Thanks to the internet, marketing has become more personalized than ever. Trend-tracking can provide insight into what people are looking for online, and where they are looking for it. This can give you unparalleled access to quality prospects, the kind of prospects who are actually likely to make a sale.

A recent small business survey found that over 90 percent of companies rate their website as their most valuable marketing tool. The survey noted that the design and management of the company website, as well as keeping it optimized for the major search engines, was the single most effective marketing strategy currently being used.

If you’re using a Facebook fan page (also known as a business page) as part of your small business marketing plan, you’re probably trying to figuring out how to grow your fan base. “If you build it, they will come” might make clever movie magic, but it’s a bomb on Facebook’s marquee. The idea of social media is the creation of a mecca for friends and, today, a gathering place for fans. Promoting your fan page and actively increasing your fan base without alienating friends is a lot like fishing. It requires finesse, patience and a lure.

In today’s world of social media marketing, small business owners might assume that email marketing is no longer relevant. But the truth is, email marketing allows business owners to create an open, direct line of communication with potential customers that is so vital to business growth. Email marketing is still a potent form of getting the word out about your business, your products, and your services.

If you’re like most of our small business marketing clients, one of your goals for 2012 is to increase sales. And if you’re like a lot of the prospects we’ve been talking to lately, there’s a good chance you’re concocting some lavish marketing campaigns in order to reach that goal.

Anybody who has tried to build an email list of any size and significance will know this. And so you can imagine a situation where, after all your hard work and investment to build a list of highly targeted recipients, you suddenly notice that only a small fraction of the emails you are sending out are actually reaching their targets.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you have not written a marketing plan for your small business. Many entrepreneurs optimistically enter the business world confident that their product or service will sell itself. They presume that with good products or services word of mouth will be all the advertising [...]

After running a small business marketing blog for several years now, I’ve become acutely aware of the need to optimize my blog (and my website in general) for both search engines and user experience. Now that everyone who is capable of turning on a computer and hammering out a few phrases can haphazardly throw a [...]

If you’re a small business owner trying to optimize your website for the best search traffic possible, you’re probably listening to all sorts of advice and trying to learn as much as you can whenever you can. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions floating around out there can wreck havoc on all [...]

In the past few weeks, we’ve been contacted by several different prospects who wanted to hire us to handle their email marketing. That’s not unusual in and of itself, but the fact that these prospects all had the same story set off an “aha moment” for me. You see, each of these prospects used to [...]