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 Following is a list of the hot trends going on in the digital marketing industry which business's are subscribing to today. WSI is a full-service provider of digital marketing tools and techniques, and can help businesses of all sizes with any of these opportunities: 

1. Mobile Websites. With the growth of the smart phone technology, all businesses should have a mobile version of their website and it needs to be optimized like a regular website so that it is highly visible to the search engines for your important keywords.


2. Mobile Advertising. Same as paid marketing or pay-per-click, only these textual ads are only displayed when the searcher is using a mobile device, and are linked to specific pages on your mobile website.


3. Mobile Text Messaging. Similar to sending out email newsletters, people are able to “opt-in” to your mobile text messaging campaign to receive information from you about special product promotions, event notifications, coupon downloads, and other opportunities that are only available via their mobile device. You have complete control of your campaigns through the broadcasting tool that we provide.
     
4. 5-star Online Customer Reviews. Putting these on a website and integrating them on to your business Facebook page is a great way to increase conversions. Site visitors are able to visually see how well a company is servicing their customers, and then more quickly make a decision to become a new customer. According to a study, 88% of all online reviews in the U.S. are positive ones, and 70% of consumers trust other consumers opinions, while only 27% trust what the experts have to say.
    
5. Blog posting, article and press release syndication. Integrating a blog with a business’s website does two things. First, it is a great way to communicate with existing or potential customers. Second, the search engines consider it fresh content, and will visit and index more areas of your website because of that. Many of my clients use our professional copywriting service, letting us write the blog posts, post them to the business blog, and then submit them to several online article or press release directories where they will also be picked up by other websites and search engines, and syndicated across the internet. We also hook up the business blog with your Facebook business page if one exists where the post can also syndicate across the social networks.
     
6. Search Engine Marketing. Paid search or pay-per-click advertising and organic search engine optimization is still the number one technique for drawing geo-targeted traffic to a business’s website:
   
   
   1. Organic search engine optimization includes on-page and off-page techniques. Detailed documents that explain what is all included will be provided upon request.
   
   
   2. Pay-per-click targeted search engine advertising is the largest advertising mechanism in the world. Advertising can be locally, regionally or nationally targeted.
             
   
   
7. Display Advertising & Remarketing – A “push” form of advertising also known as “banner” advertising. Your banner ad is displayed on other websites who have opted in to Google’s (or other search engine’s) affiliate program. You pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your website. Remarketing is a technique where your ads are displayed when people who have previously visited your website through your pay per click campaign visit an affiliate’s website. These ads can be static photo images, or include audio and video.


8. Microsites – small 2-3 page websites organically optimized for specific geographical areas. Great method for local targeting. For example, an auto repair shop may want to target people living in Madison, Fitchburg, Middleton, and Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. It is very difficult to optimize the main website for each of those locations, so the best method is to optimize the main site for the primary target area, and then create microsites and optimize those for the other locations.


9. Click to Call – Conversion tactic used successfully to convert website visitors into leads. Visitors simply click on an image displayed on your website, and the system then connects them to your business. Call lists can be set up so that calls follow the list, and then go to a recorded voice mail if nobody answers.


10. Groupon – Discount online selling to specific geographically targeted audiences, Groupon is the fastest growing company in the world. You negotiate a discounted price with Groupon who then sells your product via broadcast emails they send to their subscribers on a daily basis, and then they collect payment, keep their fee, and then write you a check for the balance.
    
    
11. Email Marketing – Monthly or quarterly newsletters, event notifications, special promotions, etc. This is a great way to stay in touch and nurture existing customers, as well as market to potential clients who subscribe to the newsletter through the business’s website. We offer a full-service option through WSI Integrated Ad Solutions (Inbox 360) as well as services through our partnership with Constant Contact.
    
    
12. Social Media Marketing. This is used in two ways. First, it is a great way to stay or get in touch with existing or potential customers, to monitor what they might be saying about your business, and be a part of that conversation. Second, the social media networks are a good place to market to potential customers without trying to sell them on your business. Use of Facebook and LinkedIn ads, additional pay-per-click advertising methods, are growing quickly. We offer social media services including the very basic setup to a fully managed social marketing strategy.
    

Owners of all size businesses should have an online marketing plan that takes advantage of the tremendous opportunities available in the online environment. If you would like to sit down and discuss these opportunities or have us review your existing online plan, you should contact WSI since we have been helping small and medium size businesses grow through professionally developed online strategies for many years. If you're in the Madison Wisconsin area, give us a call today at (608) 523-4255 and let's discuss these opportunities right away!
Best Regards,




Thomas J. Holzkopf
Certified Internet & Digital Marketing Consultant
Tom@WSIPrositebuilder.com
www.WSIPrositebuilder.com
Office: 608-523-4255

One interesting thing about online marketing plans – and one that is rarely discussed by the experts – is that a very high percentage of online marketing plans actually fail. That is, they get off to a good start, only to lose steam and never really materialize into the new sales and bottom-line gains that they were designed to produce.

Given that finding customers over the Internet is such an essential task for most businesses, how can this be?

The biggest reason most online marketing plans fail is because they are not really plans at all… they are a short list of items to do, or topics to think about. In other words, they include items like "check out social media", and "improve website traffic”, but they do not actually have any realistic actionable items attached to them. Therefore, over time, they become good ideas that were never put into play.

Your business can’t afford to make the same mistakes. Here is a handful of tips for putting together an online marketing plan that is actually a plan – and one that is likely to succeed:

Know what you want to accomplish. A plan without a goal is useless, so know what you want to achieve, in terms of increased conversions and sales, more traffic to your website, etc., before you begin.

Start small. It pays to start small and build up slowly. Do not pile so many items onto your online marketing plan that you will never finish them. A good online marketing strategy is a multi-year, on-going plan.

Turn ideas into steps. Likewise, having a list of things to try isn't enough; turn them into concrete steps you can follow on a daily or weekly basis.

Take advantage of information. Metrics are important to every step of your online marketing plan. If you cannot accurately measure traffic to your site and how many conversions you're getting, then you will never know what is working and what is not.

Review your progress periodically. Get together with your online marketing team from time to time and figure out how you are doing. That will stop you from going off in the wrong direction repeatedly.

Be flexible. Your plan should change and evolve as you discover which parts are effective and which parts aren’t. Do not be afraid to change your focus or tactics to take advantage of new information. Also, keep aware of new trends within this industry, because new opportunities are popping up on a regular basis. 

Each of these steps is something that a quality business web design and online marketing team can help you with, but as the owner or manager of your business, it is up to you to put them into play. An online marketing plan is only as good as the results it produces, so hold tight to this plan and turn yours into something that grows your business.

Owners of all size businesses should have an online marketing plan that takes advantage of the tremendous opportunities available in the online environment. If you would like to sit down and discuss these opportunities or have us review your existing online plan, you should contact WSI since we have been helping small and medium size businesses grow through professionally developed online strategies for many years. If you're in the Madison Wisconsin area, give us a call today at (608) 523-4255 and let's discuss these opportunities right away!
Best Regards,




Thomas J. Holzkopf
Certified Internet & Digital Marketing Consultant
Tom@WSIPrositebuilder.com
www.WSIPrositebuilder.com
Office: 608-523-4255

Five minutes. That's roughly the amount of time it takes for an online marketing partner or search engine optimization specialist to recommend that a small business launch a blog to go with their new website. There's a good reason that this advice has become to the web design industry what brushing your teeth and eating an apple a day is to everyone else: It's a great way to bring some fresh attention to your business on the Internet, and to keep the search engines interested in your website as well!

Unfortunately, a lot of companies – both large and small – are going about it the wrong way.

Why? Because too many blogs feature content and articles that are keyword-rich, but also completely generic. In other words, they use a whole lot of words to essentially say nothing. To get real marketing value out of your posts, you have to attract customer interest. That means concentrating on topics that matter to your readers, and going beyond the standard pleasantries of "we work hard" or "we have lower prices" to keep them coming back.

To help you out, here are a few quick ideas for turning your blog into something more than a placeholder for keywords:

Do less writing and more listening. Is there something that most of your buyers have on their mind? If so, make that topic a focus of your blog for a while. Tapping into what's already hot can be a great way to attract web traffic, especially if you can lend a new or different perspective.

Get ahead of the curve. On the same note, you can probably anticipate what your customers are likely to be discussing weeks or months from now. If you see a hot topic coming (and it isn’t confidential), be the first one to bring it up and explain it thoroughly.

Ask for opinions. Good blogging isn't always about what you think, but about what your customers have to say as well. Use your company's blog as a place to bring up interesting topics and watch the responses come in. You won't just get great feedback about your blogging business, but you might even come up with some strong ideas for future posts.

Don't be afraid of controversy. There's nothing wrong with taking an unconventional view, so long as you can back it up with some observations or statistics. Two words of caution apply, however: Don't stir up trouble just for the sake of starting arguments, and stay away from hot button topics like religion or politics unless they happen to coincide with your business – it's not worth it to anger existing and potential buyers.

Turn a great idea into a series. There's no rule that says you have to give away everything you know all at once. If you have a juicy topic that you can write about in detail, why not turn it into a series? Doing so will keep your blog stocked for weeks to come, and give readers a reason to come back time and time again.

Remember the keywords! I mentioned earlier that blogs shouldn't be all about keywords and meaningless information. But don't get me wrong, embedding the right keywords in your blog is still very important because the search engines are going to see your blog as another page on your website, and they are going to index it based on the theme of the blog post. This is just one more way to increase your brand visibility across the web.

And finally, keep the search engines happy. Always remember that what search engines are looking for is fresh, relevant content to share with their customers, who are the folks searching for information through their search engines. Posting to your blog on at least a weekly basis is going to bring those search engines to your web site more frequently, and your business will end up getting listed on the search engine results pages more often than your competitors who aren't yet in the "blogosphere". 

A lot of business owners still aren't blogging because they aren't aware of all of the benefits their business would gain by having one. Or they think that it will just take too much of their time. But the benefits far outweigh those issues. So get out there and start blogging!

You should consider integrating a blog and blog posting process with your website. If you're not quite sure where to start, you should contact WSI since we have been helping small and medium size businesses grow through professionally integrated website blogs for many years. If you're in the Madison Wisconsin area, give us a call today at (608) 523-4255 and let's discuss these opportunities right away!
Best Regards,




Thomas J. Holzkopf
Certified Internet & Digital Marketing Consultant
Tom@WSIPrositebuilder.com
www.WSIPrositebuilder.com
Office: 608-523-4255

As you've probably already figured out by now, ignoring social media sites won't make them go away. Facebook alone now boasts more than 500 million members, with Twitter and LinkedIn catching up very quickly. The men and women who log onto them – often daily – aren't just looking to chat with friends and see photos from summer vacations. They are also checking up on potential vendors, asking for product recommendations, and otherwise using them like search engines that can help them decide what and where to buy.

And if your company isn't participating, then it's probably already costing you a lot of money in the form of sales you will never see.

With that in mind, one of the things we like to remind business owners of is the need to actively play the game; you can't afford to ignore these sites, and the potential customers they represent. But as strong as those reasons, and the numbers behind them, actually are, there is actually one thing that's much worse than neglecting to try social media marketing in the first place: only giving it half an effort.

You can always tell the companies and owners who are phoning it in when it comes to social media. They have half-completed profiles, make posts that have all the spice and appeal of soggy bread, and use every available opportunity to bring the conversation back around to what they sell.

You don't want to be one of those people, and your customers don't want you to be one, either. To really make your mark on Twitter and Facebook, you need to create custom pages that reinforce your company's brand and personality.

Post consistently, but not for the sake of posting consistently. Yes, it's important to update your social profiles on a regular basis, but don't use that as an excuse to post something just for the sake of posting it. Take the extra time and creativity to find something that interests you and your customers. Otherwise, you are only wasting everyone's time.

Show off a bit of personality now and then. Not everything has to be about your company or industry. Mention your pets, your kids, or how that marathon training is going. Anything that makes you seem like more of a person and less of a faceless organization can only help your customer relationships.

Ask yourself the one key question that matters most. Following the golden rule of social media marketing is a simple as asking yourself, "Would I take the time to look at this?" If you would, then what you’ve written has value; if you wouldn't, then go back to the drawing board and start over again.

Work to develop friends and contacts first, customers second. For most parts of your online marketing plan, few things are as important as the metrics. Study the numbers closely enough, and you can be sure the new business will start flowing in. Social media marketing is a little bit different; while you can monitor how many friends or followers you have, what really matters is attention, not web traffic. Do what you can to be interesting and engaging, and you can be sure that the bottom-line business results will catch up later.