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.

It's natural to conclude two is better than one. We were taught this basic fact at an early age, and few situations in life negate this basic concept. For this reason, it is easy to understand why any medical practice would think two web domains for their practice is better than one. One domain is good; then two domains must be better, right? This assumption is wrong as multiple web domains with the same content is marketing malpractice. 

There are many things that on their own serve a distinct and useful purpose.  However when you combine two things you can achieve synergistic results.  Simply put, a hamburger is good; cheese is good, a cheeseburger is better.  The different digital applications that your business can leverage today are growing exponentially, and integrating them into one powerful strategy is easier than ever.  Two of the most common and useful platforms are your Google My Business Page and Google AdWords, and now they can be integrated to create even more opportunities. 

For today’s consumer, local search is a wondrous thing.  No matter what type of business we’re looking for or where, a simple search query returns our nearby options within moments.  It’s a functionality we’ve become so reliant on that 30 percent of our mobile searches (the top used method for online search) are related specifically to location.  And, not only are we using these results to locate a business, we’re using them to conduct research and make purchases, making the local search results that we see powerful tools for sales and marketing.