For years, marketers would have told you that your open rate is the golden metric to look at when gauging the effectiveness of your email campaigns. But even before many of these privacy changes took effect last year, your open rate never truly told you the whole story. In this article, we'll explain why open rates aren't as important as you might think and what metrics to look at instead. Why Open Rates Aren't Read More

In the marketing world, you'll often hear two terms floating around that may seem like nothing more than two ways to say the same thing: A marketing "plan" and a marketing "strategy." However, there is a very distinct difference. A marketing strategy is your overall philosophy towards marketing. It encompasses the various tactics, avenues, etc. that you intend to use and the overall result you want to achieve. It Read More

One of the biggest frustrations around marketing is that it is often difficult to truly diagnose why something didn't work. After all, you may think you have a great strategy in place, but when it doesn't produce the ROI you were expecting, it can be doubly frustrating to also not truly understand why. Maybe your vendor didn't deliver on their promises. Maybe you didn't spend enough money. Maybe the message just Read More

Many marketing companies out there will tout the importance of content, but their definition of "content" usually consists of a constant barrage of short blog articles on a current event that are stuffed with keywords to drive search engine rankings. These blogs are otherwise pretty worthless and don't provide any value to the humans who are actually looking for information. That's why you need evergreen Read More

Finally, after 7 long months, we have arrived at the final installment of our series on how to create engaging content! So far we've looked at the "Top 3" method, the “One Thing” strategy, the “Success Story” hack, the “Inspiration” method, the "Cool" strategy, and the "Markerboard" method. The final strategy is one of our favorites - The Secret Sauce. For many years, business owners hoarded their methods and Read More

This article was provided by our friend, Stacey Brown Randall, the author of the multiple award-winning book Generating Business Referrals Without Asking, host of the Roadmap to Grow Your Business podcast, and national speaker. You can find her at www.StaceyBrownRandall.com.  For as long as you have been in business, you have been taught there are a limited number of ways to generate referrals. Ask your clients Read More