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Inbound marketing makes perfect sense for companies that sell large volumes of products directly to consumers. Prospects click on an advertisement or social media mention and head straight to the virtual check-out line. However, don't discount inbound marketing if you operate in a super-specialized niche. You can still generate revenue and increase market reach.more
Remember the last time you redesigned your website? How long did that process take and how pleasant was it? If you're like most, chances are the project took far more time and money than you care to remember! Did the site perform better? Did it get you more leads, more sales or increase your margins? I sincerely hope it did, and congratulate you on being in the minority if that is the case!more
If you read my post, Who has time for Social Media Marketing, you know that a social media style guide is crucial for business success today. It’s the rule book for how social media managers will create messaging on social. It’s similar to a writing style guide or content style guide, and will cut the time you spend debating what to post in half!more
We often have the opportunity to work with many different agencies throughout our client partnerships. Sometimes we will do design work while another agency builds the site. Sometimes we build something that was designed by another agency. Those type of situations work very well because the functional behavior of the end product doesn’t depend upon the design work. In fact, in these situations, each agency can challenge the other to ultimately produce a better result.more
Let's be honest. Building a new website sucks! Sure, it starts out fun when you get to see new design concepts but that's typically where the fun stops abruptly. It can take months to build out the site and get it up on a content management system. After that, the hard part starts. And in our experience, this is the part that can literally take months to complete - getting content into the site. It sucks! A lot.more
On Monday, Pete wrote a post all about Millennials and their misconstrued reputation. As a Millennial, it really got me thinking about one of the claims against Millennials that Pete disagreed with: Millennials are lazy. As much as I’m flattered Pete had our backs, I do think there’s some truth behind this statement, especially when it comes to the way Millennials buy.more
Let’s face it-who has time for social media? Well, let me rephrase that…we all seem to have hours on end for our own personal social media, but who has time for social media marketing?more
My last post was a bit different than the majority of the content we share on the MINDSCAPE blog as it related more to personal positioning than it did to marketing. The interesting thing about personal positioning is how closely it’s actually related to your marketing and the positioning of your company and the products and services you offer. This post will showcase the similarities, as well as the pitfalls to avoid with your marketing.more
This post was orginally published on August 22, 2013, but is still relevant. Enjoy! Average is a word used to describe mathematical statistics or to show a comparative value to others. The words common, typical or ordinary could be used to replace the word average.more
When you're launching a startup, you have a million things on your mind: how do you connect with customers, who will you use as suppliers, and how many employees do you need? Don't let all those other necessities distract from your most powerful marketing tool: your website.more
This blog was originally published on March 15, 2012, but is still relevant. Enjoy! Technology is full of confusing terms, and building websites is no different. As a developer or as a person in need of a website, you will no doubt encounter a number of acronyms and words that you either don’t understand, don’t want to understand, or that just plain make you want to cry a little bit out of sheer frustration. DNS? PHP? .NET? IIS? Apache? Joomla? Drupal? CMS? IE? FF? The list grows longer and your attention span grows shorter. I’ll not bore you with all of the acronyms now, I’ll just save that for another post. Instead, I want to shed a small ray of sunshine upon a dark corner of confusion.more
Hopefully you’ve gotten to the point where you’ve accepted the fact that blogging is critical to your digital strategy, and most importantly, to attracting strangers to your website. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably noticed how difficult it is to determine which blog posts will be a “hit” and which posts will attract little to no attention. There have been many times where I’ve excitedly published a blog post and sat by my computer anxiously awaiting the views to start rolling in, and I’ve heard nothing but crickets. This can be very frustrating considering how much energy and excitement I invested into the post, and yet it just didn’t seem to be enough. If you’ve found yourself in a similar position, I’d like to encourage you to take a deep breath and not take it personally. It’s important to remember the main strategic initiative of your blogging efforts is to position yourself, and your organization, as a thought leader to the personas you serve so they begin to view your website as a valuable resource they can turn to in times of need. Keeping this in mind, there are a few things you can do to help position your blog posts so they are more likely to gain the level of exposure you’d like them to.more
Every time marketers get comfortable with Google's secret sauce, the search-engine giant changes its recipe yet again. Recently, Google announced that it would remove its right-side ad spots from the SERPs (search engine results pages), which of course meant that half the Internet marketing population experienced a temporary mental breakdown. Now that the news has sunk in, however, it's time to examine what this move means for your digital strategy.more
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a really bad picture may be worth 10,000. Photography really matters. Probably even more than you think. The quality of the photography on your website directly relates to the perceived quality of your business. This means you could have the greatest product in the world, but if the photography is bad, people are also going to think the product is bad.more
Writing a piece of inbound content can be a lot like planning for a trip. I know, this sounds kind of out there but let me explain. I would be willing to bet that when you are packing for a trip you make a list of items to pack and things that need to be done before you take off on your adventure.more
