With an effective inbound marketing strategy one of the items businesses will use is email newsletters to reach their audience. Your audience may be in a nearby town like Merrillville Indiana for us in Valparaiso or could be across the country in Amarillo Texas. When your product reaches across the country email is an effective means of communication. No matter your target audience email marketing has a lot of potential to drive people to you and inform them about your company even with the standard 15-30% open ratio. Today we will look at effective ways to utilize email marketing effectively for part of your inbound marketing strategy. We say "part of" as your inbound marketing strategy needs to cover multiple marketing methods.

The phrase that we hear over and over of "the best things in life are free" has seemingly lost it's impact and meaning through decades of ad nauseam use and the almost obligatory use on every marketing and business avenue known to humankind. Free has become free with an asterisk, making it all but free and losing any impact of the original's implications.

When working on designing and creating sites for our clients we often look at how color theory plays a factor in drawing people in, bringing out emotion, and telling a story without words. As we look at color we use it as a base of all our designs. Today we will look at and see how color theory influences your marketing efforts both on and offline.

A blog is a way to give valuable knowledge and information that shows that you are the expert in the industry you are serving. You are showing your company as the industry leader and expert that others will want to follow and emulate. The information you provide should help current customers and potential customers while also letting your competitors know that you are the leader that they should emulate.

We previously talked about how text marketing is an effective tool when it comes to marketing your business and how business owners have a form of promotion that comes with a high open and utilization rate. It's this unexpected versatility and reach that turns text marketing into an effective machine. Now that we know just how useful it is, the two questions that remain are who can use it and how can they use it?

Over the weekend I was talking with a friend and the conversation turned to the feature on Facebook referred to as "On This Day". This features is where Facebook reminds you of events that happened on a particular day. There are some negative thoughts people have about this feature that tend to happen. Either that day had tragedy in it, a life event that you prefer not to remember, or is in relation to a person that you no longer want to be reminded about. Today we will delve into this and explain how to filter based on either a specific date or a person.

We all can't have the most exciting of company brands or huge budgets to make it exciting. You may provide one of the services that truly isn't super exciting to talk about but necessary to everyone in one way or another. You provide products and services that are used either daily or occasionally. Big business is known for their exciting and ever engaging social media marketing campaigns due to the huge budgets that they can get overly creative and take boring into exciting. This doesn't mean if you are a bank, credit union, funeral home, pawn shop, dry cleaner, lawyer, restaurant, etc. without a big budget that you can't have an engaging social media strategy that people will enjoy. In fact, there are ways you can start to engage your audience to make your brand more fun. Let's look at some ways you can go from boring to engaging using social media.

No, we are not talking about taking a nap. Those are great in certain situations. We are referring of NAP when it comes to your search engine optimization efforts or SEO. NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. This information is critical for SEO to be effective and accurate. With a proper NAP setup, every search engine and wherever your customer goes will have a consistent experience on finding your business online. In this article, we will cover the core steps of NAP and why it is critical for your business to rank well on the search engines.

Text messaging is more than sending messages to friends and family. It has quietly become an incredibly effective marketing tool for businesses to send promotions, information, and sales pitches to their clients. While it's easy to assume that text messages wouldn't be an effective way to reach clients and customers due to the unfortunate tendency for people to become annoyed with an overabundance of texts, research and experience have produced surprisingly contrary results and shown to be an incredibly effective form of reaching out and making sales.