First impressions matter. Your website is one of your most important business assets. It should clearly communicate the problem you solve and what you offer while still making Google happy. Choosing the right company to design or redesign your website is a crucial step in establishing a strong online presence. There are important factors to consider when selecting a company to help create an effective website that reflects your values and engages your target audience. You also want to pay attention to the claims the company makes about their process and abilities, as well as review any past websites they’ve designed.

If you could be a fly on the wall in one of our Half a Bubble Out staff meetings over the past several months, you might hear phrases being thrown around the table like lean and classic survey results, or hyper-responsives, SMIQs and DDS. It might sound like we are speaking in code, but this fun new vocabulary all stems from learning a powerful marketing strategy known as the Ask Method®.  Are you scratching your head wondering what could be so revolutionary about ‘asking,’ or curious how it is growing businesses? In this interview, Michael Redman, Half a Bubble Out CEO, shares his personal journey of becoming a certified partner of the Ask Method^® and how it’s transforming the marketing industry.

Digital marketing is an umbrella term for using online technologies to promote your brand, reach the audience searching for your products and services, and convert them to leads and customers. The goal is to increase your sales using various techniques. What would happen if you started investing in small business digital marketing right now?

You might not care at all about the software used to provide inbound marketing services. You might care a lot because the budget you have to work with requires you to use the software yourself with an agency’s guidance. Either way, if you’re considering inbound marketing services for your business you need something that’s user friendly, can meet you wherever you are, and help your small business on the progression to get more customers.

This just in: hiring online marketing consultants may cause significant changes in your health and well-being. A significant number of small business owners have reported less stress, fewer sleepless nights, heftier pocket books, better employee relationships, and actually looking forward to going to work. They credit it all to inbound marketing.

Meet Linda, A Small Business Owner…

Linda owns a small business. She outsources a lot of the marketing to companies that do things she can’t, and she trusts that they are doing their jobs correctly. The problem is that she only has so much money in her budget for marketing, and is almost maxed out. She’s paying someone when she needs improvements to her website, an agency to manage social media marketing, a content writer to write for her site and blog - and she knows that she could get a lot of free traffic and more leads if she could only rank higher on Google. Linda has been looking into cost effective SEO services and wonders that even if she can afford them in her budget, will they be worth it? Should she add SEO (search engine optimization) services to her current marketing mix? Will they really be cost effective?

Growing up we were taught that quitting is worse than failing. We were taught to try, try again until we succeeded or we couldn’t try any more. Now fast forward to the present, you are now facing the same dilemma you did back when the playground was your stomping ground. Should you quit your marketing strategy or should you keep going? I am going to tell you a story about a client that we have that has been in the same situation as you are. 

How do you know when you need to quit what you are doing? How do you know when it isn’t working and it is time to bail, versus, when to keep pushing through the hard stuff to make it to be the BEST in the business?

Do you want to be a business that people like? Do you want to be a business that people enjoy working with, buying from and associating with? Most people would answer yes to all of those! As a small business owner you can have two different types of philosophies when it comes to your marketing. In order to grow your business and give back to your community, there is one philosophy that is the right answer.