5 Tips for Getting Serious About Online Marketing for 2017

The new year is just around the corner. With that in mind, we’ll share ways to seriously up your online marketing game for your business.

Get serious about your web design.
The cookie-cutter approach just doesn’t get it done anymore. The online competition among local businesses is fierce these days, and the web is definitely not a place for one-size-fits-all design.

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What’s Working for Small Business on Social Media?

Smart social media use can make a huge difference for small businesses at a significantly lower cost than traditional marketing. According to Social Media Examiner’s industry report, 92% of marketers working with small businesses said that social media is a crucial component of their marketing efforts.

As for the small businesses that are seeing a big ROI on their social media efforts, just what are they doing? The folks at SCORE, a nonprofit supported by the U.S. Small Business Administration, recently surveyed a host of small businesses to get a better understanding of their tactics. Below are a few highlights from SCORE’s findings.

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4 Ways to Up Your Business’s Game on Instagram

If Instagram is not on your social media marketing plan, it should be. Two months after its launch in 2010, it had one million users. Right now, there are 500 million active users. It’s bigger than Twitter, which has 313 million active users.

In this article, we’ll share tips for how you can position your business for success on Instagram with compelling content, which can be tricky since so much emphasis on Instagram is placed upon imagery.

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Marketing Trends to Watch Out For This Year

Among the few absolute truths in this world is this nugget: technology will never sit still. That being said, let’s take a look at online marketing trends to keep an eye on for the rest of 2016.

He Who is Mobile Will Rule: Mobile Optimization

Essentially mobile optimization is making sure that visitors using mobile devices can navigate your site effectively. Landing pages with a font that makes you squint does not make for a good experience.

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Essential Social Media Tips for Businesses

As regular readers of our site already know, we’re huge proponents of helping businesses – big and small – to strengthen their brands through the sheer power of social media. In this article, we’re going to share a few more tips for making sure your brand’s reputation is as strong as it can be on social media.

  • It’s all according to plan.
    There’s much more to social media success than merely slapping up a Facebook status update or sending out a Tweet. In fact, each action you take on social media should be in line with a larger social media strategy. In other words, every comment, like, share or Tweet you make should revolve around driving action towards the goals of your plan.

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Reach New Customers Through Social Media Optimization

A recent study from the Pew Research Center tells us that 63 percent of Facebook and Twitter users get their news from those social media platforms. In this article, we’ll talk about why it’s so important for business owners to move beyond simply having a social media presence so that they are actually engaging their potential customers.

SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION (SMO) AT A GLANCE

Before we go any further, it’s important that you think of social media outlets like Facebook andTwitter as much more than gathering places for family and friends to share photos of their dinner plates and pets.

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Identify Your Own Online Community

http://moz.com/blog/identifying-online-community

An online community is a group of users who have something in common. Hopefully, your online community will be composed of users who all want something that you have: products, services or information. How do you identify your own special online community and build it through the use of social media and other methods?

In order to build the right online community, it is important to first answer a few questions, such as:

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What Does Your Audience Want?

http://moz.com/blog/know-what-your-audience-wants-before-creating-content-whiteboard-friday

Before you invest a great deal of time, money and energy in a content creation campaign, it pays to do a bit of research to see what your audience really wants. How can you find out? There are several quick and reliable ways to take a pulse on what your users are looking for and create content that meets those needs.

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Using Facebook To Target Your Content Promotion

Getting content to “go viral” is not a simple process, no matter what advertising might lead you to believe. You do not just write content and sit back waiting for it to magically bring you great results. Often, you must push that content out to the public in order to ensure that people actually get to see it.

In this regard, Facebook advertising may be a great way to get your content out to viewers. One of the advantages of working with Facebook as opposed to other forms of advertising is that you can use this social media platform to fine-tune the details of your target audience. This allows you much greater flexibility in using your advertising budget to reach the people you really want to reach.

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