brands like Walmart, Target, and Nike? You're not going to make 12 billion ( Apple's total in e-commerce sales in 2016) in sales revenue by giving your team a good pep talk.more

At somepoint in time, we have all fallen victim to trends that, in hindsight, have been...regrettable. Leg warmers, jeggings, man-buns, Crocs - I think we can all agree that we were blind to their incomprehensible trendiness. Luckily for us, following these trends only led to a few terrible school photos. Getting on board with the latest digital marketing trends, however, could have more...adverse effects. Let's take a look at a few popular digital marketing trends that are now being questioned.more

There are a lot of people out there with a lot of different opinions on what a content strategy is. In fact, many believe that a content strategy is just the "why" in the who, what, where, when, and why of the title of this post. I don't really care to argue semantics with other marketers,more

Awhile back we wrote a blog post about how you can find success in your partnership with an inbound marketing agency . We didn't, however, give any tips on how to actually choose an agency. To give you some advice on this decision-making process, I talked to our CEO (and top salesperson), Pete Brand. Here is the advice he had to offer.more

I don't think I need to say how crucial video content is to a digital marketing strategy. YouTube has over a billion users, and more than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day. Four out of five consumers believe that demo videos are helpful. Including video in a landing page can increase conversion by 80%. Using the word ‘video’ in an email subject line boosts open rate by 19%. Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users. The statistics go on and on. The proof is there; video is an essential component to a successful digital marketing strategy. But you already knew that, didn't you? You're problem isn't a lack of knowledge. You're problem is a lack of resources. You know what you should be doing, you just don't have the resources to get the job done. Well, you're in luck. About 10 months ago, MINDSCAPE hired a photographer/videographer, and she shared some of the most helpful video and photography resources she has used to improve upon her skills - all taking the form of Youtube vloggers. Let's take a look at these vlogs so you can begin your journey to becoming a better video marketer (and a better photographer).more

Awhile back, we wrotea blog post covering all of the prep work that needs to be done to shoot the perfect video testimonial...but we never actually covered the shooting part. I talked to our in house photographer/videographer, Rachel Cohen, for a little advice on getting the job done.more

Measuring the performance of a content offer is one of the hardest things to do in digital marketing. Why? Because there are a million and one factors that play into a visitors decision to download your offer... and another million that contribute to whether or not they take action after. In this blog post, I'll take you through the vast majority of these factors and explain how they fit into the performance of your content offer. At the end of this post, you should be able to accurately assess the performance of your content offer and break down which areas of your campaign need attention. The Pieces of a Content Offer A content offer is an informative and relevant piece of content that you offer in exchange for a visitors personal information. This can be an ebook, a how-to-guide, a free trial or demo, or a tool or other resource. For a content offer to be successful, there are many other things that should be created including (but not limited to): A CTA Button A Landing Page A Thank you Page A Promotional Email A Social Promotion Campaign A Follow-up Email Campaign Let's take a look at how these things play into the measurement of a content offer. Content Offer Clicks - CTA Buttons, Social Ads, Email Promotions One way to measure the performance of your content offer is with clicks. How many CTA clicks does your content offer have from your various avenues of promotion? This is not an indicator in itself of how well your content offer is performing, but rather an indicator of how well your ads, promotional emails, and CTA buttons are performing. What this can be an indicator of in regards to your offer is whether or not your idea hit the mark. How well is your offer resonating with your desired audience? A lack of clicks may represent poor promotional material, but it may also represent a missing of the mark. Conversely, a high number of clicks could indicate great promotional material, but it could also indicate an interest in the topic/tool/resource you have provided to your intended audience. It is up to you to look at your content and assess which is likely to be true. Click here for advice on desiging CTA's that convert! Content Offer Conversions - Landing Pages, Forms, the Offer When reporting on the success of a content offer, many digital marketers immediately jump to conversions. If the conversion rate is high, the content offer is a success. While lead conversion is often the primary reason for creating and publishing a content offer, the line of thinking above isn't very logical. High Conversion Rate ≠ Content Offer Success A good content writer can make even the most mundane and useless content offer seem exciting and worthwhile with a little copy writing finesse on the landing page. On the other hand, a bad landing page or a form that sets too high a price may lead to the failure of a riveting and informative offer. What does this mean for your performance metrics? Conversions really don't have a lot to do with the successful the offer itself is. Customer Conversions (and other lead actions) One last way many measure the performance of their content offers is with the actions leads take after interacting with an offer. How many visitors interact with the offer and then become customers? How many leads spend a significant amount of time on site after receiving the offer? How many take another step in their buying journey after receiving the offer? This metric, like those listed before it, has its complications. Your content offer might not be directly responsible for any of the actions your leads choose to take after interacting with it. Their intent to take a specific action may have existed before they chose to download your offer. If you have a lead nurturing campaign in place, it could also be responsible for the lead taking action. Any way you slice it, you can not directly correlate a leads actions (after downloading your offer) with the quality of the offer (this isn't 100% true, but we'll touch on that in a second). So How Do you Measure the Success of Your Content Offer? Like many other digital marketing efforts, a content offer is just one piece of a much larger picture. The success of the CTA button, the landing page, the form, and the follow-up email campaign are all the success of the content offer. And each piece tells you something new about your offer. Your promotional materials - social and paid ads, CTA buttons, etc. tell you how marketable your offer is. Your landing page and form give you some insight into whether or not your audience is interested in the information or the tool you have provided, and the follow-up campaign tells you how good of a job your content offer did at guiding your leads down the sales funnel. Looking at all of these metrics is important in assessing the overall performance of your content offer. And when evaluating individual aspects of your overall digital marketing strategy, you should consider what role they play in the grander scheme of things. That being said, there are a few things you can do to assess the performance of your content offer itself. Hypothesize, test, measure. Let's say you aren't receiving any form submissions on your landing page. You believe the copy is the problem, so you change it - you see no change in submissions. You reevaluate your landing page, and you believe the design is the problem. You change the design - still no change in submissions. Finally, you conclude that your form is just asking too much of visitors. You get rid of a couple of form fields and... still nothing. The problem might be that your offer is not as valuable as you believed it would be. Hypothesize, test, and measure the difference. This will lead you to a conclusion about your offer. Provide a next step on the offer itself. If you give users a direct step to take at the end of - or in the middle of - your content offer, you can rate its performance based on how many individuals take the step provided. Sometimes assessing success is as simple as a survey. Yeah, it's that easy. Just send a follow-up email to those who interact with your offer asking them to rate it - better yet, ask them to rate it right there at the end of the offer or on the thank you page! Getting direct feed back is a sure fire way to know if your offer is successful. Regardless of how many clicks, conversions, and customers a content offer can be associated with, a bunch of one out of five's will point you in the right direction. Start with a clear goal in mind. I don't think I need to tell you that having S.M.A.R.T goals recorded is important when launching a content offer. Hopefully, this post has helped you nail down the M, but regardless of what you have learned here, if you have a specific goal in mind, measurement is easy. Did you reach your goal? If no, then your offer under performed. If you met or succeeded your goal, then it looks like the offer did its job. I know that is egregiously simplistic, but this isn't a post about setting goals. Conclusions we can draw about measuring content offer performance It isn't easy to measure the performance of an offer, but if you look at all of the different pieces that contribute to its success, you should be on your way to creating an amazing campaign. For the best results, remember to go through every possible cause for an outcome befoe making any changes. If you'd like more tips on content offers, measurment, and all things digital marketing, consider subscribing to our blog. You'll receive an email notification everytime we publish new blog content, allowing you to stay up-to-date without having to run to google. Just click below to subscribe!more

A CMS or Content Management System is a digital program or application that allows multiple users to create, edit, review, publish, manage, and archive the various forms of content that make up a website. Though, if you're doing research on them, you probably already knew that. There are a thousand different Content Management Systems out there, and it is hard to say if one is definitively better than the rest. Despite that, there is one that is definitively best for you. Asking the following four questions is a great place to start your search. Happy Hunting! 1) Is this CMS easy to learn and use? A big benefit of having a CMS is that with a simple password, anyone at your company can manage your website content. However, that benefit is useless if no one but the technologically-savvy no how to use your CMS. To get the most bang for your buck, you'll want to choose a CMS that is easy for everyone to learn and use. Non-technical individuals should have no problem navigating the system after a little training. Even if you plan on having one incredibly capable individual doing most of the work within the CMS, I strongly urge you to look for one that is at least somewhat user friendly. At some point down the line, you may want other, less technologically inclined individuals, to work within the CMS. If don't want to have to train them for two months straight before they understand what they are doing. 2) Does this CMS help maintain and even improve your current SEO rankings? If you want to improve your rankings with the search engines, or at least maintain your current rankings, you will want to check the SEO capabilities of a CMS before deciding upon it. Does it allow you to create meta-descriptions and meta-tags? Does it have a built-in SEO grader that allows you to see where you can improve your on-page SEO? If not, does it have integration capabilities with other SEO tools? All of these things are critical to developing and maintaining a good SEO strategy for your website. 3) Will this CMS grow with you? Another big question to ask when choosing your content management system deals with scalability. When you choose a CMS you aren't just deciding for right now; you are deciding for the years to come. Right now, your website might have 12 pages and two forms. But three years from now, who knows where you'll be? Choose a CMS that can support the growth you not only plan for, but dream of - best case scenario. If you have a 1,000% increase in traffic tomorrow, will your CMS be able to handle it? 4) Does this CMS keep your website safe and secure? You want your data, your content, all of your hard work to be as safe and secure as possible. While it is possible (in theory) for any website to be hacked, some content management systems offer more security than others. When making your decision, be sure to assess the threat your website faces from malicious sources and the effects a breach in security would have on your business. Here at Mindscape, we support multiple Content Management Systems including: BigTree (PHP) Wordpress (PHP) Hubspot (HubL) SiteCore (Enterprise, .NET) webTRAIN (Our own prioprietary platform on, .NET Magento (Enterprise, PHP) Shopify (Ruby) Volusion (.NET) We work with you to ensure the selection you're making is best for your company, your needs, and your future. It's not dependant on a specific language we can code.more

In the digital marketing world there is no shortage of things to measure, analyze, and report on. It is all too easy to fall down the rabbit hole of data your site generates. That being said, I've never become more lost in data then when I first began trying to assess the value of blogging. It seemed easy at first - look at visits and CTA clicks and you're done - but I soon learned there are a plethora of ways to grade a blog. Luckily for you, you don't have to stumble through the data like I did. Take a look at the metrics below and decide what is important to you - and perhaps more importantly become aware of the ways certain metrics can mislead you.more

Paid Advertising is a great tool to use in conjunction with your Inbound Marketing efforts. But if you are looking to start a campaign (or if you're already in the middle of one), you could be in danger. While allowing an agency to run a campaign on your behalf, you run the risk of losing important data. How? PPC Client-Owned Accounts Versus Agency Owned Accounts When you start a paid campaign while in partnership with an agency, some agencies take ownership of the account. When you and the agency part ways, the agency will be in full control of your paid account - meaning you no longer have access to the data from your campaigns. Why is it important to have ownership of your paid accounts? Adwords and Bing are actively running campaigns, the historical data they accrue not only helps inform strategic decisions, but it also helps the account itself improve over time. See, Google and Bing want to put the best, most relevant ads in front of their users. If your account has a history of successful paid campaigns, then costs may be lower, and it might be easier to hit your goals in things like search position. Thus, the loss of data that comes with parting ways with your agency can drive up costs (Ex. cost per click, cost per conversion), and decrease the performance (Ex. search position, conversions, clicks, impressions, etc.), of your future campaigns. How do you avoid problems with paid advertising? Well, you could run your own paid campaigns from the get-go, but if working with an agency is a better option for you, you have a couple of choices. The first is to insist that the agency implement all campaigns using client-owned accounts. We can tell you as an agency ourselves that there is really no downside to this. Any reasonable agency should be fine with giving you ownership of the account. In fact, any reasonable agency should give you ownership of the account without you having to ask. If for some reason the agency MUST take ownership, add a clause to the agreement that states when the partnership ends, ownership of the account will be transferred to your company.more

I've always liked puzzles. Crossword, jigsaw, sudoku — the process of bringing all of these separate pieces together to create something whole — has, for me, always been a fulfilling one. This is probably one of the reasons I went into digital marketing. Email, social media, blogging, SEO — bringing all of these moving pieces together to form one cohesive strategy isn't too far from a sodoku or a jigsaw puzzle. But blogging itself isn't a puzzle. It's a recipe. And I absolutely hate cooking. If you're anything like me, you probably think that there is some secret strategy to blogging. That if you just put the words together in the right way, your blog post will suddenly take off, but that's not the case. Creating a successful blog post is more like baking a cake than solving a puzzle. You need to have all of the right ingredients, prepare them in the right way, bake your cake for the proper amount of time, and let it cool for a while. Alright, enough with these analogies. You came to this post to learn how to start a blog, so let's get to it! If you've already started a blog and are just looking for tips on Keyword research and SEO, skip to step 3.more

Exactly 411 days ago, I started work here at MINDSCAPE. I was incredibly excited to begin work as a writer and knew I had the experience and talent to make a difference - or thought I knew. While I was an experienced writer, I didn’t understand the colossal difference between writing content for a digital marketing strategy and writing news articles, reviews, and other non-marketing content. I spent my first two months intensively learning the ins and outs of SEO and keyword research under the tutelage of a strategist. I learned the specific MINDSCAPE blogging process under the senior content writer. And I picked up a few tips from the resident designers and developers. I was overflowing with knowledge and ready to take on the world. But alas, there are some things that training can’t teach you; there some things that you learn on the job. Luckily for you, I have documented some of those things, so you don’t have to spend a year blogging to figure them out. Below are five key things that I have taken away from my past year of blogging. Hopefully, they’ll save you from having to learn a hard lesson or two.more

If you are active in Google Analytics, you have probably noticed the latest update made to the "homepage." The new update automatically brings useful and relevant data to the front page of a Google Analytics account, making it easier for users to locate important information in a timely fashion. I talked to one of Mindscape's strategists, Han Lee, to see what he had to say about the update.more

Stop. Stop what you're doing right now. You are making a HUGE mistake. There is nothing wrong with the landing page copy — you're making it worse. There is nothing wrong with the design, and if you ask your designer to change it again, she will probably break your laptop over your head. Everything about your landing page is perfect. It's your form that's the problem.more

Every month you have thousands of potential students visiting your website, some of whom are probably putting together their college lists. Regardless of how amazing your site content is or how great your school's reputation is, a good chunk of these visitors are never going to interact with your school again —that is unless you gather some of their information.more

This weekend, my girlfriend and I went on a little camping trip to the Nordhouse dunes, located on the beautiful shore of Lake Michigan. The drive was about two hours long, and despite the "no work, relaxing weekend" rule that was put into place, my thoughts soon drifted to, well, my work. I promptly began having a passionate conversation with my significant other on the ins and outs of SEO and the collaborative effort that is needed to create a truly riveting content offer. After about twenty minutes of overly enthusiastic speech and gesticulation, I asked some nearly rhetorical question. Something like, "Isn't that just amazing?" Only to hear the same dull "mmhmm" I had been receiving for the duration of the trip. I turned to the love of my life in outright horror! How could she not be as ardent as I on the topic of digital marketing?! The interaction set my head spinning. I fell silent. I contemplated the repugnant reality I was living in. That's when it hit me! It wasn't that my girlfriend loathed digital marketing! It wasn't even that she found it dull! I had just been talking about it in the completely wrong way. I was using words she wasn't familiar with; I was over explaining simple concepts and under explaining complex ones; I was stomping through the conversation like a barbaric oaf, instead of dancing through it like a truly skilled conversationalist. I needed to make a change in the way I was talking about my industry. If your having trouble gaining traction with your blog or other website content, maybe you do to. Below are four tips I wrote down after my car ride so that I could more effectively talk to my clients, readers, and even my girlfriend about digital marketing. Take a look, apply them to your industry, and see what improvements you can make to your content.more

The question of how to create an office-culture that Millennials will love has always struck me as odd. Because, well, I am a Millennial, and I'll tell you right now, I don't look for anything unusual or outlandish in a company culture. I'm not searching for an office that has a pool table or a basketball hoop. I don't need a pizza Friday or Bagel Tuesday. And I don't think there is anything I could care less about than bean bag chairs (seriously, where did that misconception even come from?).more

Let's say you have an email list of exactly one thousand contacts. You have worked hard to collect these contacts, creating valuable content offers, engaging your social media followers, and blogging twice a week to provide visitors with useful information. You're proud of your list, and you've been nurturing your contacts consistently to turn them into loyal customers. But lately, you've realized that almost one-fourth of your contacts are no longer opening your emails.more

Yesterday I had a Monday morning from hell. You know, one of those Mondays where you have about a million things to do, but for some reason, every ounce of determination, self-discipline, and creative energy you've ever had has abandoned you? Yeah, it was that kind of Monday. I got to work early, sat down with a freshly brewed cup of coffee, opened my laptop aaaaaaaaannnnd nothing. Nothing at all. For about four hours I stared at my screen, writing and re-writing sentence after sentence and paragraph after paragraph until I looked up at the clock and called it. Lunch Break. I felt like I hadn't made any progress on only the first of about 20 tasks I needed to complete. And my impending stress seemed to be a further source of derision between the part of my brain responsible for issuing commands and the part of my brain following them. It was a rough morning. But it taught me something valuable. After downing a double shot of espresso and returning to my computer, I started to realize why I had been having so much trouble. I had not "flipped my switch." No matter what kind of writer you are, you almost certainly have some sort of voice. It may not be the most obvious of voices, in fact, it may not be evident at all, but trust me, it's there. My perception of my own voice lives somewhere between, fast-talking con artist and talk show host who laughs at his own jokes.more