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How to Market Your Local Business’ Grand Opening

local marketing
March 3, 2020/by
How to Market Your Local Business' Grand Opening During the last month or so, my husband and I have driven by this grand opening sign on our way to his parent's house about a dozen times. After a couple of weeks, we decided to look up what it was for. We found out a new restaurant was opening, and we were pretty excited to have a new place to try (sometimes it gets boring going to the same places!). Since we were looking forward to it, we told our families, and decided to give it a try for one of our weekly dinners. This is exactly the result you're looking for when you're marketing your grand opening. For local businesses, it can be hard to get customers through the door. As a marketer, the first step is to let them know you're there. Ultimately, your grand opening marketing should help your business build relationships and create buzz with your audience. Below, let's review where to and when you should market your grand opening. Where to Market Your Grand Opening Developing your marketing strategy for your grand opening can be daunting as a new business and marketing team. After you've set your budget and planned the event, you need to discuss where you're going to market it. Below, let's review some of the top areas to market your grand opening. 1. City Bulletins or Forums. Most cities have bulletins or forums where community events are advertised. For example, consider...
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How to Increase Your Organic Growth by Over 400%, According to the SEO Lead at Nextiva

SEO Strategy
February 21, 2020/by
How to Increase Your Organic Growth by Over 400%, According to the SEO Lead at Nextiva Here's a reality check for 2020 — only one-third of businesses make it to the 10 year mark. No market demand, running out of cash, and getting out-competed are among the leading reasons businesses fail. The good news? You don't have to figure it all out on your own, because I've done a lot of the legwork for you. When I served as the VP of Marketing at Sales Hacker (a publication and community for B2B salespeople), I uncovered strategies and processes that exploded our growth. In fact, the results were outstanding: in just over a year, we were able to grow Sales Hacker's traffic from 19,000 monthly organic sessions to over 100,000 monthly organic sessions. That's a 426% increase. As a result, Sales Hacker was acquired by Outreach, a sales engagement platform. Now, I'm using that same exact process to lead SEO at Nextiva, and here is a snapshot of our organic keyword growth to prove that this really works: If you're looking to skyrocket your organic growth with an efficient SEO strategy in 2020, check out the five proven steps I've taken with both Sales Hacker and Nextiva to achieve tremendous results. First things first: why is it so hard to stand out in search? The goal of owning search rankings is simple: organic presence means qualified traffic, which leads to conversions, which turn into sales....
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45 Tech Terms Translated Into Plain English

Marketing Terms
February 21, 2020/by
45 Tech Terms Translated Into Plain English Ever seen the movie The Social Network about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook? In the movie, people kept saying "he's wired in" or "they're wired in" over and over again in reference to people coding intensely with their headphones on. Not knowing anything about programming, I always imagined that being "wired in" meant the programmers were somehow listening to the computers, or that they were connected to the code somehow ... or something weird that us non-programmers would never understand. Turns out it just meant they were concentrating really hard with headphones on. Well, good thing I never hypothesized out loud. We all misinterpret some of the techy terms floating around web and product design nowadays -- but now more than ever, marketers need to be familiar with this vocabulary so we can communicate better with our IT, web design, or product development departments. To help bridge the gap, here are 45 techy terms every marketer (and human) should understand. (For a few of these, we drew on these 60 marketing acronyms every industry pro should know.) 301 Redirect A permanent redirect from one URL to another -- usually from a company's old website to their new website. They're also used to redirect web traffic from those old web pages to the new ones that have replaced them. 404 Web visitors see 404 error pages when they try to reach a web page that doesn't exist. This usually happens when the web page...
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Is Negative SEO Hurting Your Traffic? What It Is & How to Avoid It

SEO
February 21, 2020/by
Is Negative SEO Hurting Your Traffic? What It Is & How to Avoid It Back in the late '90s (way back when), SEO was in its infancy. It was almost like the Wild West -- anything goes. Since the rules were loose, both white hat and black hat SEO tactics began to develop. While white hat tactics are an ethical way of improving your organic traffic and search rankings, black hat tactics go against guidelines set by search engines in an unethical way. Black hat SEO typically refers to exploiting a search engine's ranking factors to increase one's own rankings. This includes things like cloaking, link farming, etc. As Google's ranking algorithm has become more sophisticated, and black hat SEO yields less and less value, some marketers have pivoted to a much more aggressive tactic: negative SEO -- which focuses on decreasing one's competitor's rankings. Below, let's learn more about negative SEO from what a negative SEO attack looks like and how to avoid it. Essentially, a competitor will use negative SEO to attack your traffic, in hopes of improving their own. A negative SEO attack is typically only detectable when a site’s rankings and incoming traffic drops. Wait, did you say 'negative' SEO attack? A negative SEO attack is when a competitor uses mostly off-page tactics such as building unnatural backlinks or duplicating site content to negatively impact your search rankings (we’ll talk about how this happens in just a minute). Sometimes a negative SEO attack...
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15 Ads That Prove Nostalgia Is a Powerful Marketing Tactic

Advertising Examples
February 8, 2020/by
15 Ads That Prove Nostalgia Is a Powerful Marketing Tactic Nostalgia marketing is the advertising equivalent of comfort food. In a time when most marketing focuses heavily on the future, it transports us back to a simpler place where our current problems don't matter and the hustle and bustle of modernity just melts away. Instead of anticipating the next great thing, nostalgia marketing urges us to focus on the things we already know are great. We know at a gut level that nostalgia gives our lives a feeling of meaning and continuity, but you may be surprised to learn it can also make us looser with our wallets. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that nostalgic feelings made participants more willing to spend money on consumer goods and services. It would appear that advertisers have caught on. Over the past five years, nostalgic ads have been popping up left and right -- with millennials as their main target. Although these ads are getting more common, marketers have known that millennials would be a nostalgia-fueled generation for some time now. Even in 2015, when many millennials were still young adults, nostalgia was a hot topic in publications like Digiday. "Millennials are coming of age in an age of economic turmoil -- a difficult job market," Cassandra McIntosh, a senior insights analyst at Exponential, told Digiday. "Therefore, they end up romanticizing simpler times much more -- even those times they weren’t around for." To give you inspiration for your...
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Subdomain or Subdirectory? What They Are & How They Affect SEO

SEO
February 7, 2020/by
Subdomain or Subdirectory? What They Are & How They Affect SEO One of the most heated debates that I've been apart of is when I was arguing with my best friend that Taylor Swift is a good dancer. The first thing you should know about me is that Taylor Swift is my favorite artist, so you'd have a hard time convincing me she's bad at anything (because she isn't). That's how I imagine the debate is between two search engine optimizers who debate whether subdomains or subdirectories are better for SEO. As a marketer, that debate can cause confusion. Below, let's review the differences between a subdomain and subdirectory and how they affect SEO. Essentially, it's all about site hierarchy. Subdomains appear before the domain name in a URL, such as blog.hubspot.com, instead of a subdirectory, which would look like this: hubspot.com/blog. A subdomain can be used if portions of your site are extensive enough that they need a separate hierarchy. When it comes to a subdirectory, though, all portions of your site branch off of the main domain. So, how can a company use a subdomain? Below are the most common ways: 1. Support: Sometimes it doesn't make sense to have your customer support on your main site. For instance, Google uses support.google.com instead of google.com/support. The main reason is probably because of the site structure. Google.com is a search engine, and Google’s Support line doesn’t belong to its Search business line. Therefore, it needs its own...
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20 Nerdy Valentine’s Day Gifts for the Marketer in Your Life

Company Culture
February 7, 2020/by
20 Nerdy Valentine's Day Gifts for the Marketer in Your Life Roses are red, violets are blue, Valentine's Day is coming ... and you didn't think this one through. If you're shopping for a marketer, picking out a gift can be even more intimidating. We love trends, creativity, but also practicality! So, do you go the creative and funny route, by us something that can help us in the office, or embrace a pop culture trend we've been raving about. With everyone's favorite "Hallmark holiday" right around the corner, we had a hunch that some of you might have forgotten to pick up something special for a friend, family member, or special someone who works in the marketing world. Rather than letting you default to a box of chocolates, we've come up with a list of creative, useful gifts that are sure to impress. Now, we'll be the first to admit that some of them are kind of nerdy ... but aren't we all a little nerdy, after all? We've accounted for all types of budgets by listing the gifts in ascending order by price. All the following items might not ship in time for the big day, but you can still use the following list as inspiration for a last-minute in-person shopping trip. Top 5 Nerdy Valentine's Day Gifts: Catnip Chocolate Covered Strawberries Plant-o-Gram Spicy Honey Bluetooth Beanie Potato Parcels Mini Photo Printer Smart Ring ...
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How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Platform for Your Ecommerce Business [Checklist]

Ecommerce Marketing
February 6, 2020/by
How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Platform for Your Ecommerce Business So you've decided you're ready to take your marketing to the next level by investing in a marketing automation tool — congrats! But as you start your research, you soon discover there are 7,000+ marketing automation solutions available as of 2019. How will you know which is the right platform for your ecommerce business? Like with every tricky business question, the answer is: it depends. In this post, I'll cover seven factors to consider when comparing different marketing automation platforms. These factors will ultimately help you make a more confident and informed decision about the future of your tech stack. But first, let's discuss why ecommerce businesses should always use some kind of marketing automation platform. Why Use Marketing Automation for Ecommerce? Marketing automation uses online software to automatically execute your marketing tasks, like sending emails, growing your database, and collecting data to help drive your strategy. Although it's commonly known for making the lives of digital marketers easier (which I can completely attest to), it also helps your ecommerce business scale. At Campaign Creators, we help ecommerce brands leverage the power of marketing automation. Here's a list of some of the immediate benefits we've seen our clients reap after implementation: Reduced customer acquisition costs Increased average order value (AOV) of customers Conversion of one-time buyers into repeat, loyal customers Increased frequency of purchases Improved conversion rates with automated emails (i.e. abandoned...
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How Market Intelligence Will Make Your Marketing Team More Agile

Conducting Market Research
February 6, 2020/by
How Market Intelligence Will Make Your Marketing Team More Agile When I was younger, my dream was to open a cheese store with my family. My mom, brother, sister, and I — we're all obsessed with cheese. So anytime I see a cheese store, I'll go in and sample everything … for research, obviously. Although I'd never thought about it this way before, I was already thinking in terms of market intelligence and market research (two different concepts … more on that below). I was thinking about the product and the competitors. As a marketer, market intelligence is important because it can help you understand your position in the market, evaluate your product, know your target audience, and conduct a competitor analysis. With this information, your marketing team will be better equipped to position your company in the marketplace. Below, let's review what market intelligence is, how it's different from market research, and marketing intelligence systems that can facilitate the process. So, what's the purpose of gathering market intelligence? To learn more about the customer and the competition so you can better market your own product or service. For instance, companies can gather general demographics and spending habits of their consumers to write better, more targeted social media ads. Additionally, market intelligence can help a company make decisions on product development and establish a stronger brand. So, what type of information should you collect? Generally, market intelligence can be divided into four main categories of information: Competitor intelligence....
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