Why Your Website Content Matters

A computer on a desk with a website on screen, showing the value of good website content

Your website is often the first impression potential customers have of your business. While visual design sets the stage, it’s your website content that informs, engages, and compels visitors to become customers. High-quality website content should be a top priority for small business owners looking to drive leads and sales online.

Why Does Your Website Content Matter?

Let’s review some of the biggest benefits your website and business will experience from having high quality content:

Two working professionals working on their website content
Why does your website content matter?

Provides Value for Visitors

Excellent website content should educate, engage, and add value for visitors. But before you can think of how your website content can achieve these action items, put yourself in the shoes of a website visitor and ask yourself, “Why are they viewing my website?”

Once you know that answer (you may have multiple answers), your website needs to provide solutions. Consider these ideas:

  • Offer tips and how-tos. Depending on the products or services your business offers, this can be really helpful for both current and potential clients. If you want to include more detailed, in-depth information about your products/services, consider having a blog on your website.
  • Provide an explanation of products/services. Ever hear the saying, “Can’t see the forest for the trees”? While you know your product or service inside and out, odds are that most people do not. It’s a delicate task to explain what your products/services are in a cohesive, structured way while not providing too much content or detail but also offering enough information so viewers aren’t confused.
  • Share local information. Where is your service area? Who is your target customer? Sharing helpful information about the areas you serve, how your business fits into the area, and any relevant contact information will make it simple for your ideal customer to work with and contact you.

Providing truly useful content keeps readers engaged and spending more time on your site.

Takeaway: Creating high quality website content by offering tips, providing an explanation of services, and sharing local information will provide value to website visitors.

Boosts Your SEO

Well-written, keyword-focused website content also aids search engine optimization (SEO). While the use of AI to help create content can be useful, it can’t completely replace a human writer or optimize your content for SEO.

You can write the best content, but without properly utilizing relevant keywords throughout natural-sounding copy, search engines like Google won’t be able to understand your pages’ topics. Not having your content indexed by search engines will directly impact how high you can rank in search results.

The moral of the story? Optimized content attracts more qualified organic traffic to your site.

Takeaway: High quality content optimized for search engines will help you rank higher in search results and drive more traffic to your website.

Supports Your Overall Marketing

Your website content isn’t just the hub that anchors all marketing efforts driving traffic to your site – it’s also the only digital “salesperson” operating 24/7 for your business. Just like your branding should be consistent across all graphic design, web design, and print materials, so should your web copy align with and support campaigns across social media, PPC ads, email marketing, and more.

Strong, consistent content better converts that traffic into leads across channels.

Takeaway: Your web copy is an integral part of your marketing that requires consistency across all relevant marketing channels.

Enhances the User Experience

If you’ve ever been on a website and were unable to find the information you’re looking for, clicked links that turned out to be broken, or couldn’t understand the information provided, you might have decided that business wasn’t worth working with, given your negative experience.

Users should be able to easily navigate and find information on your site. Here are a few ways you can achieve this through your website content:

  • Write descriptive headers that are clear so visitors can quickly scan and jump to the sections most relevant to them.
  • Include bulleted lists to help break up dense paragraphs and highlight key takeaways, which helps retain reader attention.
  • Use ample paragraph breaks to make the content less intimidating and easier to digest so readers are not confronted with a huge wall of text.

Add internal links to improve user experience, allowing visitors to seamlessly navigate to other related pages of interest. This keeps visitors on pages longer, and viewing more content rather than quickly clicking away.

Takeaway: Well-written and organized website copy results in a positive user experience that keeps people on your site longer and viewing more content overall.

Increases Leads and Sales

Informative, engaging website content educates consumers so they feel confident doing business with you. By consistently providing valuable information through your copy, you establish expertise and credibility. Readers see you as an authority they can rely on for solutions related to your products or services.

Here’s an example of how this might look on a buyer’s journey:

  1. First, they may land on a blog post from a search, learning about their problem. 
  2. Second, they read about tips for evaluating solutions, building desire.
  3. Finally, more content compares options and outlines your process, nurturing leads.

With each stage, viewers become more qualified due to the knowledge they’ve gained from your website content. They feel assured you understand their needs and can provide the right solution.

In this way, useful copy moves prospects through the sales funnel, turning cold traffic into engaged subscribers, qualified leads, and finally loyal customers. Your website content plays a central role in attracting and converting visitors throughout the buyer’s journey.

Takeaway: When every piece of website copy, from blog posts to service pages, focuses on addressing needs, solving problems, and clearly communicating value, website visitors can become qualified leads and loyal customers.

Here’s a Quick Recap:
  1. Provide value: Creating high quality website content by offering tips, providing an explanation of services, and sharing local information will provide value to website visitors.
  2. Boost SEO: High quality content optimized for search engines will help you rank higher in search results and drive more traffic to your website.
  3. Support marketing efforts: Your web copy is an integral part of your marketing that requires consistency across all relevant marketing channels.
  4. Enhance user experience: Well-written and organized website copy results in a positive user experience that keeps people on your site longer and viewing more content overall.
  5. Increase leads & sales: When every piece of website copy, from blog posts to service pages, focuses on addressing needs, solving problems, and clearly communicating value, website visitors can become qualified leads and loyal customers.

At Paragon Marketing Group, we understand that creating great website content requires an investment of time and resources. But the payoff in increased visibility, traffic, leads and sales makes it well worth it.

If you need help with your website content, contact our team to perform an audit of your current site and revamp the copy to deliver better results. Let us optimize your 24/7 online salesperson through high-impact website content.

To learn more, please visit our website at paragonmarketinggroup.com or call us at 262-443-9092. We’d love to hear from you.

4 Reasons Your Small Business Needs a Website

Getting a small business website

If you own a small business, at some point you’ve probably been told you need a website. But with social media networks and so many cheap or free website options out there today, you might question how you should go about creating a website or whether you should even have one in the first place. Is it even necessary for your small business to have one . . . ?

4 Reasons Having a Website Is Critical to Your Business

At Paragon Marketing Group, we’ve fielded every type of question about websites, from why social media isn’t a replacement for a website, to the benefits of getting a website for your business, to why getting a cheap or free website might not be the best idea.

So today, we’re going to answer our clients’ frequently asked questions about websites.

Why do you need a website for your small business?

1. Client Question: Why Is Social Media Not a Replacement for a Website?

We’ve all heard someone say, “I have a Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok page. I don’t need a website.” So then why are social media platforms not a replacement for a website for small businesses?

Paragon’s Answer:
  • You don’t own social media pages. Facebook, Instagram, or any other social network can and will go down from time to time. You don’t have control over social media platforms’ appearance or features.
  • You’re limited with SEO options when you don’t have a website. When people use search engines, your website can be optimized for local searches to attract an audience.
  • Websites offer credibility. And people buy from businesses they know, like, and trust.
  • You can have a consumer’s full attention with your website. Rather, you have to compete for it on social media.
  • Websites are far more multi-functional than social media posts. Websites can include resources, a blog, have ecommerce capabilities, be promotional, and informative.
  • You don’t have a landing place without a website. You can’t direct your social media traffic anywhere that will cause your customers to convert when there’s no destination to direct traffic.

2. Client Question: What Are the Benefits of Having a Website?

So now that we understand why social media can’t replace a website, what are the biggest benefits of a small business having a website?

Paragon’s Answer:

3. Client Question: Why Is Getting a Free or Cheap Website a Bad Idea?

We’re all trying to save money and cut corners today, but why do we recommend someone get a professional website designed rather than go the free or cheap route?

Paragon’s Answer:
  • A free web address (domain) can appear unprofessional. Do you think consumers will take a site like [email protected] seriously?
  • Free websites often come with irrelevant or inappropriate ads. These ads often look tacky and unprofessional, and they’re usually unrelated to your business entirely.
  • Your website could get shut down at any time since you don’t own it. Being free means you don’t own your site, which means you can’t control what happens with your site.
  • Your information can be sold to third parties with no repercussions. Today, these companies trade information, and you may start receiving email and phone spam, even though you didn’t give your information to third-parties directly.
  • Many free website services have little security and can often distribute malware. Unfortunately, free or cheap websites lack the security you need to protect not only business information, but also any other information you store on your computer.
  • You don’t want to have to redo it a year from now when it no longer meets your needs. What can seem great upfront often fails to meet your needs as you grow and may become more work in the long term for you.

4. Client Question: What Is Web Hosting/Maintenance, and Why Do I Need Them?

In marketing, we hear a lot of terms get thrown around, like “web hosting” or “web maintenance.” But many people have no idea what these things are, much less understand why they’re really important.

Paragon’s Answer:
  • Web Hosting
    • A web hosting service gives your site a place to live and allows your website to be live. If you want your site to be visible, then you must get web hosting.
    • Essentially, web hosting provides a secure place to store online content; it’s like a digital repository.
  • Web Maintenance
    • Web maintenance keeps your site up-to-date and running smoothly.
    • It’s every business owner’s worst nightmare for the company website to go down. That’s why we’ll test for any issues before it goes live, keep it up-to-date, and scan for any hackers or malware.
Here’s a Few Takeaways:
  1. Social media profiles like Facebook or Instagram are not replacements for a business website.
  2. 70% of consumers will visit a store because of information found online is one of the biggest benefits of having a professional website.
  3. Web hosting and maintenance are necessary to keep your website secure and running smoothly.

If you’ve been considering getting a professional website for your business, we hope we were able to answer a few of your questions.

At Paragon, we understand how critical having a website can be in your small business’s success. As always, we want to be a resource for you. So as you have questions, we’ll be here to answer them.

Want to learn more about this topic? Check out our podcast, the Main Street Marketing Podcast, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your audio platform of choice.

Top 10 Marketing Mistakes

Circling marketing mistakes in pink highlighter

“Don’t be a fool and make these marketing mistakes.”

Um . . . what?

We promise this isn’t a prank or an April Fool’s Joke. We’re not calling anyone a fool. Rather, as a small business, one of our biggest desires is that other business owners not make some of the most common marketing mistakes we’ve seen over the last several years.

Don’t Make These Top 10 Marketing Mistakes

Now maybe you’ve made some of these. Or maybe you’re looking for some tips on how to avoid making these mistakes. Either way, here are the top 10 marketing mistakes we’ve seen:

Business owner pondering what marketing mistakes he's made
Have you ever made any of these marketing mistakes?

Mistake #1

Your business doesn’t have a website OR your website is outdated.

Having a sleek, professional, and updated website is a vital part of your web presence. Not only will a website help your customers find your business online, but it will also give your business more credibility than organizations with just social media sites.

Mistake #2

You aren’t thinking about your mobile viewers.

More customers are conducting business, making purchases, and scheduling appointments on their phones today. So every business needs an attractive, functional, responsive, and mobile-friendly website that will serve your customers where they are and encourage them to spend more time on your site. Because more time on your site means a higher likelihood of them making a purchase.

Mistake #3

You don’t know who your audience is, where to find them, or how to reach them.

This is where marketing strategy comes into play. If you’re just throwing content onto the internet, there’s no way you can track, measure, or even hope for success. Determining who your target audience is (and where to find them) is a crucial step you should take before deciding which marketing channels to use.

Mistake #4

You don’t know who your competitors are or what they’re doing.

As a small business, you have to work even harder to get your message out there when you have competitors. Learning who your competitors are and what they’re doing — as in what’s working and what’s not — is vital to help you differentiate your business from the competition.

Mistake #5

You’re under-utilizing OR over-utilizing your social media channels.

Most people are on at least one social channel, if not several. This is great news, because that means your customers are ready and waiting for your business to interact with them! But successful social media requires a plan. Are you posting once every 6 months, or 6 times a day? You don’t want your audience to forget about you, but you also don’t want to annoy them. Come up with a plan and then consistently post to your social channels.

Mistake #6

Your business is difficult for your customers to find.

Before you can build trust with potential clients, listing your business in leading directories will make your business visible and easy to find. Plus, making your business easy to find in leading applications, search engines, and other directories will provide the validity your business needs to be established online.

Mistake #7

You’re hoping rather than creating a well-thought plan and strategy to accomplish your marketing goals.

We often don’t put enough stock into our plans. It’s so much easier to come up with a few marketing goals and then hope for the best! But marketing goals shouldn’t be just unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions. Schedule time to come up with a plan (or contact us so we can help you make one!), write down all your goals and your plans to accomplish them, and then start executing.

Mistake #8

You aren’t distinguishing your products/services from your competition.

For better or worse, you know you’re not the only business owner selling your product or service. You likely have local, regional, and national competitors vying for the same customers as you. That’s why it’s so important to differentiate your product or service. Ask yourself what separates you from all your competitors. Why should customers buy from you rather than from someone else?

Mistake #9

You’re trying to do all the marketing yourself OR you’re not doing any marketing at all.

Perhaps you’re trying to figure out how to market your business, or maybe you’ve even wondered how much money you should spend on marketing per month. Have you ever wondered how you’re supposed to have time to do all your marketing while trying to run your business? Whether you need to delegate marketing responsibilities to other staff or outsource your marketing altogether, we recommend not trying to do it all yourself. In fact, that’s where our company tagline comes into play: “You run your business, we run your marketing.” If you’re interested in outsourcing any of your marketing, we’d love to help you.

Mistake #10

You consider marketing an expense rather than an investment.

Like all things in life, it’s much easier to focus on the short-term than the long-term. Yes, it does cost money to outsource your marketing, but as a marketing agency, we stand by the belief that it’s so much more a long-term investment in your business rather than a short-term expense.

Let’s face it — no one is perfect at marketing. No business owner has all the answers and can do everything perfectly. In a way, we’re all fools to an extent, because it’s impossible to know everything. And even if we did know everything about running a business, our time can’t fully be dedicated to marketing our businesses.

And that’s really where we come in. At Paragon Marketing Group, we understand exactly what it’s like to feel overwhelmed. We know what it’s like to wear all the hats and juggle all the balls. We’ve been in your shoes before. And that’s why it’s so important that we not only help other small businesses like us, but also be a marketing resource that you can access whenever you need.

Want to learn more about this topic? Check out our podcast, the Main Street Marketing Podcast, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your audio platform of choice.

Design For Your Target Audience

Design For Your Audience.

All businesses have a target audience, and it’s important to define who that is! When you are making your marketing materials, whether it be a printed brochure or a website, you need to design for your customer, not for you. It’s all about what your potential customers are looking for and want.

Considerations When Designing for Your Target Audience

You should ask yourself the following questions:

  • What colors reside with your target demographic?
  • Are they searching the web on their phone, a tablet or a desktop?
  • Are they readers? Or visual people?
  • What drives them to make a purchasing decision?

Color Schemes & Functionality

When designing materials for your business, step into the shoes of your target audience and consider what they are looking for. According to a study compiled of information from The New York Times, Harrington College of Design, and other sources, the older end of the Gen-Z generation (1996-2015) enjoy muted and pastel colors, like spearmint and blush pink. Their style is influenced by the 80s and 90s, so try bright colors like yellow (named “The Color of Gen-Z”). Millennials and Gen-Z are automatically attracted to a service or product that is aesthetically pleasing to them. Of course, the quality of the service is always important, but initially attracting them and bringing them in relies a lot on visuals.

If you’re attracting an older audience, those who are a part of the Baby Boomer and Gen X generations (1943-1960, 1961-1980) enjoy a much more mature color palette. Warm yellows and whites, pale blue, and jade green, and shades of grey are comfortable and classic for these generations. Of course, this is not exact science and varies from person-to-person, but this is a good baseline to start. These generations may not care as much about aesthetics as they do about the functionality of a service or product. But your website is often the first time new customers interact with your business, so it’s worth thinking about.

Smart Devices & Navigation

Combining what your audience might enjoy aesthetically with a website that’s easy to navigate will attract current and new customers. Of course, Millennials and Gen-Zers might be accessing your website on their smartphone more often than on a laptop or desktop like Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers. In 2020, it’s safe to assume most people own and use a smartphone, so it’s always good to make sure navigation is easy regardless of the age of your target audience.

Aesthetics & Information Channels

You should also consider the amount of text on your website. Millennials like a very minimalistic look. They can be easily overwhelmed and distracted, so have a simple, straightforward point when explaining your services. Further, Millennials are more likely to seek out services from word-of-mouth. The Gen-Z generation, however, likes to use the Internet to research a business and their options. Gen X-ers are oftentimes quite direct and like to engage in honest, open conversations. Because of this, it’s important to consider bringing honesty and transparency when explaining a product or service to them.

To find out more information or if you need help finding the design and color palette perfect for your website, Paragon Marketing Group has the people and resources to help make all of it come to life.

Websites—The Face Of Your Business

Websites—The face of your business.

Websites. They’re the face of your business, your first impression on consumers, and a way to communicate with customers. Check out what you can do to update your website and what customers are looking for!

Personalization

In our previous blog, which you can find here, we talked about what it means to brand yourself – this includes your website! If your logo has certain colors in it, make sure you’re using that across your entire website. Keeping fonts, pictures, and color consist not only shows people that you have a clear brand, but they get to know you on a more personal level.

Ease of Navigation

Have you ever clicked on a restaurant’s website to try and order food and can’t find their phone number? How about frustrations with trying to schedule an appointment online? You may not realize it, but all of these small difficulties add up to a person’s impression of not only your website, but your entire business. If people can’t find it, how are they supposed to buy it? Use tabs to clearly label where things can be found. If you know of something that takes more than a couple of clicks to access, try adding a search bar to your website. You can also study the patterns of the use of your website and see where certain things can be fixed.

Call-to-Action

This one may seem obvious, but is often overlooked. You can have all the testimonials, photos, videos, and customer reviews that you want to validate the quality of your business, but if there’s nowhere to lead your customer to buy a product or an email to reach out to, how do they move forward with your services? Make sure there’s a, “contact us today,” or, “click here for more information,” etc. to point your customers in the right direction.

Updated Content

If you haven’t uploaded recent customer reviews, photos, or blog posts in a while, how do prospective customers know how you’re growing and developing? Having reviews from 8 years ago is great to show that your business has been about quality since day one, but how are consumers going to know how your business is doing now? Also, constant stream of uploading shows loyalty to your business and customers.

Social Media

People want to stay in touch and see what’s going on! Maybe you’re a heating and AC service company; chances are, customers don’t need your services on the daily or weekly. If you provide links to your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., your customers can stay in the know with your business and get to know you on a more personal level! That way, when it does come time for an HVAC tune up, they’ll know exactly who to call.

Personalized About Page

When it comes to making a business transaction with a new company, people want to know not only what your business offers, but how you got started, what your business’ morals are, and how you like to work. Including these things lets your customers get to know you on a more personal level. Would you rather do work with a company that provides their title and a bare minimum description of their services, or do you want to work with someone who is transparent and honest?

Validation and Testimonials

We touched on this one earlier, but this can really make or break providing services to a prospective customer. Showing before and after pictures of your services, video testimonials, or even written reviews from current and past customers lets consumers know how you run as a business, and of course, other people’s experience working with you. If your business takes pride in quality service for low prices, or treating your customers like family, make sure your customers are there to back you up! It only takes a couple of minutes to reach out to your customers and ask them to leave a review for you.

You have a lot of competitors. Make sure your competition has nothing on you! Be honest with prospective customers, stand out with your own personalized touch, and be open and consistent with communication.

Why is video needed in your Marketing mix?

This is a business team gathering around a laptop.

According to Wordstream, viewers retain 95% of information from watching a video compared to retaining 10% from reading the same information. This trend is astonishing to me but also understandable. When I look back at things I buy online or things I learn, it is the same for me. As a matter of fact, I think it may be worse because I can’t read a long article with my attention span but I can definitely watch a video or listen to a podcast. At this point, I am wondering how much more to write and how to line it up. According to that statistic, I should end it here! However, please continue and choose to be the 10%, then please go and watch the video or listen to the podcast to remember the rest.

 

Every good content marketing strategy encompasses a mixture of different things: blog, video, social, web, ads, and podcasts. Obviously, it is called content marketing for a reason! Think about those things, how many of those strategies can you incorporate into a video? The big question that we always get is, why?

 

  1. According to the same article on Wordstream, a video on your home screen can increase conversions by up to 80%. Who can’t use more leads?
  2. Video creates a personal touch that you can’t get anywhere else. The old saying, “People do business with people they like” is still important today. It may actually be more important because of the internet.
  3. According to an article written by Vidyard, 65% of viewers watch more than ¾ of a video. This is not even close to what people read!
  4. Search Engine Optimization asks you to link and backlink as much as possible as long as it is relevant content. What can be more relevant than you talking about your product on a video?
  5. Content Marketing Institute says that audiences are 10 times more likely to engage, share, and comment on a video than they are a blog or social post.
  6. Last but certainly not least, email is more seen and more returned with a video in the message.

 

About a year ago, a friend of mine told me that he was going to start doing a weekly video newsletter along with his regular newsletter. I got his newsletter and I fully admit that I only read about half of it on a regular basis. Since he started doing a video newsletter every Monday, I have learned so much about what is happening and what he is doing. I never knew most of that information before, even though I received his regular newsletter. This is an example of the power of video at its finest and a perfect reason to incorporate video into your marketing campaign.

 

The big obstacle that you will face with this is yourself. Most people do not like to be on video and admittedly, I am one of them. I believe I have a face for radio but I do videos on a regular basis because that is what is being asked of me by our clients. In the next article, I will talk about what you will do with a video once you have it.

Cybercrime affects Small Business

This is a blue circuit board with a blue lock in front.

We have all heard the word Cybercrime and we know that we need to protect ourselves. What most small businesses do not understand is how much it affects them. We have heard all the stories from the news about the big companies getting hacked and information being leaked. What we never hear about is the small businesses that get hacked on a daily basis. According to a survey done by CNBC less than 2% of American small businesses say that they are concerned about getting hacked.The big reason why is, “We are the little guy, they don’t want to hack us.” This thought process is incorrect and is exactly why you should care more than the big companies.

Hackers know that you do not have the time, money, or knowledge to protect your site like the big companies do. Therefore, your website is targeted more than any other. Just because you only have 100 clients or 1,000 clients does not make you immune. It makes you a perfect candidate for hackers. They can go in, get what they want, and get out without anybody knowing. What’s better is that because you are a small business, the word that you got hacked won’t go out to everyone in the world because it won’t be considered a big story.

So, what can a small business owner do to protect themselves? More importantly, what can a small business owner do to protect their customers? Well, here you go!

1. Make sure your website is on a secure server. You have a lot of options when it comes to hosting your website. We highly suggest that you find out what equipment or software your host has to combat hacker attempts.

2. Redundancy is very important. Make sure your host has more than one copy of your site. Having multiple servers in different locations would be ideal. This way, if one location gets hacked then they can quickly change over to a backup copy.

3. Consistent security scans. Security scans should be happening weekly on your site or at the minimum monthly. If you keep up on your security scans you will remove any trackers that may have attached to your site in-between scans.

4. You must be updating your site monthly at the minimum. By staying up to date you are also keeping away any new hacks created by having an old version of the theme or integrations your site requires.

5. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encrypts any conversation that you have with the customer, the website and your office computer. This item is so important that Google is now requiring this if you want your page to be found on Google. It is required as of June 1st to have it. You’ll know you have one by seeing HTTPS:// instead of HTTP:// in your URL.

By following these steps we cannot guarantee that you will never get hacked or that your information will never get out. Hackers are getting smarter and smarter every day and nobody can ever guarantee that. What we can tell you is that by following these 5 things you are giving your clients and yourself the best protection you can.

6 steps to retail marketing

This is a view of a mall from the top floor.

Marketing in the retail world can be a lot of fun. It also can be very time consuming and monotonous. However, without marketing in the retail world, you will not maintain or grow. Retail has an attrition rate and it doesn’t matter how long you have been in business or how great of a reputation you have, there still has to be marketing. You have to replace the people you lose yearly or you might as well shut your doors right now. How do you do this, is the question and how do you do it well?

1. It all starts with building a brand. You have to have a brand recognition or you will not grow. When people think of the typical products you sell, you want your name to come to mind first. In marketing, there is a rule called the rule of seven. Now, some marketers will say it is the rule of 10 or a rule of 5, regardless, it is still important that you follow it. A person must see your brand 7 times before they start thinking about you for a certain product. How those 7 times is achieved can be hard, however, the rest of this blog explains a few tricks.

2. How you are found is important and that is where listings come into the equation. There are literally hundreds of sites that your business should be listed on depending on exactly what your product is. Personally, I believe that if you are listed properly on the top sites then the rest will follow over time. What people do not realize is that everything HAS to be exactly the same across all of your online listings, right down to the dot in the same place.

3. Social media marketing is going to give you the most bang for your buck. Depending on your demographic you will utilize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Anyone of these 4 are going to be important, however, the two most important are going to be Facebook and Twitter. The most important thing with these platforms is to not post just 1 time per week about your store and expect people to flock in. You have to post regularly and you have to not only educate the consumer about you but also about your products.

4. You have to create a personalized experience. Just as we talked about social being important well, so is mobile marketing. It is said that 58% of people will look on cell phones before they look for your store on a desktop or laptop. With the world of artificial intelligence growing it is very important to learn new ways to use personalized mobile marketing in order to attract new clients.

5. Reward programs are becoming very popular. Create an awards program through email marketing and offer a free product for being a member of your newsletter program. Once you start getting emails from consumers, do not miss a single month of sending newsletters out. I would suggest that you send out an email at a minimum of bi-weekly. One can be a newsletter talking about anything new that you have done and the other can be an offer of the month for members of the group.

6. People will come in and spend more if they know you are supporting the community. Your local chamber of commerce or business group will have a list of events that are community-based in order to help you find a great charity or event to support. Once you find one, offer your support or sponsorship then market about your contribution. Millennials today want to know that you support a charity or local event. They will remember that and come back to you because of it.

Having a retail establishment is a very exciting and fun thing. In today’s world, you have a great opportunity to provide a great location for people to get what you need. The more people that know who you are, the better. With the digital world, you have a great opportunity to tell the world about you! Have fun with it but remember to be respectful and responsible. You will be successful with these suggestions.

How is your budget doing? How about your leads?

This is an image of measuring your budget.

It is very important that you keep up with your budget on a regular basis and track what your Cost per lead or cost per sale is. Ultimately you should be keeping this up on a regular basis however at minimum you should do this quarterly.

The first step is to determine how much you have spent on marketing so far. Hopefully you have been tracking this independently if not I am sure your accounting department has. Hopefully either you or they are keeping track of where the money is going. Not only that it is going to marketing but where in marketing it is going.

The next thing to determine is how many total sales you have for the the quarter. Again you should be getting this information on a regular basis from your sales team so this should be something you know but if you do not then find out from your sales manager. This should be broken down by new sales and existing sales. This should also be broken down by the amount of sales and the amount of leads. In short, how many appointments the sales reps ran and how many appointments the sales reps closed.

Now here comes the math:
Marketing spend/amount of leads = Cost per lead
Marketing spend/amount of sales = Cost per sale

I suggest you go further as well. Hopefully you have been asking where leads are coming from, television ads, radio ads, web, and social are just some of the categories. You should be able to get this same information from your sales if in fact you did get it.

Here comes the math again:
Marketing spend for category/leads from category = Cost per lead for category
Marketing spend for category/sales from category = Cast per sale for category

When you set up your budget I showed you how to do this same thing for your budget. How are your actuals working towards these numbers? What category is trending higher than budgeted? What category is trending lower than budgeted? What should you be focusing on for the next quarter to fix the differences? This is how you know that you are on track with what you budgeted and expected and this is how you stay on top of your budget make it adaptable.

On page and Off Page SEO what is the difference?

This is decorative text of SEO, Search engine optimization.

The latest and most important thing about websites is SEO also known as Search Engine Optimization. However there are 2 different kinds, so what is the difference and why are both important?

First, lets cover On page SEO. Searchmetrics defines On-Page SEO as, “Onpage optimization (a.k.a on-page SEO) refers to all measures that can be taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings.” This involves a few things:

Meta Description – This is the page description of a webpage that is keyworded to match. They should be no longer than 16 characters and must be relevant to the page they are describing.

Title Tags or Meta Tags – This refers to the description in the URL. These are not seen on the page but they are both seen and ranked on the search. These are also referred to as page titles. These should be no longer than 70 keywords and they must not repeat keywords.

Headings – We refer to these a lot as H tags. H1, H2, H3…. These are tags that are used for the creation of headings. They will most likely be the heading for the post you are creating.

Site map – As the name implies, it is a map of what is on your site and where exactly the content is. Google uses this to crawl your site and create the roadmap of your site.

Now, let’s cover Off-page SEO. This is a technique that is used to improve the position of a website in the search engine results page (SERPs). This includes many items but most importantly are:

Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Linkedin and Pinterest are just to name a few. Social media allows you to create stories while linking and creating a web of links that go back to your site.

Listing Services – Sites like Yelp, Yahoo, Google and Facebook all have to be tied and linked back to your site. More importantly are the smaller spaces like Hotfrog and Citynet. The key to this is that everything must be EXACTLY the sames right down to the dot in certain places, otherwise it hurts you.

Blogging – Writing a weekly, monthly or even quarterly blog with links back to that section of your website will increase your backlinks.

Podcasting – Again, this helps create backlinks to section of your website. It also shows you as an authority of the market you are in.

This list could go on for many pages but you get the point. The more backlinks and associations that you can get to your website, the more it helps get you ranked. Ultimately you can think of On page SEO as your website and how it is created and maintained and Off site SEO as everything else you should be doing across the web. Both are very important for your website and where you show up. Off site SEO also creates a relationship with your company prior to them getting to your website and On page SEO carries that through to the ultimate step which is conversion.