Blog Articles from Fawkes Digital Marketing

You have one or more social media pages to have a social online experience. This social information reaches dozens, hundreds, and maybe even thousands of people. This reach on social media can be organically (free) or through paid advertising/boosting your posts to achieve a specific marketing goal. If you are lucky your Facebook page will even show on the search engine result pages (SERPs). You keep your social media sites updated weekly, you monitor and respond to questions and inquiries daily, hourly, and more. Is that enough for your digital online experience? If you want to control your name and brand on the internet it regretfully is not. Whether you are on Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook or another site you do not control the look-and-feel, information, or how many times the information shows. You often have to pay for the placement you want on the platform. What you can do is establish yourself as an expert in your field by having a professional website with quality content, a blog that allows you to showcase your expertise, and make certain all your good information gets out. Additionally, with a website you can further market your business beyond just listing your products and services by showcasing your company colors, your logo, and none of your competitors information will show. To achieve this you need a website and not just any website. You need one that is designed to 'Convert' your visitors into customers. To achieve this you need a Call to Action or CTA. Let's take a look and see what an effective call of action is and how it can benefit your business online.

The quality of your website content is essential not only for search engine rankings but for business credibility as well. Your content should include the keywords and phrases that you want to rank higher for, but it should also make sense and not be repetitive to your readers. Writing good content that also helps your SEO can be tricky, which is why we've compiled a list of easy ways to help improve your content.

Five years ago, a dream was planted to change the world in the digital marketing space. This covers not only social media but websites and any electronic media of the modern business. We also decided to do this in Northwest Indiana rather than Silicon Valley or another major tech sector area of the country. The reason was simple and that is there was an untapped pool of truly awesome people that had desires to do good in the community and the world. Many who have been held back but knew they had the potential to do good in the world. Experts exist everywhere around the world and not in these tech sector centric locations. Our city of Valparaiso Indiana has proven and helped us grow with its entrepreneur spirit.

In 2016, mobile overtook desktop as the primary device used to access websites. People use all sorts of devices today to browse the internet, including cell phones, tablets, laptops, and even smart watches. 'Responsive design' is the term used to describe how a website responds to the screen size, orientation, and resolution of each platform. Even though responsive design has been around for a while now, the majority of sites still fail to meet usability standards. Most websites are built for desktop and then dialed down for mobile. Having a mobile optimized website will not only make your website more user-friendly and universal, it will help your search engine optimization and get you ranked higher in search results.

If you ask customers and clients what some of the most frustrating experiences are when it comes dealing with businesses, the topic of miscommunication often comes up.

You have either started or have had your small business running in towns like Valparaiso, Chesterton, Merrillville, Hobart, Portage, or (insert your small town here). You compete with great customer service, quality products, and that local small town flare. But how are you able to compete against big corporations that seem to have endless marketing budgets at their disposal? Today we are going to dig into some of the 'tricks of the SEO trade' that we have used time-and-time again to help small businesses grow. Are you ready and willing to get more business and grow? If so, continue to read on and learn some of our proven techniques on growing your small business.

Aggregate: verb (without object), 1. To combine and form a collection or mass

Aggregation of services has become a significant business. Hotels.com is an aggregator. Another prevalent aggregator is the aggregation of marketing services via geographic or demographic based community sites. These communities generally have three elements: the aggregator, the reader, and the contributor. Let's look briefly at the business model.

When it comes to working with clients, the last answer they want to hear are the three words of doom: 'I don't know', a phrase so adverse to client relations that mentioning them often is equated to losing their trust and reliance.

Social media sites like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter are a popular way to share content and get involved with the online community. They are free to use and they give the public a place to create a profile and keep in touch with their local and global community. For businesses, not only does this give the public a way to connect with your business more personally and stay up to date with your products and sales, it also helps your search engine optimization (SEO).

We find that companies that are customer focused, wanting to change their brand image, and are looking for results faster (can you say typically lower costs???) will utilize agile marketing as part of their marketing efforts.

Agile marketing is focused on the customer, uses validated learning, works in short and adaptive iterations, and encourages cross-functional collaboration between departments. Whereas Traditional marketing will focus on spin, controlling the message, and owning the brand. In this article, we are going to cover some of the core basis points to start showing how being agile can produce more results and better engage your customer.

Web page optimization is the first step to increasing your website's search engine optimization (SEO). Optimizing your web pages means designing them to get the best use out of them. Whether it's search engine optimization, which increases your website's ranking on search engines, or performance optimization, which ensures that your website runs quickly and smoothly, it is extremely beneficial for you and your visitors to have your web pages be the best they can be.

The more we talk with clients the more that they want results. To get results though you need to have outstanding communication. Communication comes in many ways and varies for each one of your customers. Businesses know they want a website to communicate their message and they need to be on social media to continue that reach and engage prospects and customers alike. Both platforms are working for you 24x7, should work together as a collaborative digital marketing tool for your business. To achieve this you need to have an effective communications strategy.

What exactly is SEO and how does it affect my business? Let's break things down and start from the top! SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and we already know what a search engine is, right? Google, Yahoo, Bing, and many other websites serve as search engines, where a visitor types a phrase or word into a search box and a list of results pops up instantly. These sites look through every page of every website on the world wide web and matches results to the phrase or words searched. Optimization means making the best and most effective use of this resource, or in our case, designing your website so that search engines list it near or at the top of their search results list.

With great growth, a company needs to take a step back and look at everything it does to further provide value. We are focused not just on the local small and medium sized businesses but those across the entire country and around the world. We continually look at the paper purchased, the way our solutions work for our clients, and to the services that are offered. Each item has an impact to the bottom line of the company and if done incorrectly can truly cost the company and ultimately our customers. Keeping our budget tuned, living within our modest means, and checked constantly we can keep prices down while continually providing more value and grow each month. In just four years we've moved from a home office in Michigan City Indiana to a 2,000+ square foot office in downtown Valparaiso Indiana. We encourage everyone to read through this article on what makes JM2 Webdesigners unique and capable of meeting your businesses growing needs.

Social media is a necessity for every size business today. You need a plan and not a shotgun approach when using it to have a positive part and gain from the benefits of social media. You need to be consistent in your message, target your messages based on the social platform being used, know when to respond, how to respond, and how to engage with your target audience. Like all marketing and branding efforts for your company you need a plan of attack so that your business is shown always in the best possible light. Today we will cover twelve items that should be in your social media plan whether you are in a small town in Indiana or a larger city like Chicago Illinois.

Five years ago, in 2012, a dream, even a fantasy if you will, was started. With a year of challenging work in the city of Michigan City Indiana a business plan was developed, modified, tweaked, vetted, and tweaked some more. Change was wanted, and needed, in the web design and marketing space. Having worked for several years at a printing company that did marketing I saw a lot of great old school things that still worked well today but could be enhanced with software and an eye on the future. After a year of work, saving money, the dream started to become a reality. This is the story of the four-year journey that JM2 Webdesigners & Marketing has made.

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.