Content marketing has turned into one of the most important things, in a marketing-sense, that you can do for your business. It is a practice which focuses on engaging and communicating with your customers or future prospects to sell the brand of your organization.

Content marketing is more appealing to your customers and potential prospects when the message is based on them and their needs.  If the content you are sharing is not relevant or valuable to them, why would they care to engage in it?...

Note: Click here to view the new Skoda Minotti Strategic Marketing website.

So after admiring the Skoda Minotti brand all these years, you may be asking yourself “Hey, what’s with the blue? “Isn’t your brand color green?”

Great question and the answer is: Yes…until now. 

Skoda Minotti, like all growing companies, is evolving and as we evolve our brand needs to evolve with us.  Although you may know Skoda Minotti more as a CPA firm, we really are a business advisory firm, offering such services as IT,...

When my invite to the Pinterest community was first accepted, I spent most of my time repinning quotes, decorating ideas, pictures of mustaches (long story!), and funny pictures like this one about “The Google.” Although I still repin those sorts of things for my personal entertainment, I also see how businesses can benefit from incorporating Pinterest into their social media plan by driving traffic to their website and getting in front of the site’s 7.51 million unique visitors.

First things...

Although nearly 1.5 million people visit Pinterest every day, terms like “pinning” and “repinning” sound as foreign today as “tweeting” and “retweeting” did three years ago. As this site gains popularity, understanding this site will become even more important for marketers, especially in the B2C space.

Before we define some basic Pinterest terms, let’s start off by describing the site – it is a social bookmarking site that allows its users to organize images they find online.

• Pin: A pin is an...

Don’t forget to check out part one (keyword selection) and part two (keyword traffic estimation). 

Now that you’ve selected targeted keywords for your AdWords campaign, it’s time to start creating your ads. Google has a specific set of character limits that you must follow in each of your ads –

Title (Blue underlined text): 25 characters

Ad Text: 70 characters

Display URL (Green text): 35 characters

There are also a set of parameters around your ad content including:

• User experience
• Accuracy
• Legal...

Look at any list of the top 10 fears of people and the fear of public speaking will undoubtedly be at the top of any list.  In a world where content marketing is becoming ever more important, the need to not only write the content, but present it, is now even more critical for people looking to develop new business leads and position themselves and their companies as leaders in their respective industry.  In this week’s Marketing Blog, I’ll share some additional tips to giving a presentation. (Cl...

Look at any list of the top 10 fears of people and the fear of public speaking will undoubtedly be at the top of any list.  In a world where content marketing is becoming ever more important, the need to not only write the content, but present it, is now even more critical for people looking to develop new business leads and position themselves and their companies as leaders in their respective industry.  In this week’s Marketing Blog, I thought I would hit on some of the foundational tips to...

Writing web copy that is search engine optimized is an important piece to your website’s overall SEO. Creatively written copy, that uses the right keywords, is no daunting task. But, when done correctly, it can become one of the most important pieces to your online marketing plan.

Creating a search optimized website with separate and specific service pages gives you the opportunity to optimize each individual page for very specific and targeted keywords.

For example, if you had one page for “Market...

In Parts 1 and 2 of our trade show marketing blog we touched on the importance of pre-show planning and at-show strategies that can make or break trade show success. In Part 3 we will cover some post-show activities that are imperative to meeting the show objectives spelled out in your Pre-Show planning. If you missed Parts 1 and 2, click here to review pre-trade show planning and at-trade show strategies.

The show is over, your display is packed and shipped, and your sales team is at the...

In Part 1 of our Trade Show Marketing Strategy blog, we highlighted the importance of quality pre-show planning to maximize return and objectives for show attendance. In Part 2 we will discuss some things you can do while at the show to meet your objectives and improve your visibility. If you missed Part 1, click here to learn more about pre-trade show planning.

While a big part of pre-show marketing strategy is to develop a meaningful show message and outreach program to drive traffic to your...

Trade shows are a unique form of marketing that generally gets sales teams licking their chops at the thought of hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of pre-qualified prospects in the same room for three solid days. And to a large degree this is true. Trade show marketing presents an extremely targeted venue in which to further your marketing strategy - be it to drive sales, generate leads, increase brand awareness, or all of the above.

However, it is important to note a few caveats to this banquet...

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Tips #2: Keyword Traffic Estimation

Don’t forget to check out part one of this series, Pay-Per-Click Advertising Keyword Selection.

Now that you have selected your pay-per-click keywords, you need to get an idea of how many clicks you can plan on receiving to help set your pay-per-click (PPC) budget on a typical day.

For example, let’s say that by using the Google Keyword Tool, you chose the following five keywords (hooded sweatshirts, zip hooded sweatshirts, hooded...

Click here if you missed part one of “Developing a Marketing Budget for 2012.”

How much should I budget for marketing?

This is the big question and one we get a lot. Typically marketing budgets are measured as a percentage of sales. The percentage will vary by industry. Both the Counselors to America's Small Business (SCORE) and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) define the variable for a proper marketing budget to be between 2% and 10% of sales, noting that for B2C, retail and...

Have you put together your 2012 marketing plan? There is still time.

The Coming Year

Moody’s, Goldman Sachs, the Economist and other sources point to 2012 as another year of stagnate growth for the U.S. economy. Most of these sources point to less than 2% growth in GDP. As you know, anything can happen but it appears to be another tough year to grow your business. You need to plan for more of the same and hope for better. 

Part of this planning should include developing your marketing programs and...

On April Fool's Day, 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released the Apple I computer and Apple Inc. was born.  They had one product they manufactured and sold and they were successful enough that they eventually came out with the Apple II a year later.   The rest of Apple’s history as a tech visionary developing groundbreaking products is well documented, but not the intended focus of my blog. What I do want to focus on is the ease at which they were able to leverage their brand in an effort to...

If business owners were asked on a marketing exam: Who is the target audience of your branding efforts? My guess is 9 out of 10 would answer “Our customers.”

That answer would garner only one-third partial credit. 

While it’s a given that brands are developed with the customer in mind, you would be selling yourself short (by about 66%) if your branding efforts stopped there. Your brand does more than just attract customers. It also attracts valuable employees and business partners.

Think about...

Remember the old fable about the ant and the grasshopper? The ant labors all summer long storing up food for the long winter ahead, while the grasshopper spends the warm summer months singing, dancing and playing. Then when the winter arrives, the grasshopper finds itself dying of hunger while the ant is taking inventory of all the food it had stored. The story concludes with the grasshopper, ill prepared for the hardships of winter, struggling for survival and ultimately starving to death.  

Sur...

I have a confession to make. I’m not an order taker. If a client or prospective client instructs me to design an ad, a website, a direct mail piece, et al.,  I’m not going whip out my notepad, or iPad for that matter, and start taking orders like a waiter in a restaurant…I won’t be asking “Do you want a side of SEO with that website”?

I’m a branding guy. I believe that before you can expect to get meaningful results from any kind of marketing tactic (i.e., website, brochure, tradeshow display or...

Over the next several weeks and months, we’ll be running a series of pay-per-click advertising tips to help you get your first pay-per-click campaign up and running or make modifications to improve an existing campaign.

After getting your pay-per-click advertising account setup, the first step to a successful campaign is proper keyword selection. So, how can you find information on the keywords that are going to be the focus of your advertising campaign? Google, of course!

Google provides a...