Long gone are the days of disjointed marketing efforts and advertising campaigns.  In today’s world of inbound marketing and readily available, in-depth analytics, it seems almost laughable to think of a time when businesses would spend advertising dollars without ever really knowing how many customers resulted from them.  Now, we are often able to track our leads from their very first point of contact to the moment they convert and adjust our marketing efforts based on data. 

If your business has invested in advertising, it’s a given you want that money to help you stand out, produce an ROI, and convert leads into customers.  You may think your website alone can handle all the heavy lifting of lead generation.  After all, no one actually uses the phone anymore, right?  Wrong.  Studies show that call leads convert 10-15 times more often that web leads and that calls to U.S. businesses from search, social, display, or other paid ad campaigns ads have grown 110 percent since 2014.  

65% of businesses consider phone calls to be their most valuable source of leads.  This makes sense because a phone call gives you the opportunity to engage directly with a potential customer or client.  While creating a relevant ad, developing a targeted keyword strategy, and designing a conversion-friendly landing page to generate leads is a strong initiative and the basis of paid search advertising, if you aren’t tracking calls then you’re not seeing the entire picture and could be leaving money on the table. 

From the beginning, our Baton Rouge-based inbound marketing agency has strived to stay ahead of the curve with the latest industry news and best practices.  In turn, this knowledge has been readily passed to entrepreneurs, marketers, and other interested parties through the regularly maintained BlinkJar Media blog.  Topics covered encompass all elements of the inbound marketing realm, from SEO to social media, while also educating readers on how to effectively connect these components to their more traditional marketing efforts.  Today, we are proud to announce that the wealth of information included on the BlinkJar Media site has led to its distinction as one of the top 100 inbound marketing blogs across the web.

If you’ve read part one of this social media series, you have already identified your strategy and goals surrounding social media and the platforms best suited to achieve them.  Now that you have those important pieces in place, you can begin to take into account what your competition may be doing, as well as begin measuring the success of your own efforts.  So, let’s discuss these remaining elements of your social media battle and how they can help you succeed in the long run.

You already know social media is a critical component of your marketing strategy, so let’s get down to it!  Your business is on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram – all the major social media players. You post to them as frequently as you can, maybe even daily.  All that hard work has to be paying off, right?  You are certainly working harder at social than your competitors.  But, are you working smarter? This strategy of posting as much as possible to all of the most visible platforms may have worked in the past, but the social media landscape is steadily changing. And, that means that your strategy should be too. 

Ever since search engine optimization entered the collective consciousness of marketers and business owners, there has been a long-fought struggle to clinch the coveted number one organic ranking position for targeted search queries.  But, if there is anything that Google has taught us over the years, it’s that nothing stays the same, a fact reinforced by the growing popularity of the featured snippet.  Just when we truly believed that it couldn’t get better than achieving number one, along came this little feature, otherwise known as position zero.

Every business has a story. Whether it is rich in family tradition or a tale of blood, sweat, and tears, everyone likes to tell their company's story.

As the web has become more ubiquitous and vital in our lives, so has the desire for a better user-experience. These days, it's often jarring to still occasionally come across a website that isn't mobile-friendly and requires you to pinch-to-zoom to read its microscopic text on your phone. And your site also needs to be fast: no one has time to sit and wait for a loading spinner. Even if they do, they're likely not going to have enough patience to remain on your website for very long.

Many things are considered when an architect designs a golf course.  Elevation, undulation, trees, water, length, angles, and more all establish how a hole and an entire course should be played.  In this sense, a golf course and a SERP (search engine results page) are quite similar.  If you do the things that you are supposed to, you’ll be able to navigate the course with a successful score.  This means accurate driving and good putting on the golf course, and likewise, it means search engine optimization and content creation on your website.  Now there are other factors that can seem to influence the difficulty of a golf course: newer, bigger drivers, wind, technologically advanced golf balls, playing from closer tees, and more can all, in theory, make the game easier.  But the fact is the original design still dictates your strategy, and there is no direct correlation between these variables and the difficulty or ease of the course.  This is also true when it comes to your website’s organic rankings and the impact that Google AdWords does, or doesn’t have.  Simply put, if you tee off with your brand new driver on the first hole, it doesn’t mean you’re going to win The Masters, and likewise, if you spend a million dollars on AdWords, your organic rankings aren’t going to shoot to the top of the page.  However, there are ways that paid search can influence the organic landscape.

Social media, for most of us, is a way to connect with friends and family, see what our favorite brand is doing, or a way for us to stay up-to-date on the current state of affairs in our busy lives. However, if you’re a business and not on social media – 2018 might be the year to not jump, but throw yourself onto the bandwagon. I’m not saying you need to be on every platform, posting every hour, retweeting, or sharing every second of every day. But, it is important you have a presence on the right social media platforms to reach your consumers in an authentic and mutually beneficial way.