Inbound Marketing Blog

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

Photo credit : HBOmore

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

Content is king. Websites should be designed to deliver content, not merely serve as pretty wrappers to drop content into. With this growing emphasis on content it’s no surprise that typography plays a major role in the user experience and is arguably the most important design element of your site. Great typography not only looks good, but is highly functional.more

Your brand is a bit like a puzzle. It's made up of many pieces that all fit together to create the overall perception that people have of your organization. In our blog post last week, 3 reasons your branding should evolve, we made the case for changing elements (or puzzle pieces if you will) of your brand gradually over time, rather than drastically changing everything all at once. One piece of your brand, that can be updated relatively easily, is your social media.more

Nearly every time we partner with a business on launching their site, we run into the same roadblock - they want everything to be perfect. Every word must be reviewed, every part and product entered, every page created.more

The case for evolution: why evolving your brand is better than blowing it up. Re-branding can be fun. But it’s not fun like jogging with a weiner dog, it’s fun like being wide open on a Ducati 959 Panegali. That is to say, it’s a bit terrifying, and if something goes wrong, there are going to be serious consequences. Which is why I’d like to suggest a *different* approach. Instead of completely transforming everything about your brand like Shazam, allow your brand identity to change slowly and gradually in relationship to its environment.more

As anyone who is involved in the world of e-commerce knows, it's a tough industry. You have to deal with a variety of external forces that aren't necessarily going to work in your favor. You face competition from the entire Internet, competing with businesses all over the world who offer the same products that you do. And if you do break through all the noise and get someone to shop with you, they might be shopping from a desktop, phone or tablet. Then you have to make sure that no matter what device they're on, they have a great shopping experience. If they don't, that might very well be the only time that they shop with you.more

We've all heard it a thousand times, "You have to walk before you can run". You have to learn the basic aspects of something before you can move on to the more complex ones. This holds true for almost everything in life, including learning how to write proper CSS (the style language that defines fonts, colors, margins, background images, etc. on a website).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

Recently, a hot topic in the photography and videography space is the use of drones. While the more widespread accessibility of drones has allowed people to capture footage that wasn't otherwise available to the regular citizen who didn't own a helicopter or plane. But as with many new technologies, there are debates around regulation and safety.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

So, you've created a fantastic marketing email, the copy is eloquent, the template design is beautiful and you have a click-worthy CTA. Now you have to make the dreaded decision, when should you send this email?more

Are your marketing emails not performing quite as well as you might like in terms of click through rates and conversions? Improving email performance doesn’t have to mean completely overhauling your email templates or coming up with an entirely new email strategy. Sometimes making a few small changes can make a huge difference, particularly if they are ones that make your emails easier to read and more visually appealing.more

I was going about my day today, texting friends, checking emails, perusing social media, I realized that no matter where I looked, I encountered GIFs (or Global Interchange Format). They were being used in Facebook ads, emails from my favorite stores, I even saw a few popping up in website content.more

In eCommerce, providing user paths that meet a user's secondary needs can have a significant impact on revenue.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

A few days ago I was doing some research for a client and came across an article called, "Just Keep Scrolling! How To Design Lengthy, Lengthy Pages". There are portions of this article that are a bit technical and geared toward designers and developers, but you don't have to be a professional to get something out of the post. Here are the high points of the article that can be beneficial to anyone in marketing (or anyone with a website, really).more