What is Small Business Saturday?

Small Business Saturday is the Saturday after Thanksgiving that has been dedicated to shopping locally and supporting small businesses. It comes right after Black Friday and before Cyber Monday. The unique thing about Small Business Saturday is that it's meant to draw attention to small businesses in your local community, rather than just the big box operations.

You work so hard to make your company great, striving for excellence in even the small things because you know that great companies are made by a thousand little efforts. You know about your company’s passion, quality service, and how you can really benefit your target market. The question is, do your [potential] customers know? It’s always a challenge to make your company known, so to help you out here are a few of the digital marketing services that will help to build your brand awareness.

Facebook has updated its targeting capabilities for advertisers that allow for much more specific targeting than before. If you're running paid ads on Facebook as part of your social media marketing efforts to get traffic to your site, this is great news. Details are below, but a quick note – you have to be using Facebook’s Power Editor presently to access these capabilities.

So you want to develop an online marketing presence and get your site noticed. You want customers to start coming to your site in droves. You want to make sales from those website visits too so that you’re not spending all of those marketing dollars for nothing.

All of this sounds nice, but it won’t just happen on its own. If you're trying to build your online marketing presence, a blog is a great place to start. It can take the form of written content, infographics, images, or videos (or a mix of these). It can be “how-to” in nature, a checklist, or any kind of helpful information.

Google may be smarter than you thought. Next time you search for something, that search might be answered by a machine called RankBrain that can learn and figure out what you are trying to find. Call it creepy, or call it cutting edge and game changing, but it’s here.

This story broke in a recent Bloomberg article, which had the following to say:

"When Google-parent Alphabet Inc. reported eye-popping earnings last week its executives couldn’t stop talking up the company’s investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

When you’re using email marketing to target your audience, getting an email address is the first step. This is done either by placing an option on your site to opt-in or by specifically requiring an email address in exchange for a valuable content download that is free of charge. But once you have the email, what’s the best email marketing strategy to re-engage your leads and continue the customer relationship? Here are a few things you can do to keep communicating with your audience.

As a marketer or business owner, you may have heard the terms inbound marketing and outbound marketing at some point along the way. You may be wondering “what is the difference between the two?” or “why do I even care?” It can be helpful to know the difference, especially so you can know the most effective way to allocate your marketing dollars. Here are a couple of quick definitions of inbound and outbound marketing:

Do you want more customers for your business? The answer is most likely “YES!" You’re in luck with today’s marketing landscape, because there are more internet marketing options than ever and you can reach your target market in many different places. The following list is made up of key internet marketing solutions that are being used, so look it over and see where your business is at and what you need.

Imagine what life must have been like before the modern technology we all are so used to today. Imagine visiting New York City say, 100 years ago. You arrive by rail, are hungry and have really wanted to try one of those new “frankfurters” (hot dogs to most of us today). You start walking into the city, and soon you hear someone yelling from the next street over that they are selling them. You head that way and see that there are actually several vendors on the street. They are all trying to get your attention by yelling out what they are serving up. You have choices, they have gotten your attention, and you go with the one that has exactly what you’ve been wanting.

You’ve probably heard a lot about mobile search lately. It keeps getting more and more popular, as consumers are shifting to their smartphones to research, find local businesses and even purchase products.

In a recent article, Search Engine Land reported that the Google search app is now the 4^th most popular app according to ComScore research. This is really significant, and here is what Search Engine Land had to say: