Sales Renewal’s insight:

While we disagree with Ms. Patterson that a website is a shiny marketing object, we couldn’t agree with her more that too many small businesses get hoodwinked by the marketing fad du jour.
A consideration and analysis of your business’s strengths and weaknesses and its competitive position and financial resources should determine your marketing game plan, not a blog post you read, trending marketing topics on Twitter or the advice a random cocktail party guest assures you is just what your business needs (plastics anyone?).
The rest of the article makes that point as Ms Patterson discusses why she was successful without a site. What’s left unsaid, and we’re curious about, is how well her new website fit into her marketing plan and how successful it was a driving additional business for her.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

Sales Renewal recently relaunched its website, complete with a “customer journey” home page.
At first glance, our two service options are similar in many ways, so conveying the differences in an easy-to-understand manner was an important part of our redesign.
By using the storyboarding technique described in this article, we were able to set up a home page walks visitors through the variables that help determine which service is best for them, encouraging them to explore more in depth at different points along the “journey” and helping them in their decision-making process.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

Does “republishing” an older blog post somehow feel like cheating?

When I coach clients about republishing their evergreen blog content, I find they are quite often hesitant to push the button. After all, shouldn’t a blogger be able to turn out fresh, interesting content every week?

This article from uberflip provides some good reasons for reviving your older content as a regular part of your content marketing strategy:

• Having fresh, up-to-date content helps you demonstrate your brand’s reliability.
• Keeping popular posts up to date helps you continue to build on their good ranking to bring visitors to your site.
• Updating gives you the opportunity to improve poorer-quality posts, which will help you address Google’s Panda update targeting low-quality content.
• Updating, like curating, is a lot easier than writing a brand-new post. You can give yourself a break once in a while!
• Updating is an opportunity to give the old content a new SEO pass. You probably know more about optimization and good-performing keywords now than you did when you wrote the post.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

On April 21, Google released an algorithm update which brought potential changes to how sites rank based on mobile-friendliness. Fearing what some called “Mobilegeddon, ” companies scrambled to make their sites comply with the changes to prevent ranking drops following the implementation of the update. The thinking behind this was that if a site was not optimized for mobile, then the site would no longer show up in search results. Luckily, the changes came and rankings seem to have not been altered on a large scale. Early reports indicate that 45% of businesses did see ranking changes following Google’s update, but perhaps not in the disastrous scale anticipated. Some businesses have claimed to notice their sites drop a few spots in ranking, while others have claimed lower traffic.
Though the changes are not as crippling as expected, some have seen a decrease in rank even after optimizing for mobile. According to Ben Norman, CEO of Koozai, the hype surrounding the update caused businesses to miss the larger picture. He says that “exaggerating the impact meant that businesses didn’t anticipate that even small changes in their ranking can have a big impact on their organic mobile search results, ” and now, some have seen negative impacts even after optimizing. Norman claims that while optimizing for mobile, competitors may have increased rank simply because they are better optimized for some of the other 200+ Google ranking factors that exist today. Increasing rank may take reevaluating some of these other factors, rather than focusing on mobile optimization.
Overall, the changes do not appear to be widespread, or nearly as destructive as some expected, but small ranking drops have occurred. You can read this article in it’s entirety here.
Has your site seen any ranking changes since the algorithm update went into effect? Let us know.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

As Marketing Profs notes in this article about content curation, and Sales Renewal agrees, creating fresh, engaging original content on a consistent basis is a tall order for most smaller businesses. It takes an understanding of what is “engaging” to your readers, plus time and talent to plan, write and distribute.
We believe smaller businesses can differentiate themselves in the realm of content marketing by using a combination of original content and “curated content” – seeking out and sharing content that others have created (giving them credit, of course).
If you are considering or have ventured into the realm of curated content, this article offers some good guidance:

• Select quality content – content should come from trustworthy sources, be relevant to your readers, can take multiple forms (video, articles, Infographics)
• Add value – don’t just re-post, but provide your insights or commentary
• Distribute the content – as you do with your original content, use your digital channels (newsletters, social media, website) to share the content

Sales Renewal’s insight:

Omnichannel marketing – removing silos, putting the customer front and center, approaching ROI from an integrated perspective to maximize the performance of channels working together. this is the heart of omnichannel marketing. Businesses who approach marketing in an omnichannel manner are also probably starting with a strategic plan that incorporates a broad range of tactics and programs in a unified approach. Has your marketing evolved?

Sales Renewal’s insight:

A recent report from Forrester Research confirms that traditional approaches to loyalty programs don’t cut it anymore. In today’s complex marketing world, loyalty programs can no longer be stand-alone, transactional tools, but integrated into the entire customer experience to build company loyalty.

Sales Renewal’s insight:

You know you have to focus on marketing to grow your business. But if you think you can do it yourself – along with everything else you need to do to run your business – think again.
This article describes five reasons why it just makes sense to hire someone to do your marketing, whether you’re a small business or a large corporation.

1. You don’t know what you don’t know
2. You can’t be objective
3. There’s no “plug and play” formula
4. Marketing requires a particular training and knowledge set
5. DIY marketing won’t save you money in the long run.

Consider these points as you decide how to take the next step in marketing your business.