The Small Business Marketing Blog by Company Sprout

Easiest Way to Boost Your Social Media Mojo

Posted on by Paul in Social Media with No comments

Why It’s Essential to Engage in Social Media

Long, long ago in an internet far away (roughly a year ago) it was relatively easy to rank your site’s pages in the search engine results. All that you had to do was optimize the pages, have decent, original content, and to gather a vast variety of backlinks to your pages.

Ahh, the good ‘ol days.

No longer. Google has upped the ante, and besides making sure we are still managing to accomplish most of the above named items, we are now expected to have a viable and buzzing social media presence to boot!
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Online Reputation Management Tips

Posted on by Paul in Web Marketing with No comments

Online Reputation Management Can be key to Your Success

Spend any time wondering about your online reputation management? That’s what I thought! Based on a study by Erik Qualman of Socialnomics.com nearly three-quarters of consumers report they trust the feedback provided by online reviews. Also some 80 percent have changed their mind about buying a product after reading only one negative review online, and over 84 percent reveal the fact that they find online reviews to be a trusted source of information.
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facebook-advertising-for-small-businesses

Facebook Ads – It’s All About the Image!

Posted on by Paul in Social Media with No comments

Facebook ads are among the fastest, easiest and most effective do-it-yourself platforms for getting traffic to your offers, building prospect lists, and for just about any other objective imaginable for your website. Ad campaigns are extremely easy to set up, include great targeting tools, and can be online in minutes. There is one key to understand, however, in regards to getting the best results and return on investment:
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Ramp Up Your Content Marketing for More Traffic and Authority

Posted on by Paul in Web Marketing with 1 comment

Content marketing might be a term you’ve heard tossed about lately, yet still may not know exactly what it means for your small business. Simply put, content marketing is the practice of creating, collecting, and making available fresh content for one’s readers. This may come in many forms, including blog posts, articles, whitepapers, short reports, videos, podcasts, ebooks, social media and more. We live in an age that treasures information, and the more you are able to offer your readers with the greater authority you will carry in their eyes, which can often produce better rankings, increased traffic, links, and sales.

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Are You Sabotaging Your Own Emails by Not Optimizing for Different Platforms?

Posted on by Paul in Mobile Marketing with No comments

Email marketing can be tricky enough without us making the job even more difficult. With mobile email open rates rising rapidly, it can be a virtual death sentence for your business should you overlook optimizing your marketing emails for small screens.

Mobile email opens are exploding!

Mobile email has become the most opened email, surpassing desktop with a robust 36 percent, according to Knotice.com. Combine that with the fact that email is the favored online communication mode of 74 percent of all adults, and you start to see why it’s so important. And it’s not just phones either.
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15 ways to screw up your website homepage

Posted on by Paul in Web Marketing with No comments

A lot of times, it’s as much about what you don’t do as what you do. This can be particularly true of your website. There are a boatload of crazy problems that can send website visitors running away from your website. Let‘s see which if any of these pertain to you.

No clear objective – According to DinkumInteractive.com you’ve got about 4 seconds to show what your site is all about before they leave.
Not making the content scannable – We read in chunks, if you can’t scan your webpage and have the gist of it in a few seconds, you might turn off a significant percentage of your visitors!
Not being mobile ready – Mobile is no longer an extravagance, as according to Google half of all web traffic is already mobile.
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What infographics are and how you can use them in your business

Posted on by Paul in Business Marketing with No comments

So why use infographics? Infographics have taken our world by storm, as we are all increasingly more inclined to process data visually than through the written word. Neuroscience explains why: based on research from 3M (maker of Post-its, among other things), 90% of data transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text! So some smart person somewhere invented infographics (probably Al Gore) to help us tell our stories. Now, smart businesses are utilizing these visually pleasing, data-rich illustrations to educate and engage new customers.
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7 simple and fast ways to get more client referrals

Posted on by Paul in Business Marketing with No comments

Most small businesses are always looking for ways to get more client referrals. However according to GrowThink.com some 58.6% of us don’t even make an effort to request them! This isn’t something that happens automagically, but instead is the offspring of a straightforward, targeted strategy applied consistently. So that you can catch the idea allow me to share seven easy tips to get more client referrals, quicker and easier than you might have believed possible!

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Have You Heard What They’re Saying about Your Business?

Posted on by Paul in Business Marketing with No comments

Do you truly know how well you’re doing with your customers and clients? Are there trouble spots or gaps in your customer support you’re not aware of? Would you like to find out what they really think? There’s really only one way to get this information—ask them! A well-crafted customer survey can be a great tool to help you discover the answers to these and several other items you may not even have known were issues for your customers.

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Using Google Local to Get More Customers!

Posted on by Paul in Business Marketing with No comments

Although it’s been a few months since Google merged with Google Places to become Google Local, there is some confusion as to precisely what this new entity would grow to be. Not anymore. One glowing illustration of what is possible for small business is the Google business page for BakeSpace.com. They have utilized all of the features such as hangouts, video and more to garner more than 330,000 users within their circles. Companies are waking up to the massive opportunity that lies within Google Local and are finding fantastic ways to use it for finding buyers and prospects.

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