How Offline Marketing Strategy Can Influence Your Social Media
Did you know that having employees volunteer hours at a local fundraiser could elevate your search rankings and generate 5-star reviews of your business? Did you know that attending trade shows and conferences could create brand authority online? If you ask any savvy marketer, they'll tell you that your company’s offline activities can have a positive effect on your social media and web presence in general. Community Involvement and Social Media Doing good in your community or outside of...
Make the Most of Trade Shows with Sales Automation
There are many benefits to exhibiting at trade shows,
including getting quality face-to-face time with your potential customers, a
desirable advantage in today’s market. Being physically present gives B2B
companies an opportunity to build relationships with clients and prospects. It
also offers the chance to compare how well your business stacks up against
other players on the showroom floor.
Trade shows and events can get expensive though, with booth
and travel costs, per diems...
How to Use Postcards to Market Your Business
We talk a lot about digital marketing trends and tips in this blog, but some offline methods of marketing are still effective, even if they don’t get the lion's share of media attention these days. One of these methods is utilizing postcards. Postcards are a simple and effective direct marketing tool that can be a charming and inventive way to market your business. Here are a few ways how to and why you could use postcards in your next direct marketing campaign. Why Use Postcards to...
Sales & Marketing Technologies' 25th Anniversary
This week, Sales & Marketing Technologies will turn 25
years old! We sure have come a long way through the emergence of search
engines, email, content management systems and more. But today we want to take
the time to thank all of the people that have made our journey possible…
To Our Clients
Thank you for… Trusting us to unlock your potential to thrive online Challenging us with small and large projects in a wide
variety of industries and technical levels of...
Looking Back at 25 Years of Digital Change
Sales & Marketing Technologies SMT is proud to be celebrating our 25 th anniversary this year and in celebration, wanted to look back at all that has changed in the digital world since we started SMT in 1991. The Beginnings December 20, 1990, Tim Berners-Lee launched the world’s first website, which is still live today. In the following years, many more websites emerged offering users information with bare-bones usability and optimization. As the Internet began to grow with more and...
5 Tips for Growing Your Retargeting List with PPC
Whether you are looking to expand your list for email marketing, Facebook retargeting, or even for pay-per-click PPC remarketing, growing your list via paid channels gives you the opportunity to quickly and effectively add more leads into your funnel. In order to get these leads, your PPC campaigns will need to be on point. Keywords will need to be meticulously chosen, ad copy will need to be cleverly written, and budgets and other settings will need to be carefully adjusted. And even when...
How to Get More Leads from Your Landing Pages
Many businesses are investing heavily to drive traffic to their landing pages in hopes of garnering more leads, sales, and email subscribers. To maximize your investment you need a top converting landing page. Here are a few tips to make better landing pages: Contemplate Your Content From The User’s Perspective Think of content as what you use to get your message across. That could be mainly words, it could be images, it could be video; it could even be audio or animation. The amount of...
5 Ways to Boost Facebook Engagement
For a long time, brands and businesses were able to post to Facebook and easily reach their target audience and fans organically without using paid ads. That all changed in 2013 when Facebook’s algorithm changed to feature business pages’ posts significantly less organically. With this shift, Facebook went from a huge traffic generator and branding tool, to a pay-to-play model platform. Battling Against Lower Organic Reach Despite the algorithm change that dictated what is shown...
Google Set to Increase Mobile-Friendly Ranking Signals Again
For those of you who heeded our warning about getting a responsive website back in April 2015, you don’t need to fear. However, if you are still operating with a website that is not mobile-friendly, Google has announced it will be making another shift to strengthen their mobile-friendly ranking signals again; which means your website could drop farther down the mobile search results than ever before solely based on this ranking factor. While the initial data after what most marketers...
5 Secrets to Keep Your Customers Coming Back for More
Acquiring new customers is a time and resource intensive process – advertising to them, learning what they’re interested in, and enticing them to purchase. In fact, it takes on average 5 times as much to get a new customer in the door than to get an existing customer to purchase from you again. So how can you keep your current customers coming back for more? Using Marketing Automation to Build Relationships Marketing automation offers you powerful insights into what your existing...
Remarketing Facebook Ads – Targeting Interested Audiences
In
the past, we’ve talked about how the power of Facebook’s advertising
capabilities can successfully bring in new leads to your business. [ Click here: How
Ultra-Targeted Facebook Ads Bring You New Leads ]
In
addition to the extensive targeting options available through the advertising
channel, Facebook also has the ability to reach people who have already visited
your website or landing pages. You do this by installing the Facebook pixel
found in your Ads Manager on Facebook...
Google's New Ad Structure... Will You Pay More?
A major shift in the way Google displays its advertising took place this past week. Google began phasing out the right hand or sidebar ads and instead are now featuring 1-4 ads at the top of the page, placing three more at the bottom of the results page. Google has confirmed that the change is now rolling out to all searches, in all languages, worldwide. Ads will not appear on the right side of desktop search results, with two exceptions: Product Listing Ad PLA boxes, which show either above...
Running Facebook Flash Sales to Boost Customer Acquisition
Facebook Flash Sales are an excellent tactic when you’re looking to acquire new customers at break even or better. It is important to remember that these types of sales aren’t necessarily meant to make a huge profit; it is about acquiring new customers. Think of it as a Groupon offer or a Black Friday sale. You create an offer at such a discount that it’s nearly impossible for customers to say no. Don’t run these sales every week. This would start to train your...
Trouble Hitting Your Sales Goals? Maybe You Are Using The Wrong Number
Lots of companies give salespeople dollar goals to hit. While that is certainly one way to do it, in some cases it can be counter productive. After years of trying different sales goals, we finally found an approach that got better results across the board. Here is what we did... 1. We separated marketing goals from sales goals. We gave each team their own goals where they are totally accountable. 2. We gave our marketing team a goal of X number of inbound sales leads to generate per week. We...
How to Build a Community Around Your Business
Building a community around your business can be challenging, but the payoffs can be astounding. Research has shown that customers in communities spend 19% more than customers who aren’t in communities. That’s a big jump. One of the most challenging parts of building a community is getting people to notice, and then actually participate in what you do there. There is a lot of effort that goes into building a community around your brand. It’s creating content, being...
Is Email Marketing Dead?
Far from it! Email marketing is alive and well. Here are some stats from MailChimp just one email service provider for 2015. In 2015, MailChimp handled 62,310,854 email campaigns. They sent 204,383,657,109 emails. Of those, 42,164,247,301 were opened and 3,527,638,012 resulted in clicks. 3.5 billion clicks doesn’t sound dead to me. Here are a couple tips to make sure that you are doing your emails correctly: Be Mobile-Friendly More and more, email is being read on mobile devices. You...
Don't Leave Money on the Table – Website Conversion Tactics Post-Sale
Many businesses spend a lot of time, hard work and money in order to attract new visitors to their websites. Of those new visitors, some decide to leave the website while others take an action or "convert" into a lead by filling out the contact form, making a purchase or placing a phone call to inquire about more information or to engage your services. In a typical sales scenario, you answer your prospect’s questions, make the sale and that would be the end of the customer purchase...