Branding is about more than just getting your current and potential customers familiar with what your company is all about. It is also about getting all of your employees on the same page, too. When your entire team not only knows what your core values are, but also believes in your ability to deliver on those promises, then they become happier employees and better advocates for your brand. Here are a few ways that you can make sure your branding carries over internally.

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From the smallest local businesses to major national companies, branding is an integral part of a successful marketing and advertising strategy. Without a consistent, recognizable brand, your company blends in with the rest of the competition, and you simply become a provider in your industry. Here’s what you need to know about branding and why your business can’t skip this essential component.

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Creating a recognizable and relatable brand is an essential part of any marketing strategy. Your company’s or product’s branding is like a public image or persona, and getting it right means giving your consumers a shortcut to your brand’s identity. In a single glance, your branding will communicate the values and characteristics of your products and services while nudging consumers to align themselves personally with your company.

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Social media involves a lot more than just posting and tweeting. Social Media channels provide great ways to build relationships and engage with audiences on a direct level. You can enhance your brand by building social proof and staying current, helping you generate sales leads to grow your business. Social media is an important tool for improving your marketing plan.

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As a 21st century business owner, you need to understand the importance of Social Media and how it will affect your business.  Social Media establishes your online reputation and taking the time to do it correctly will pay off in a big way.  Here are the top best practices to ensure your social media activities are a success.

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Once you have decided to create or update your company’s website, the next major step is to consider your target audience.  You need to understand your customers and why they buy your products and services.  It is tempting to design a website that you like, but this isn’t the best approach.  First, you will need to create personas for your target audience and create a profile of their interests.  Then apply the information you gathered to your web design.  Finally, you should assess the effectiveness and make adjustments as necessary.  Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps.

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Throughout our SEO journey, we’ve learned the importance of high quality content for search engines and people.  While aspects of your website remain static for years, your content can not.  A website is a living, breathing document that requires updates to survive.  Let’s take a look at the freshness of your site by examining both content and site design.

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There is no denying that Wordpress is a popular tool to create websites and manage content.  Approximately 26% of websites on the internet were constructed using Wordpress.  But, does being popular mean it’s the best choice for your small to medium sized business?  Wordpress may work well for some, but could end up causing you, and your web designer, a lot of frustration in the long run.

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Well... it depends.  To answer this question, you must take a look at your future business goals.  Do you plan on growing your business?  Do you plan on advertising products or services?  Do you want to keep your existing customers?  Are you thinking about selling your business?  Do you want more customers? If you answered “yes” to these questions, then you need a website.  One of the only reasons you won’t need a website, is if you are planning on shutting down the company.

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We all know that making business decisions can be stressful.  This is especially true when selecting a new web designer.  You’re putting a piece of your business in their hands, so it’s important that you trust them.  Think of it as job interview.  Asking the right questions will not only help alleviate your anxiety, but will create a great working relationship with the web designer you select.

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Choosing the right color scheme for your website involves more than just selecting your favorite colors or using your company’s standard color scheme. The experience that visitors have on your website could vary tremendously just from a few color changes, and our conversion rates could skyrocket just by changing the color of a single button on your website.

Not convinced? Let’s take a closer look at the psychology of color and how it affects the success of your website design.

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The most important aspect of a good web design is communication. Web designers and developers are good at what they do, but they cannot know what is important to you or your business unless you tell them. Of course, giving them the information they need can be difficult if you’re not sure what the process is.

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Tackling projects yourself is often a great way to save a few bucks and maybe learn a few new things along the way. When it comes to web design, however, doing it yourself could end up costing you in the long run. Web design is about much more than impressive graphics and pretty colors; it is the hub of your company’s presence online and should be working hard to deliver qualified leads to your sales team. In case that is not convincing enough, here are five more reasons to hire a professional web designer.

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For many small businesses, being found by local residents or other nearby businesses is essential to their success. If you think about businesses such as heating and cooling companies, or small bakeries, the search terms they are ranking for probably include a city, zip code, or the word “nearby.”

Google does a good job of figuring out where you are and when to include you in a list of local lineups, especially when the competition is not so hot. However, when you have a lot of local competition, you will want to know how to optimize your website and your business listings for local searchers.

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This installment of our SEO for Beginners series will talk about link building. It is one of the most important aspects of SEO, but it can also be one of the most challenging. You’ll learn about what the idea behind all of it is, plus a few tips for link building the right way.

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On our journey through the SEO jungle, we are looking at the various ways that you can directly have an impact on how well you rank in a list of Google search results. So far, we have covered what quality content is and we talked about some of the technical aspects of search engine optimization that you should know about—specifically on-page optimization factors. Today, we are going to go through a few more on-page factors that Google is looking for when it is scanning your web pages.

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In our last post, we talked about how important it is to make sure your content is high quality. Google has its own customers—people using search engines—that it must answer to. By tailoring your content to Google and its customers, you can increase the likelihood that Google will return your content near the top of the list of search engine results. We also mentioned that there are a few technical bits to know about to give Google the right shortcuts to understand what your page is about, and that’s what we will detail in the next two posts.

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Promoting your site and your content are important ways to drive traffic to your website. However, up to 64 percent of web traffic comes from organic search, or when someone types a few words into a search engine like Google and chooses one of the unpaid links in the results. One recent survey gives 90 percent of all organic search credit to Google so today we will be talking about the best practices for getting your links to the top of Google’s results pages.

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Mobile web users are here to stay, and they are not satisfied with scrolling, scrunching, and resizing the screens of your desktop-optimized website. A separate version of your site that is optimized only for mobile users is one solution, but that means keeping up with two websites all the time. Native apps are another solution, but people are only willing to download and install so many apps on their devices.

This is where responsive design comes in.

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With most of the country baking in a heatwave, it can seem a bit ridiculous to think about holiday sales. However, we are down to our last 100 or so days until Christmas, so it’s time to start planning your end-of-year strategies. Even if you are not in the retail industry, we can all leverage the season to give our businesses a boost.

An email newsletter is a great opportunity to keep your brand at the top of your customers’ minds while giving them valuable information that will hopefully lead to a conversion. On the other hand, no matter how much your customers love you, there is only so much patience they are going to have for poorly constructed newsletters. Here are five mistakes you may be making, and what you should do to fix them.


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There are almost 2 billion emails sent every single day. Depending on which study you read, every individual receives between 40 and 100 emails per day with those who receive emails at work falling at the higher end of the scale.

In other words, if you are trying to send marketing emails, you have a lot of competition for your recipients’ attention. The first hurdle you must overcome is getting your messages opened. It does not matter how hard you have worked on the content inside the message if nobody sees it. Here’s what you need to know to write email marketing subject lines that get clicked.

For some people, email marketing brings to mind spammy messages peddling various pills and contraptions that often have nothing of value to offer the recipient. Today’s email marketing is savvy, creative, and focused on the customer. Most of all, people want to receive it.

That’s right, according to a 2012 study, 77 percent of consumers prefer to receive promotional messages by email. The next runner up is direct mail, and only nine percent of consumers prefer it. Email is crushing the competition, and for good reason.


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