Did you know that the average person spends about 7 hours per day on the internet? That is a 9% increase from 2020’s average, meaning we almost spend as much time online as we do sleeping. Covid-19 affected communities around the world, forcing the majority of individuals to transition into the digital world. The recent Hootsuite Digital 2021 report… More »
The Digital Trends Shaping Marketing Strategies in 2021
In a comprehensive LinkedIn SlideShare, Hootsuite and We Are Social teamed up to summarize the digital trends of 2020. From internet use to social media reach, this summary of trends from 2020 is a glimpse into what will shape digital going forward. As we start 2021, it’s time we reflect on what we learned from… More »
Google AdWords Industry Benchmarks for 2020
Wordstream, an official Google Premier Partner, compiled their PPC statistics as they do each year in their Google AdWords Industry Benchmarks for 2020. In addition, this year they also released a revised version that examines the impact of COVID-19 on Google Ads across 21 industries. The two below infographics show the average click through rate… More »
Writing Effective Emails – Make Sure You’re Getting Heard
Email has been around for well over a decade and is a valuable tool that most of us use daily. Because so much of our business communications are done via email, it’s incredibly important to hone effective communication and email skills. Although it’s a great tool, it can be difficult to convey emotion or to… More »
Defensive Domain Strategy: Don’t Be Like Donald
An oft-overlooked piece of developing your online presence is your domain strategy – and your defensive domain strategy. Just ask Donald Trump. Although the Trump Organization apparently owns 3,643 domain names, the strategy did not include buying ImpeachTrump.com and that omission has come to haunt him recently. Don’t have the time to read the entire… More »
Cheat Sheet: Most Common Graphic Design File Types
Graphic designers typically work with three main programs which are all part of Adobe Creative Suite (CS): Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. We’ve outlined these three programs below along with their basic uses and restrictions. Abobe Illustrator – AI: The files generated are vector art. This means that all objects can be manipulated, recolored, resized, etc…. More »
Free Image Use For Social Media and 6 Great Sites Offering Attribution-Free Collections
This post was updated on July 5, 2018. Our team recently had a conversation about the use of free images in blogs and social media posts. Of course we all know better than to just pull something from Google, but there were still some open questions about creative commons, attribution, and to what extent exactly… More »
Using Vine and Instagram to Your Video Marketing Advantage
Vine and Instagram are the happy marriage of video marketing and social media. It can be a challenge to create video content for these social media platforms because they have extremely short time limits. Almost all the typical formats of video marketing mentioned in our last video marketing post are possible on Vine and Instagram, but it does… More »
7 Fresh Ideas for New Video Content
As a follow up to the earlier 4 Tips for Video Marketing Success post, here are seven different video types to inspire some fresh approaches to your video marketing strategy. 1. “How to” and Tutorials How to’s, tutorials, tips and tricks, and product demonstrations are all very popular video formats because they help customers see… More »
Six Simple Rules for Your Next Website Design
These six basic but oh-so-often violated simple rules should guide the design for any website. Despite the simplicity of these, we’ve seen every single one of these rules being broken over the years — from different sets of navigation on each page of a website to a home page containing a book’s worth of content…. More »
4 Tips for Video Marketing Success
Video is such an important element of any marketing strategy because it gives marketers the power to show, instead of tell. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth? Here are 4 Tips to Successful Video Marketing: 1. Create Great Content The first step in successful video marketing… More »
New FDA Social Media Guidance Means Marketers Must Skip Twitter
The FDA recently released two draft guidance documents on the use of social media platforms by drug and device manufacturers. Guidance on the inclusion of risk and benefit information is one of the most important pieces to come out of the documents. The draft states that the character limitation on certain social media platforms does… More »
Gray Hat SEO: 4 Ways to Bend the Rules
As the color suggests, gray hat SEO is defined as white hat tactics plus a few tactics that bend the search engines’ rules a bit. Some SEO professionals believe that there is actually no such thing as 100% pure white hat SEO, but instead only gray and black hat. Gray hat SEO’s main benefit is… More »
White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO: 6 Ways to Keep Your Site from Being Blacklisted
First of all, SEO professionals do not wear colored hats. The term’s origins come from the Westerns, in which the hero wears a white hat and the villain wears a black hat. The term “hat” is used in both the SEO industry and hacker community. In the SEO industry hat refers to the types of… More »
Top 5 Web Design Trends for 2014
It’s that time of year. Prediction articles abound. Saw one set of web design predictions recently that I really liked because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how web design is changing. Again. Here are my top five predictions for what I think are the most important web design trends, and how I see… More »
Twelve Days of Social Media: The ThinkResults Cheat Sheet
In the spirit of the upcoming holidays, we offer this gift to you. This is the cheat sheet we use when posting social media material to make sure we’ve covered everything in those 140-character to 2000-character posts. We thought it might be helpful for you as well. Also be sure to check out the social… More »
What’s Old is New Again: It’s All About Engagement (and Metrics)
“It’s time to stop thinking about new vs. old media, or traditional vs. online. The goal is engaging audiences wherever they are. Video is video. “ – Jay Fulcher, CEO, Ooyala This quote from my good friend, Jay Filcher, CEO of Ooyala, a video analytics platform to track viewer engagement with actionable metrics across all devices…. More »
Latest Facebook Redesign: Implications for Your Facebook Content Strategy
Constantly implementing new ideas and directions, the latest Facebook redesign was done with the intent of positioning Facebook as a personalized newspaper. These changes have important ramifications for your content strategy. With a strong emphasis on visual content, Facebook has made changes to create subfeeds within categories, as well as allowing larger images since, time… More »