How to Respond to Negative Online Reviews
Depending on what industry you’re in, positive customer feedback on user review sites like Yelp, Google Places, and social media can have a big impact on your business. For small restaurants, local...
View ArticleGuest Post on Drew's Marketing Minute
Simple Machines has been featured as a guest blogger on the blog "Drew's Marketing Minute." The post discusses the benefits of getting an outside marketing audit - along with some of our own examples....
View ArticleSetting Realistic Expectations for Your Marketing Campaigns
Launching a new marketing campaign is kind of like dating; your level of satisfaction has a ton to do with your expectations, and those expectations are better shared sooner than later. Just like the...
View ArticleAre You Getting Enough Feedback from your Customers?
It sounds simple enough: feedback from your customers helps you to improve your customer service, your marketing, and your business in general. Your customers can give you a wealth of valuable...
View ArticleWhy No One Reads Your Press Releases (And How to Change That)
Press release, news release, media release—a piece of newsworthy communication directed to the media about your company. For a little over 100 years, press releases have announced new products and...
View ArticleInvest in Marketing BEFORE You Have a Revenue Problem
I know, I know – coming from a guy who works for a marketing company, that headline sounds like a poor attempt to drum up demand for sales. But the truth is that the inspiration for this post has come...
View ArticleApproaching Content Marketing from the Bottom Line
If you happen to work in marketing at an agency or on the brand side, chances are good that you want content marketing and authorship to be a big part of your marketing strategy in 2013 — if it’s not...
View ArticleSimple Way to Calculate B2B Marketing ROI
For B2C marketers (at least those selling products), tracking ROI is often as simple as making sure you know where your traffic comes from – it’s pretty easy to translate it to dollars from there. For...
View ArticleWhy Your Blog Didn’t Make the Cut
I was recently wondering how much bad advice is floating around the internet pertaining to best blogging techniques. To get an idea, I did a quick search for “bad blogging advice.” On the first page of...
View ArticleBeware the Overpromising Marketer
If you’ve been at the helm of a business as it launched its online presence in the past decade, you probably remember a period soon after launching where you started to feel pretty popular. Out of...
View ArticleHow to Waste Your Marketing Budget
Is your marketing budget too big? Are your marketing efforts drawing too much interest from qualified prospects? Do you need a way to flush that money down the toilet? I’ve got your answer – don’t...
View ArticleThe Single Most Important Conversion Tactic
It doesn’t matter what type of a website you run – ecommerce, blog, news aggregator, etc. – the key to your success is ease of use for your visitors. Don’t roll your eyes! I know it sounds obvious, but...
View ArticleShedding Bad Recession Habits: The Return to Tracking Profitability
I started my marketing career in 2008, just as the latest recession was rearing its ugly head. As you undoubtedly already know, priorities in the worlds of lead generation and sales were very different...
View ArticleTelemarketing Simplified
I know, telemarketing is an easy channel to hate – I’ve been on the receiving end of plenty of those calls, too. Hate it all you want, but the fact remains that when it comes to B2B lead generation,...
View ArticleWhat the Google Penguin Updates Mean for Your Business
Last week, Google unrolled its most recent webspam algorithm: Penguin 2.0. As SEOs dissect, analyze and speculate about every word in the announcement from Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, let’s...
View ArticleWhat You Lose by Not Tracking Your Leads
You’ve been working hard to create visibility for your business. You get calls and emails from your website. Changing your number and contact email is only going to confuse visitors and potentially...
View ArticleSeven Types of Trade Show Displays for Indoor or Outdoor Use
(Occasionally we like to invite guest writers to weigh in on topics that we don't regularly write about but that some of our readers may find useful. Today's post comes from Mike Weimar, who provides...
View Article3 Ways to Get More From Your Existing Content
Several of the posts on the Simple Machines blog have dealt with the task of generating effective, optimized content – whether it’s website copy, blogs and articles, social media content or press...
View ArticleSimple Machines Posts from Around the Web
Along with the posts we write for the Simple Machines blog, we contribute to a number of different websites that cover similar territory. Below are a few of our recent favorites. 1. Content Marketing...
View Article5 Ways a Small Business Can Compete with Large Companies at a Trade Show
(As a follow up to our post about seven types of trade show displays, business and tech writer Elizabeth Alton outlines a few important ways small businesses can compete in this space.) Trade shows are...
View ArticleHow Marketing Surveys Could Inform Your Strategy
It goes without saying that businesses need to have a finger on the pulse of their target market in order to succeed. If you don’t know your customers’ psychographics and how they make buying...
View ArticleThe End of Search Traffic Data from Google
Recently, we made a significant change to how we report on SEO work. Before the change, we included a metric in SEO reports called “HVK traffic” – traffic from visitors searching for high value...
View ArticleCreate a Plan to get the Most from Your Analytics
If you’re in any way involved in the management of your business’ website, it’s a given that you’re familiar with website analytics. Odds are that you’re using Google Analytics (or a plugin for it),...
View ArticleHow to Assess Social Media Campaigns
If you’re not measuring your social media marketing returns, you’re not alone. According to a recent survey by Tata Consultancy Services, 44% of companies surveyed reported that they do not have...
View ArticleHow to Create a Quality Twitter Following
With 78% of small businesses gaining new customers via social media, there’s no surprise that Twitter is at the top of just about every small business owner’s mind. One of the most common things we...
View ArticleGuest Blogging Simplified: Avoiding Google Penalization
This week, Google started taking action against guest blogging websites found to be in violation of their SEO guidelines, following through on the warnings issued starting in January. This situation...
View ArticleWhy You Need Must-Have Marketing Milestones
We’ve touched on the process for assessing marketing channels a number of times on this blog – looking at how to calculate marketing ROI and how to assess social media success. These posts look at how...
View ArticleHow to Eliminate Copy That is Scaring Off Your Customers
Have you ever landed on a website, interested in purchasing a service from a company, only to be overwhelmed by the volume and organization of information? How quickly did you exit out of the tab? One...
View ArticleHow Website Encryption Will Affect SEO
Google to begin factoring HTTPS encryption in search rankings In a move to promote better online security practices, Google has announced that it will start using website encryption as a ranking...
View Article5 Tips to Improve Your Mobile Website Conversion Rates
Mobile optimization, the creation or editing of mobile websites to ensure that they look great and function properly on all mobile devices, can make or break your chances of converting mobile users....
View ArticleHow to Use Emotion to Tell Your Small Business's Story
If you’re a small business owner, you have probably wondered how to pique interest from your target audience—without spending a great deal of money. One of the best ways to get people to care about...
View ArticleGoogle Rank: The Harsh Truth About Getting To Page One
We often hear from business owners who are anxious to be ranked at the top of the first page of Google for the keywords they are targeting. We can’t blame them – being one of the first search results...
View ArticleMarketing and the Role of Strategic Planning
For small and growing businesses, the development of a marketing plan should not take place in isolation. To ensure that a marketing operation is truly positioned to achieve broader business goals –...
View ArticleHow to Differentiate Your Brand in an Over-Saturated Market
Some companies bring something new to the table, such as an innovative product or a personal touch that no one has experienced before. Most companies, though, don’t stand out. A great product? Sure,...
View ArticleThe Challenges of Marketing Your Sustainable Business
If your small business has aspects of its products and/or services with benefits that could be considered sustainable, green, responsible, eco-friendly, environmentally-friendly – or whatever other...
View ArticleAdWords, Bing, or Facebook: Who Should You Choose For Your PPC Campaign?
PPC campaigns are a staple of many digital marketing campaigns. While most people think of Google AdWords first when considering where to run their ads, Bing and Facebook also provide ample – and...
View ArticleGoogle’s New Algorithm Puts Small Businesses at Risk. Here's What You Need to...
April 21 marks the beginning of a new, more mobile-focused era for the Google algorithm. With more and more web searches being done on mobile devices (in the final quarter of 2014, 29% of all U.S....
View ArticleHow Should You Set Your Marketing Budget?
Over the years, I’ve noticed that a couple common things can happen when small businesses set and reassess their marketing budgets. For some businesses, there’s a yearly ritual when putting the annual...
View ArticleAre Your Sales and Marketing Teams Working in Harmony?
Sales and Marketing: they can be the best of friends or the worst of enemies. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to find these two teams suffering when their work is siloed. Both teams are working toward...
View ArticleThe Problem with Purple Cow Syndrome
Recently, I was talking with members of my team about some of the more common and problematic misconceptions people have about marketing. There are plenty out there – and we’ll examine more of them in...
View ArticleCommunicating Major Organizational Changes: Your Checklist For Doing it Right
Changes in your organization are all but inevitable – stick around long enough and you’ll need to (or be forced to) deal with changes that are so significant that you need to announce them to the...
View ArticleHow Are You Calculating Your Conversion Rate?
Quick: what’s your company’s conversion rate? Remember that percentage; we’ll come back to it in a minute. Having a handle on your business’s conversion rate is a critical step toward being able to...
View ArticleThe Four Sins of Reporting (And How To Create Reports That Are Actually Useful)
Any marketer worth their weight in AdWords knows that reporting is one of the most important cornerstones of a successful campaign. Reporting allows marketers and the business owners working with them...
View ArticleShould You Download Google Primer?
In October of last year, Google rolled out Primer – the app designed to help startups, small business owners and would-be marketers learn the basics of marketing strategy development through short,...
View ArticleAre You Marketing the Wrong Attributes of Your Business?
You know your business better than anyone. After all, you’ve put your blood, sweat and tears into building and marketing your vision. You have every reason to be completely confident that you are...
View ArticleBefore Launching an Inbound Campaign: A Marketing Checklist
One common misconception about marketing is that sales and intake are somehow separate from marketing. The truth is that every area of your company that affects how your market perceives you – from...
View ArticleWhat Does a Successful Marketing Agency Relationship Look Like?
You’ve just signed a contract with a new marketing agency. You’re buzzing with excitement about what the future holds for your company. Think of the campaigns! The leads! The sales! And it’s not just...
View ArticleIs Your Obsession With Lead Generation Quality Holding You Back?
Lead quality and lead quantity are sometimes thought of as competing ideas, requiring you to pick one and sacrifice the other. Either generate many leads of questionable quality, or a very small number...
View ArticleHow I Used LinkedIn for Prospecting
It seemed like finding clients on social media was the stuff you read about on, well, social media, so my initial reluctance to use LinkedIn as a prospecting tool was high. While it sounded like the...
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