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The most important question any small business can ask when it is shaping its marketing strategy is, “Why?” Why are you doing this? It’s the question I ask of clients most often, too. They say, “We want a social media strategy.” I ask, “Why?” Then I keep asking why until I get to the real […]

Happy accidents are perhaps the most wonderful gift a small business or digital marketer can have. It’s those accidental discoveries that can fuel growth or even change our business plans completely. You have a random discussion with a stranger that sheds light on a new audience segment. Or you misspell a word in your pay-per-click […]

What do you think your most important strategic plan is for the next five years? How about the next 10? 20? You can talk about user acquisition, revenue growth and market penetration all you want, but the most important strategic plan any business has right now is building trust. Why? Because all signs point to […]

Monday we discussed the online-offline balance of influencer identification. One theme there was that an influencer tool for small business only gives you a look at half of the equation. It counts online metrics to deliver a set of recommendations for who might be your influencers. You still need to connect the online recommendations to […]

Influence is not an easy thing to understand. Yes, there are dozens of softwares out there with understanding influencers as a claim. They measure how many followers people have. They count the number of likes and comments and such to put a number on someone’s “influence” to convince you they know. But they only give […]

The problem of how to measure social media is  we’re all convinced you need a tool to do it. This is because the software companies out there who have these tools want you to buy from them. The realization hit me as I stumbled across Agorapulse’s recent post entitled, “What Social Media Measurement Tool Does My […]

You hear a lot of conventional wisdom as a small business owner. It typically comes from people trying to give you advice on how to be successful. This expert or that author tells you what they know to be true, which is the conventional wisdom aggregated in their study of that little sliver of the world. […]

How do you measure Twitter for Small Business? Is it the number of followers you have? What about the number of retweets each Tweet gets? Or the reach and impact of that message? Do you even know how to measure those things? If not, don’t feel bad. There are very smart marketers out there who don’t […]

Every business wants qualified leads. If you don’t use that term, then you want customers lathered up and ready to buy, but they can still be described as a qualified lead. So how do you find qualified leads? Well, you can create content and drive people to it hoping they’ll ask for more information. You […]

How much money should y0u spend on small business SEO? Super alert reader Emmerey Rose asked this great question in response to our discussion about ranking well in search. The true answer is, unfortunately, it depends. But here’s how I broke down my answer to her that I thought would help all of us: SEO is […]

Monday of interactive weekend at South-by-Southwest is typically the day the social media and digital marketing crowd wakes up and realizes they aren’t in college anymore and that much alcohol is best used in truck engines. SXSW has been called “Spring Break for Geeks” and though I am not in attendance this year, I can attest, […]

NOTE: The 2017 Marketing Pricing Guide and its predecessor from 2015 inspired a full bi-annual effort to offer insights into what marketing costs across a range of disciplines and executional needs. Please see the main Marketing Pricing Guide menu to see updated information from 2017 and 2019 surveys. What does marketing cost? A lot of […]