The landscape of social media is constantly evolving, forcing marketers to stay ahead of the game and leverage their creativity to ensure their posts are seen while also keeping consumers engaged.  Today, that means producing quick, eye-catching, informative videos that algorithms will favor and users will actually watch.  When done effectively, videos can be a great way to show off a product or service, highlight your brand’s personality, and connect with your audience.

My name is Remy Blaize, and since December of 2017, I have been an intern at BlinkJar Media.  Today, I’d like to give you a little insight into my experiences here, the day-to-day operations of the agency, and the takeaways that will guide me as I prepare to begin my career.

All business owners share one thing in common -- a yearning for a more defined return on investment from their marketing and advertising efforts. In marketing circles, this is called "closing the loop." One of the most effective ways businesses can close the loop and gain a clearer picture on their return on investment is through call tracking.

Clutch, a business to business research, ratings, and reviews firm based in Washington D.C, has recently featured BlinkJar Media on their Press Release as a Top Digital Marketing Agency in Baton Rouge. This acknowledgment by Clutch is a significant feat for the entire team at BlinkJar, and we feel honored to be a part of a distinguished group of digital agencies in the Baton Rouge community. Clutch has researched thousands of business service companies, just like BlinkJar, to determine the top performers in various sectors. Client feedback, market presence, and quality of work are just some of the measures Clutch uses to rate and rank companies. For more details on the ranking by Clutch, view the BlinkJar profile on the Clutch website.

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.