If you're like most of the small business owners we talk to, you're already spending some money on digital marketing. The real question is whether you're spending enough. Maybe you have a website, you're running some ads or posting on social media, but your budget has stayed roughly the same for years while the competition [...]
Here's an important question to consider: In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), what's worse than not ranking on the first page of Google for your desired keyword? You can't do any worse than that, right? Wrong! You can actually do much worse. The answer is investing time and money to rank on the [...]
Whether you're planning for the year ahead or just want to take stock of where your marketing stands right now, the best place to start is with an honest assessment. To help you in this process, I put together 21 questions that need to be answered honestly and accurately. The questions go through the 7 [...]
If you've been putting off your marketing plan, this 4-step process will help you get it done. But before we dive in, I need to clear up an all-too-common misconception about marketing. Are You Trying To Answer The Wrong Questions? I bet you and your team are smart, maybe even smarter than me. But here's [...]
I'm sure you've heard the saying, "throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks." It's a common way to describe the process of testing many different tactics at the same time in order to identify what works (sticks) and what doesn't work (falls to the floor). It's a nice analogy to visualize the process [...]
Many businesses are so eager to get ranked in Google that they overdo it. They use aggressive SEO techniques that ultimately backfire, pushing their website further and further down the rankings. When you overdo it with Google, they'll push you further down the results instead of rewarding you. So in this article, I'm going to [...]
If you’ve been following along with our recent articles, you know The Growth Formula, you’ve thought about which marketing channels make sense for your business, and you’ve started thinking about budget. That’s real progress. But there’s a question that comes right after all of that, and it’s one I get asked constantly: who’s actually going [...]
If you’ve hired a marketing agency, chances are good that you get some kind of report every month. Maybe you get a monthly call to review the report. But if someone asked you, “Is your agency actually doing a good job?” you might not know how to answer. Here are four signs that your marketing agency [...]
You’ve committed to investing in marketing. That’s the hardest part for most business owners, getting past the mindset that marketing is a cost to minimize and treating it like the investment it is. But now comes the next question: where do I put the money? We have this conversation all the time. A business owner [...]
If I asked my pool guy how he gets new customers, he’d say referrals. My plumber would say the same thing. So would my landscaper, my dentist, and my electrician. These are the business owners I’ve hired for years. Whenever they’d eventually ask what I did for a living, the conversation would always turn to [...]
