Local Business Transparency & Empathy for the Holidays: Tips + Downloadable Checklist

Posted by MiriamEllis

Your local business will invest its all in stocking shelves and menus with the right goods and services in advance of the 2018 holiday season, but does your inventory include the on-and-offline experiences consumers say they want most?

Right now, a potential patron near you is having an experience that will inform their decision of whether to do business with you at year’s end, and their takeaway is largely hinging on two things: your brand’s transparency and empathy.

An excellent SproutSocial survey of 1,000 consumers found that people define transparency as being:

Open (59%)
Clear (53%)
Honest (49%)

Meanwhile, after a trying year of fake news, bad news, and privacy breaches, Americans could certainly use some empathy from brands that respect their rights, needs, aspirations, and time.

Today, let’s explore how your local brand can gift customers with both transparency and empathy before and during the holiday season, and let’s make it easy for your team with a shareable, downloadable checklist, complete with 20 tips for in-store excellence and holiday Google My Business best practices:

Grab the Holiday Checklist now!

For consumers, even the little things mean a lot

Your brother eats at that restaurant because its owner fed 10,000 meals to displaced residents during a wildfire. My sister won’t buy merchandise from that shop because their hiring practices are discrim… Read More

The 10 Most Significant SEO Metrics You Need To Study and Improve

Understanding how your SEO efforts are actually working requires studying the data created by the traffic you receive after implementing new tactics.

No longer is simply looking at keyword ranking enough to assess the effectiveness of your work. To properly measure the return on investment earned by your SEO practices there are now a wide variety of reports that you need to study.

In this article, we’ll go over the ten most important SEO metrics you should consider when putting together reports that will evaluate your SEO efforts.

#1. Number of Clicks

Starting from the Search Console, you can access a report that will tell you the number of organic clicks your site has received as well as which search queries generated those clicks.  You can compare the number of clicks received from month to month allowing you to determine which search queries are responsible for the most clicks.  This report will also allow you to pinpoint which landing pages are attracting the most clicks and what page elements are driving those clicks.

How to Keep Your Conversion Optimization Process Organized

I have a confession. I am a control freak. I get extremely nervous when I don’t check things off my to-do list for more than a day. I also need to know what my team is doing at every given hour.

I am a big believer in what James Cash Penney said:

No business can succeed in any great degree without being properly organized.

However, there are marketing areas that are extremely hard to organize. Conversion optimization is one of them. There are usually a lot of people and third-party tools involved and many tasks take weeks to complete.

I do have some tricks I am using to get the conversion optimization process more organized and productive. Here you go:

1. Turn the conversion optimization process into actionable checklists with Serpstat.

Conversion optimization is an ongoing process consisting of various steps and tactics. It includes a lot of analyzing, designing and testing. And you can never really think you are done with it.

With that in mind, how can you organize the process to actually get things done?

I am a big fan of to-do lists and checklists.

When it comes to conversion optimization, your task management solution needs to include a solid collaboration component to … Read More

How to Do an Instagram Giveaway: Ideas and Tips

Wondering how to run an Instagram contest? Looking for Instagram giveaway ideas you can adapt? In this article, you’ll find tips and inspiration to help you plan a successful Instagram competition that supports your marketing goals. What Are Instagram’s Rules for Contests? Instagram makes it relatively easy to run contests, compared to Facebook regulations that […]

The post How to Do an Instagram Giveaway: Ideas and Tips appeared first on Social Media Examiner.

… Read More

Visualizing Time: A Project Management How-To Using Google Sheets

Posted by R0bin_L0rd

The short version of this post: Project management is a vital part of our job as marketers, but planning and visualizing projects over time is hard, so I’ve created a set of Google Sheets to make that work easier for you.

I’ve found this system helpful in a number of ways, so I’m sharing my templates here in case it’ll make your day a bit shorter. I’ll start off with a brief overview of what the sheets do, but in the latter section of this post I’ll also go into greater depth about how they work so you can change them to suit your own needs.

If you’d like to skip this post and get straight to the templates, you can access them here (but I’d recommend reading a bit about how they work first):

Planner Version (everything you need to know, plus Gantts)
Stakeholder Version (a cleaner version for bosses, clients, or people doing the work but not project managing)
What-in-God’s-name-have-I-missed Version (combined view of lots of different projects, showing you if you’ve forgotten to tell someone about work, missed a deadline, or over-planned)

It’s worth mentioning: I don’t consider these sheets to be the only solution. They are a free solution that I’ve found pretty useful, but I have colleagues who swear by the likes of Smartsheet and Teamwork.

It’s also … Read More