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Marketing in 2017 – A Quick Marketing Audit to Help You Prioritize and Plan

2017 ahead - is your marketing ready2017 will be here before you know it. Here’s a quick list to help you audit your current marketing efforts, plan and prioritize for the new year ahead:

Planning and Positioning

  • Have we taken a hard look lately at who our target market is? Who are our best customers and why? Who do we want to target in 2017?
  • Is our company positioned, in terms of our marketing and public image, to go after our target market?
  • What are our top 3 marketing and public relations goals in 2017? What kind of plan do we have in place to make those goals happen?

Website

  • Is our website up-to-date in terms of words and photos? Hint: if the copyright at the bottom of your page still says 2014 or 2015, it probably hasn’t been updated in a while.
  • Does our website LOOK old and outdated? Maybe it’s up-to-date in terms of words and photos, but is the overall “look” of our site showing its age?
  • Does our website have a responsive design? In other words, does it scale to the size of the user’s screen (computer, tablet, mobile phone)? This kind of design is better for your visitors AND it’s better for your google search rankings. Read more here.

Social Media

  • If we’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or others, did we take a “build it and they will come” approach? Or are we posting to social media regularly? Are our posts garnering engagement? Is the company’s profile on each channel up-to-date?
  • Are we spread too thin on social media? If we don’t have the bandwidth to stay active across 2-5 social media channels, is there one we should really focus on in 2017?
  • Are we advertising on our business Facebook page? If not, can we allocate some funds to Facebook advertising in 2017 to improve our results? If we are already advertising on Facebook, have we analyzed our results?

Marketing Materials

  • If we pull out all our print and online marketing materials (i.e., brochures, business cards, website, etc.) and look at them together, do they look like they came from the same company? Do we use the same logo, colors and other branding elements in all of them … or do they look like distant cousins? Or, worse yet, competing companies?
  • Are our materials up-to-date in terms of content? Have we expanded to new markets, opened new locations and/or rolled out new products or services that aren’t included?
  • Do our marketing materials look outdated?

Public and Community Relations

  • Has our company won awards, contributed to the community or had other good news that we just aren’t letting people know about?
  • Do I or members of my team have unique knowledge we could share to help our target market and spread the word about the solutions we provide? Could we do that via our blog, our enewsletter and/or articles we write for industry media channels?
  • Is our company active in the community in any way? Are there opportunities to give back that we’d like to explore in 2017 that match our company’s vision, values and target market?

In-Person Marketing

  • Have we pulled back on networking meetings and other opportunities this year? Are there organizations we should get more involved with, in person, next year?
  • Are there opportunities for us to share solutions, knowledge and lessons learned via speaking engagements? Do we have any presentations we can create or update? If we have experience speaking to organizations, do we mention this on our company website, LinkedIn profile or to organizations we are part of?
  • Are there trade shows or other events where we can get in front of our target market by attending, speaking and/or exhibiting at them?

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Websites 101: What Business Owners Need to Know About Building a Website

responsive website design illustrationI have been getting a lot of questions lately about the core components of websites, as more clients build new, updated and/or revamped sites. I figure they aren’t the only ones with these types of questions, so I thought an article with a short website primer would be helpful to everyone.

Home Sweet Home

When you’re building a home, you need an address, land to build it on and the actual house. The same holds true for a website. Your domain name is your address (i.e., www.thrivepublicrelations.com); your website host is your land (i.e., Blue Host, GoDaddy, etc.); and the website platform (i.e., WordPress, GoDaddy, etc.) is where you select and build your floorplan, walls, floor, ceiling, cabinets, doors, windows, etc. that becomes your “home.” You must have all 3.

You can purchase your domain name from a variety of sources (Alldomains, Godaddy and many more). In some cases, you can purchase your domain through the same company that hosts your website (like BlueHost and Godaddy), although you definitely don’t need to, and there are some experts who suggest using different companies for your domain and hosting to help guard your site against hackers. And finally, you need to select a professional website developer to create your site.

Content is King

Before you select a company to build your website, understand which website platform they are using and ensure that it has a content management system that is easy to use. A content management system (CMS) is the back-end part of your site that you or someone on your team can log into and easily (or not-so-easily, depending on the CMS) update the words and photos on your web pages. It’s also important to identify who on your team will have access to and the responsibility for keeping your website up-to-date over time.

The next task – and the one that overwhelms many companies and stalls their website project – is to determine your site’s content: the words, flow/navigation and images that will tell your story the way you want it told and provide the information your visitors need.

What’s Google Got to Do with It?

Now more than ever, Google also loves and prioritizes quality content – content that is relevant, natural, unique and updated. They are in the business of serving up search results to their users, and the way they keep their customers (and their #1 search engine ranking) is to continue providing the most relevant search results possible.

Content is the most important part of your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. Before you worry about anything else related to SEO, make sure your website’s content is written well. Quality content is king – for your website visitors and for Google. Resist the old, outdated tactic of key word stuffing. Google will now penalize you if you’re just filling your web pages full of key words, rather than natural content.

Can You See Me Now?

thrive pr mobile friendly analyzerSpeaking of Google, it also cares whether your website is mobile-friendly. If they deem that your website is not, it will impact your search results when someone is searching on a mobile device. Need to test your site? Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/.

According to Google, a page is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot:

  • Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
  • Uses text that is readable without zooming
  • Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom
  • Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped

There are 2 ways to accomplish a mobile-friendly website. The first is to create a mobile version of your website. Most companies who had recently invested a lot of time and money into their existing non-mobile-friendly website when Google made the “mobile-friendly” change in 2015 opted to go this route (including us at Thrive PR), at least temporarily. The second way is to create a new website with a responsive design (note: we just finished doing this for our own website).

No new website should be built without a “responsive design,” which simply means that the website is crafted using technology to automatically respond to the user’s screen size — from desktops to laptops to tablets and mobile phones. This goes beyond pleasing Google by providing your visitors with an easier way to see and use all the content on your website, no matter which device they’re using.

Final Word

If you’ve ever worked or talked with me, it’s likely you’ve heard me say, “Don’t compete with yourself.” It’s difficult enough to establish your brand, get the word out about your company and stay top of mind with your prospects and customers. Don’t make it more difficult for yourself by not being consistent across ALL your marketing materials, including your website. Your site’s look, feel and content should match the way you present yourself anywhere and everywhere else. Don’t compete with yourself by acting and looking like one company online … and another offline.