How Canva Re-energized My Marketing Strategy

While there is no doubt that content is still king when it comes to SEO and that it is a critical component of any inbound marketing strategy, I have to say that the medium that is having the biggest impact on my marketing efforts, as of recently, is imagery. In a world of 140 characters, it is hard to make your insights and message stand out, but if you add the right size compelling image that ties into the post message, you can stand out in a sea of hashtags. Continue reading

How to Choose the Most Effective Social Media Platform for Your Brand

Go where your audience is

This is a basic of marketing, digital or not. For example, If you are selling custom hunting bows, you wouldn’t advertise in the Vogue magazine. Instead, you will analyze the reader demographics and psychographics of each magazine to determine which magazines will allow you to best reach your target audience. This same process should be used for determining which social media platforms you should focus the majority of your efforts on.

The infographic below from Social Barrel analyzes the audiences that frequent ten of the most popular social media platforms to help you decide where you should focus your efforts. Continue reading

5 Tips For Creating Traffic Driving Blog Posts

There has been a lot of buzz in the marketing world the last couple of days about an update to the rankings section of Google’s Webmasters Tools. The update reads:

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.

Prior to this update, Google encouraged marketers to focus on link building for improving site rankings:

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.

This is not a big surprise because the importance of unique and well written content on websites has been steadily increasing over the past few years.  This update does not mean that other factors, such as site structure, internal and external link building, Author tags, and social signals are not important. But, in level of importance, unique and well-written content is definitely at the top of the pyramid. Continue reading

best and worst times to post on social media thumbnail

Best Times to Post on Social Media [Infographic]

Social media is 24/7. Someone is always tweeting, posting on Facebook, or uploading a new picture to instagram. However, for social media managers and businesses alike, this can be quite of a challenge. We obviously can’t be online all day, even for those of us who are social media managers or strategist. But how do you know when to best reach your audience? There are a couple different ways to determine when your audience is online: Continue reading

social media workflow

Social Media Workflow [Infographic]

Ever wonder how much time you should devote to social media each week? While there is no set formula, this infographic breaks down the  components of maintaining and measuring a social media strategy  (based on a 40 hour work week). Maintaining a social media strategy is not only about scheduling tweets and replying to mentions. Rather, social media  marketing is a living process in which each component is connected to the others. From content creation, to post scheduling, to campaign development, to analytics reporting, social media is an ongoing process.

The social media work flow infographic below assigns time benchmarks for eleven components of a strong social media strategy: Continue reading

rock social mendia in 30 minutes a day

How to Rock Social Media in 30 Minutes a Day Infographic

With a defined social media strategy in place, marketers can rock social media in 30 minutes a day.

Sound too good to be true? It is actually possible if your daily use of social media is built upon a well-developed social media strategy. But, a strong social media strategy does not mean that your brand has to be on every single social media channel out there. Instead, focus on the social media channels that the majority of your customers frequent.

The infographic below explains how having an over-arching social media strategy in place can save you time and make you a more effective social media strategist. This great infographic was developed by the talented Matt Wesson, a Marketing Content Specialist at the marketing automation company Pardot. It focuses on a six channel social media strategy, and how you can build engaged communities around your brand in as little as 30 minutes a day.

So how should you allocate your time on each channel? Well the  infographic breaks the recommended 30 minutes down as follows: Continue reading