As marketing and business consultants we have the privilege of meeting with a lot of businesses out there who are doing their best to keep up with the ever changing world of marketing. They recognize the importance of the internet and the fact that they need to increase website conversion to keep their sales funnel moving forward. With so much out there that feels new, where do you begin to make sure that your efforts really do increase website conversion and don’t just become a bunch of activities that make your marketing folks look busy, but don’t really make a difference?

I woke up this morning thinking about In-N-Out Burger and how its menu reflects a key piece of what defines good marketing. It’s simple…one thing. One thing, one focus, one piece of information. If you eat at In-N-Out you know what you are getting. Burger and Fries. Simple, straightforward, a single focus. Your only decision is if you want a single or a double, and if cheese and grilled onions should be involved!  While most restaurants go for the broad offering and add new menu items regularly, In-N-Out has chosen a simple, single focus. That might be the single most difficult thing to do in marketing, maybe in communication overall.

SEO services for small business is a hot topic for business leaders. Sure there are a few businesses that are still holding out and believing that they can be successful without an internet marketing strategy, but most are recognizing that the world has a-changed and there is no going back. If you are one of those CEOs who know that your online efforts are not yielding the results that you need, you may find yourself uncertain of what your next steps are.  

Have you ever gotten to the end of the day, knew you had been incredibly busy all day, but been unable to identify exactly what you accomplished?

If you have been following the Bubble at all this week, you already know that Michael and I have been in Boston all week at #INBOUND13, a conference focused solely on inbound marketing. If you don’t know what inbound marketing is and you are looking for leads and customers, then we should talk, but that isn’t what this blog post is about.

Shocking as this may be, I didn’t send my first email until I was in college, which makes me think of the entire internet as a mere youth. Even so, email is “old” in online terms. Email marketing has been around as long as the internet itself and as an email marketing consultant I can tell you that it has come a long way, baby!

Natasha, one of our amazing bubblers, got engaged this week to Johnny, her sweetheart sheriff. A lawman with great taste in rings! Well done Johnny! Along with that, she turned 25, which she insisted feels old. As someone who is old enough to be her mother I take offense to that statement, but decided we would celebrate with her anyway. Engagements, birthdays, anniversaries, parties…events are worth promoting and getting excited about.

When you consider how to add keywords to a website, you have to ask the question, who are the keywords for? Adding keywords to a website is all about optimization. That’s a big word that’s used all over the internet marketing world and almost always is preceded by the words “Search Engine” so that when we hear about optimization, we regularly think about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. But what is optimization and is there more to it than just optimizing for Google, Bing and Yahoo?  When we consider how to add keywords to a website, I think we have to pull back a little to see a larger picture.

Have you ever been to a website and once you moved from one place to another, you forgot where you were in the first place?  We’ve all done it, right? Clicked on a link that led you from one place to another in search of the information you were looking for, but when you get there you are confused. What you thought you would find was not there, and what was there appeared, from your perspective, to be basically unrelated to what you were hoping for.

So I posted over the weekend all proud of myself that I passed my #Inbound Marketing Certification with HubSpot. I was super excited and now, because I passed with flying colors and I’m worn out from all my studying about internet marketing, content development, blogging, using social media for business, how to create great landing pages, email marketing and market segmentation (just to name a few things) I am going to unabashedly steal (all credit given) some of the data that my HubSpot Professor Rachel Goodman provided in the Social Media piece of things.