Paralysis by Data Analysis

Paralysis by Data Analysis

We are currently being overrun with data and data companies. You can buy IP targeted lists of 27 year olds who can get dental insurance at work but have chosen not to. You also can monitor every aspect of that group who saw an ad. While data is great, more often than not we hear business owners tell us it's confusing. They also have no idea how it helps their business. Unfortunately the digital marketing space is full of companies all too happy to shove a report in their clients' faces. Then explain nothing, leave an invoice and say "you're welcome." Data and reports are great but if not properly explained or tied into a business purpose, it's not helping anyone. Analytics ToolsOne of the best tools in the game today is Google Analytics. This tool is free and ties into the backend of your website. It can tell you almost anything you could possibly want to know about the traffic on...
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Blogging on a Budget, Part Deux

Blogging on a Budget, Part Deux

As we've discussed in our previous posts, content marketing and blogging is an incredibly effective way to engage with your website viewers and to help attract new ones. In today's online world customers want to connect with the companies that they buy from. They want to know and hear from your voice directly. Writing a blog is almost as important today as having a Facebook page. And make no mistake, everyone has a blogging strategy. Not ever writing content is a decision and a strategy. I would not recommend that strategy as it essentially flies in the face of everyone who knows what we're talking about. Engagement with consumers is very important and can be a way to convert prospects, writing a blog is also a must to get any kind of decent on-site SEO results. Google and the other search engines have been telling us for a while that content is the most important thing they are looking for is content....
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The Digital Marketing “Black Box”

The Digital Marketing “Black Box”

Digital Marketing Have you ever gotten a monthly report from your ad vendor and felt more confused after reading it than before? If you've ever bought digital ads at any time, ever, I'm betting the answer is, all the time. This is typically done by design, and sometimes just done by accident. Either way you have found yourself in the digital marketing black box. The largest publishers and media companies sell their own ads and that is how they make the majority of their revenue in the digital space. The name of the game for them is to just sell inventory, just like the dinosaurs still selling print ads and TV ads. Traditional media companies and these publishers sell their ads based off of price or the "data" they use to target people on their site. That's the only way they can really differentiate themselves. Don't get me wrong, banner ads still have their place in the digital world, but the ROI just...
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SEO in 2018

SEO in 2018

There have been several updates to SEO in 2018 and google's PageRank algorithms this year. We found a few articles that discuss many of these updates and wanted to share with our readers. Backlinko In the old days, Google would analyze your page to see how many times you used a specific keyword. In other words, they focused 100% on your page’s content. So the Google spider would visit your page to check if your keyword appeared in your: • Title tag • URL • Image ALT text • Description tag • H1 tag To be fair, they still look at that stuff. But today’s Google is MUCH smarter than it used to be. So instead of only measuring content, they now focus on context. Backlinko Article SEO Moz There is a ton of detail to ranking in this world, to try and rank in Google's results. But when we pull out, when we go broad, I think that just a few items, in fact just the nine we've got here...
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Witch Hunts and Twitter Advertising

Witch Hunts and Twitter Advertising

Twitter has always been somewhat of a mystery in the larger social media picture for many advertisers I talk to. They have heard of it and have mostly made fun of the premise. During its formative years, before the "witch hunts", the platform was mostly sharing quips with friends and of course sharing food pics. Saturday Night Live even made fun of the hashtag phenomenon, wherein people spoke in "hashtags" in real life and degraded normal conversation even more than we've already accepted. However partly due to certain elections and political development over the last couple of years, Twitter has shifted quite a bit towards a more trusted source of news and information sharing than it ever had been. (source) Smart people have said correlation doesn't equal causality for decades and this certainly fits, but Twitter advertising revenue and effective marketing promotion results have skyrocketed in the last two years. This presents an interesting opportunity for marketers and their advertising clientele. In the...
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