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Marketing Planning 16 Nov 2016 5:00 AM (8 years ago)

With the last quarter coming to an end, it is perfect to use the remaining time to review and look at your marketing plans for 2017.

We know how quickly digital marketing changes so the best way to start the year off right is to gather your sales and marketing team together for a series of planning sessions to get everyone aligned and headed in the same direction.

An effective, well-considered, and data-driven approach to marketing planning benefits the entire organization. Here are 5 key components to put together a sensible plan for achieving your goals in 2017!

SWOT

Assess performance of your current plan using SWOT Analysis. The point of a SWOT analysis is to help you develop a strong business strategy by making sure you’ve considered all of your business’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the opportunities and threats it faces in the marketplace.

Budget for Success

Building a successful budget is a key component in determining your success. Determining the size of your marketing budget will allow you to allocate enough resources (people and money) to accomplish your company’s goals and see results throughout the new year.

We’ve just completed a detailed series on developing a successful marketing budget. Use those articles as a starting point for establishing your budget for 2017.

Review Your Customer and Update Your Ideal Target Audience

Reviewing your best customers and identifying the characteristics that make them profitable and enjoyable to work with will align you up to reach your ideal targeted audience and growth goals for the year.

Review Your Website and Online Marketing

Take a look at your website and social media channels to make sure that you are reaching your targeted audience, your branding and messaging is consistent and your content is engaging and educational.

Record Your Sales and Marketing Strategy

Prioritize the issues you’ve identified and develop a phased approach to tackling them over the next four quarters. Depending on the issues you’ve identified, you may need to develop tactical plans for content/inbound marketing, social media, lead generation, lead nurturing, or account development.

It’s not too late to start drafting your marketing plan today and launch 2017 aggressively! The digital marketing experts at AI Web Designs are available to help you develop a marketing strategy that will help you achieve your 2017 goals. You can contact us at 410-696-7573 or online.

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Website Redesign Checklist 12 Oct 2016 5:00 AM (8 years ago)

Are you ready to take the next big step in developing your company’s online presence?

There are a lot of reasons why you might want to redesign your website. But every now and then your website needs a refresh. But a redesign of a website without a proper strategy in place can actually have the opposite effect — it can drive people away from your site! Whether you’re working with a web agency or redesigning in-house, this checklist will help to ensure that your new website will become a successful part of your overall marketing efforts:

• Keep what you love: A redesign of your website doesn’t mean you have to recreate the whole thing — keep the parts that work and get rid of the parts that don’t.
• Analyze your competition: Visit your competitors’ websites. You don’t have to make it the sole basis of your redesign. What might work for them won’t necessarily work for you.
• Define your audience — ask your current clients what they like about the website, and what they would change if given the chance. That will give you a good idea of what to build on!
• Is your website functional? Consider how you can implement such tracking metrics as Google Analytics, in order to fully optimize the redesign. This will give you a quantitative measurement of your redesign success and/or failure.
• Plan Ongoing Content Strategy: In the world of inbound marketing, less is not more, especially when it comes to content. It’s important to build a strategy that’s all about adding more and more content to your website over time.

How your website look is important. But more important is how it works. When the two work hand in hand, it is a thing of beauty.

Because the website is such an important element in any company’s marketing, a redesign needs to integrate with all of your online marketing efforts, be they email, social media, lead generation and nurturing, PR and advertising and take your entire marketing plan into account.

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Content Marketing and Promotion Strategies for Blogs 15 Sep 2016 4:00 AM (8 years ago)

The growing importance of adding new content to your website on a regular basis is a big part of the equation, but the other, often overlooked area of content marketing is content promotion.

Content marketing is learning online marketing strategies to help you market your blog as a whole, as well as each piece of content you create.

The ingredients to effective content marketing boils down to these three key strategies:

•  Creating great content
• Reaching the search engines
• Promoting it to your followers

All the hours you put into creating that resourceful piece of great content will have been for nothing if your blog is not getting in front of the right people.

Without content promotion your great content will struggle to earn a social mention and reach the search engines.

Today we share with you the most successful techniques used every day to promote your blog and build targeted traffic to your site:

1. Email Marketing: A great start is to build and prioritize your email list. This turns organic traffic into engaged viewers who will see your content and return to your site.

2. Sending your content at the best time: Email plays an important role in your marketing strategy. You can read more on Which day and time is the best to send emails?

3. Marketing automation: is a software platform that helps you to automate your marketing and sales engagement to generate more leads, close more deals, and better measure marketing success.

4. Email Signature: Be sure to include links to your website, blog and your posts in your email signature.

5. Share your content: Great content takes effort and time to create. Don’t miss the opportunity to share it. Schedule it, post it, and sharing messages on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are all easy and potential strategies to draw additional interest to your blog.

The goal of content marketing and promotion is to have as many visitors as possible when you start to monetize your blog.

Still not sure how to promote your blog?  We are ready to grow your business to the next level using strategic power and great reach of marketing planning designed to connect directly to your ideal clients, maximizing engagement, increasing sales resulting in more and consistent profit. Contact us for a free consultation by calling 410-696-7573 or completing our contact form.

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SEO Ranking: 5 Key Elements Search Engines Are Looking For 8 Aug 2016 4:00 AM (8 years ago)

You know that Search Engine Optimization and paid marketing is what you need but you just don’t know what to do.

First let’s start with understanding the purpose of SEO: SEO is to

• Create a great, seamless user experience.
• Communicate to the search engines your intentions so they can recommend your website for relevant searches.

Generating a consistent source of website traffic is the foundation of every online business. Search engines want to do their jobs as best as possible by referring users to websites and content that is the most relevant to what the user is looking for.

Here are 5 key elements search engines are looking for:

1. Quality Content: Great content created specifically for your intended user encourages the viewer to link to your page and increases site traffic, which improves your site’s authority and relevance. SEO is based and shows how interesting and authoritative the page ranks which leads to search engine success.
2. Performance: Determining how fast your site performs and if you need to speed up your site so it works properly to get your page load time down to less than one second for mobile devices.
3. Website: User Experience is key and keeping your site current and easy to navigate is a great way to maintain your position. Take time to improve the visual appeal of your brand by optimizing the layout of your site to engage viewers and help reduce high bounce rates.
4. Make it link-worthy: “Click here” has no search engine value beyond the attached URL. Focus on making sure your site has good enough content by writing out the text of the name of the destination. Rich keywords will improve your search engine rankings as well as the ranking of the page you are linking to.
5. Social Media: Building your presence on social media is a ranking factor that search engines clearly view as an authority brand. Adding social media links and share button links on your site allow your viewers to like and share your content and may help to boost and sustain your rankings over the long term.

Search engine optimization is a long-term process that doesn’t generate results overnight. Realistically, it could take a few months before you start reaping the benefits of your SEO labor.

These are just some strategies to implement how SEO ranking can make a difference in your business.  As a marketing agency, we understand and focus on how search engines work. We have the tools to effectively manage and nurture your ranking, maximizing your search engine optimization. To find out how to communicate to the search engines to improve your SEO ranking and how to get started contact us here.

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Which Day & Time Is The Best To Send Emails? 2 Aug 2016 6:10 AM (8 years ago)

Email plays an important role in your marketing strategy. Realistically, there is no one time during the week when everyone will stop what they are doing on the same day at the same time and say, “Now is the time to read my email.” Everyone’s schedule is different and let’s face it, it is just not going to happen.

When are the best days and times for sending email?

The time of day you send your emails can be just as influential on open rates as the day you send them. You might have learned to send your emails in the morning. However, this may not be the best strategy for your newsletter or on-boarding emails.

While most people check their emails while hopping on in the morning, they’re usually trying to start their day on a productive note. This means anything unnecessary will likely not get read and moved to the trash or archived pile.

The middle of the week always performs at or near the top of the list, so you simply cannot go wrong with this as a starting point. Numerous studies find that open rates are higher on middle days, such as Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, versus Mondays and Fridays.

Does it depend on your audience?

Having a day and time in place is a good starting point, but they will fail to be helpful if they don’t serve your audience.

Taking a look at your audience will help to determine if your readers are busy entrepreneurs checking their emails while running from meeting to meeting or small business owners who are reading emails when they get home?

Try to adjust your email timing to better meet your audience’s needs fit in with their schedules.

Is your content work related? Or is it for leisure time?

In conclusion, there is no one right answer.
Performing different tests to figure out what works best for you might take a few months, but you should feel free to play around with the days and times you send your emails to find out what succeeds. Run different campaigns with the same content to see what scheduling works best. Take note of the emails that get the most clicks, then send your subsequent campaigns following the new timeline.

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Social Media Trends in 2016? 13 Jul 2016 4:00 AM (8 years ago)

Social media is an integral part of any small business’ and has become known a marketing tool to converse with current and potential customers in a personal way.

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way.

Using social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram can help a business engage in “brand building” to get people talking about your business and creating a brand that people can identify with.

Many organizations will use more than one social media platform, which can help connect with different demographics. Here are a few social networking platforms currently trending:

Instagram has now added a new feature that will help users get personalized video recommendations every time they open the Explore tab.

Facebook still remains the most popular and just released 2 big updates and 3 more features currently in testing on how you can leverage these changes for your marketing strategy!

Snapchat is a newer social media app, with a fun younger demographic, however, many companies are starting to become active on it to interact with customers.

Twitter in the coming months will make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters.

Pinterest allows small businesses to showcase their own product offerings while also developing their own brand’s personality with some unique pin boards.

The real value is getting other people talking about your business. Build an affinity with them and get them to be your advocate.”

When it comes to promoting content, social media is one of the most powerful tools available; however, most content marketers fail to truly maximize its potential. We are ready to grow your company to the next level using customized strategic approach designed to connect directly to your ideal customers, maximizing engagement, increasing sales resulting in significant and consistent profit. Contact us for a free consultation by calling 410-696-7573 or completing our contact form.

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Business Marketing Checkup 15 Jun 2016 4:00 AM (8 years ago)

Conducting routine checkups on your business in the areas of marketing, operations, and finances can go a long way in keeping your business in line of your goals.

The reason for a marketing checkup is to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in your business. It is good practice to conduct two annual assessments in your business to ensure your company is not on the wrong path and miss a whole year of opportunities wasted. I also recommend that your goals are reviewed quarterly so that a company is on track to accomplishing their goals.

Here are afew quick and effective tools to try to create a well thought out plan for decision making in your business:

Strengths – Give your business an advantage in the given situation you are evaluating.  These may range from your product/service, employees, market position or any other items that give you an advantage over others.

Weaknesses – Similar to your strengths, but will be a listing of your limitations. Things that place you at a disadvantage in relation to others.

Opportunities – External factors that can come into play that will give your business an advantage.

Threats – External elements that could potentially adversely affect your business and that could be disadvantageous to you.

Do you need help with analyzing your business’ marketing strategies? Contact AI Web Designs and let us create a plan that will increase your presences, leads and sales both online and offline. Contact us for a free consultation by calling 410-696-7573 or completing our contact form.

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4 Valuable Tips on Competitive Analysis 11 May 2016 4:00 AM (8 years ago)

We’re all using social media to help build our online presence on the various social sites to grow our businesses. Competitive analysis can be crucial for brands invested in social media, but it’s often overlooked.

Understanding your competition can help your business in many ways. One of the best ways to help develop a social media strategy for your brand is to assess what your competitors are doing. Here are 4 relatively easy tips for learning more about your competition while scouring their website:

1. Identify Your Competitors: Find businesses similar to yours, but not limit your analysis to competitors of a specific size.
2. Choose Your Social Networks: Start with the main social networks first: Twitter and Facebook.
3. Analyze Competitor Profiles: A great social media campaign starts with solid social profiles and pages: What Wording, Images, Products and Services are your competitors using?
4. Analyze Competitor Content: You will need to create content for your social media updates. Do your competitors use their own content, post updates, and engage with their audience?

These are just a few tips to give you ideas on what you should be tracking. They can help you to better understand what your competitors are doing on the social sites and how this is working for them.

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Has Technology Changed Marketing Planning? 13 Apr 2016 4:00 AM (8 years ago)

One of the biggest challenges for any business is how to create an effective marketing plan.

Marketing tactics are constantly changing but fundamentals still apply as much as ever. Marketing still needs a defined target market to reach the right people with the right message. Marketing is still getting people to know, like, and trust your business.

Here are some key strategies to focus on and include in your marketing plan:

1. Continuity

Continuity is critical to serving up a winning marketing plan.  Make sure it is unified and the entire team is on the same page before putting it out there.

2. Social media

Social media offers your company a number of advantages and requires little to no financial investment. It can promote your brand to countless individuals and allows you to network with other companies.

3. Blogging

Blogging is one of your best weapons when it comes to marketing your brand. You should be blogging about your brand on a regular basis in addition to looking for guest blogging opportunities on other worthwhile sites. Guest blogging allows you to incorporate links into posts, bringing traffic back to your website.

4. Budgets

In order to budget your marketing plan, you have to manage the money. A good marketing plan needs to include budgets for expenses, and the sales that result from the different activities.

Is marketing overwhelming you?  We are ready to grow your business to the next level using strategic power and great reach of marketing planning designed to connect directly to your ideal clients, maximizing engagement, increasing sales resulting in more and consistent profit. Contact us for a free consultation by calling 410-696-7573 or completing our contact form.

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Does Your Business Need Marketing Automation? 16 Mar 2016 4:00 AM (9 years ago)

Everyone’s talking about it, but what is all the buzz about “marketing automation” and do you need it?

Marketing automation is a software platform that helps you to automate your marketing and sales engagement to generate more leads, close more deals, and better measure marketing success.

Marketing automation has been shown to increase sales and generate significant new revenue for companies and nurture lead generation with useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted customers.

Marketing Automation helps you:

• Create and improve a consistent experience for your customers
• Personalize and send targeted messages
• Increase marketing efficiency
• Generate more leads
• Qualify and prioritize your leads
• Nurture those leads to a sales-ready state
• Manage all of your email marketing campaigns

These are just some of the things marketing automation can do for your business.  As a marketing agency, we understand the contribution sales and marketing are making to the bottom line. We have the tools to effectively manage and nurture your leads, maximizing your marketing budget. To find out if marketing automation is right for your business and how to get started contact us here.

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