Best practices, recommendations, and tips for digital marketers

During the COVID-19 pandemic, live streaming and video chat became not just convenient but critical mediums of communication and content delivery. And that continues today. Is your franchise live-streaming? If not, it’s not too late to get started! But before you dive headfirst into live-streaming … Continue reading “Is your franchise live-streaming? 12 tips to look professional”

How creative are your SMS text message marketing campaigns? Are you seizing every opportunity to engage with your subscribers and ultimately boost sales with your ideas? SMS, otherwise known as Short Message Service, is really just texting. And more than 560 billion texts are sent … Continue reading “7 creative ideas for SMS text message marketing campaigns”

You may hear it often these days. Your franchise voice is everything online. It helps people connect with your brand, engage with you and (hopefully) come to trust you. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when … Continue reading “8 steps for finding your franchise voice”

Despite all the new digital marketing platforms coming out, email remains a valuable, effective and inexpensive tool. In fact, email marketing can play a significant role in the success of ecommerce businesses. Essentially, email marketing is a direct marketing channel. It enables businesses to share … Continue reading “6 benefits of email marketing for ecommerce businesses”

Going live on any social media platform can feel intimidating, but if you let fear keep you away from live videos, you’re missing out on an ample opportunity. Live videos capture attention between 10 and 20 times longer than prerecorded, on-demand content, while more than … Continue reading “Going live: 7 tips for any social media platform”

How often do you perform a competitive analysis of your franchise competition? If the answer is “not often” or “never,” your franchise business is missing out on valuable insights.  About 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies practice some form of competitive analysis regularly. A franchise … Continue reading “7 steps to gain insights into your franchise competition”

It’s tough to beat SMS text message marketing when it comes to digital marketing tactics. Text messaging is fast, direct, efficient and relatively inexpensive when compared to other advertising tactics (such as Google Ads). Short message service (SMS) marketing is a form of marketing that … Continue reading “9 do’s and don’ts of SMS text message marketing”

Gathering marketing data is a great first step to understanding your franchise’s target audience and ensuring your campaigns are effective. However, after gathering data, you’ll need to understand that data by being able to read and evaluate it. Evaluation is key to ensuring you cut … Continue reading “How to evaluate your franchise marketing data”

SMS text message marketing is a powerful tool in your digital marketing toolkit with many benefits, but it can feel a little intimidating for small businesses to dive into. SMS, otherwise known as Short Message Service, is really just texting. And more than 560 billion … Continue reading “7 benefits of SMS text message marketing for small businesses”

Email marketing campaigns are still one of the most effective tools in your digital marketing toolkit. For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $40. In addition, email is the main driver of customer retention and acquisition for … Continue reading “10 ways to create email marketing campaigns that convert”

If your business has a mobile app, you have additional opportunities to both engage with your customers and increase overall sales. Mobile apps are powerful tools. About 49 percent of consumers open an app more than 11 times each day, and about 70 percent of … Continue reading “5 strategies to increase sales with your mobile app”

Now more than ever, consumers want businesses to treat them as individuals. Personalization in your digital marketing can help. In fact, personalization allows you to show that you really know your customers and can create unique experiences for them across platforms. Personalized marketing, otherwise known … Continue reading “8 benefits of personalization in your digital marketing”

Email marketing is an important tool in your digital marketing toolkit. Not only is it continuing to grow in popularity, but it’s powerful. About 92 percent of online adults use email, and about 61 percent of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email. … Continue reading “11 do’s and don’ts of email marketing”

It’s impossible to create and execute successful SMS marketing campaigns without measuring key metrics. SMS marketing involves sending promotional campaigns or transactional messages for marketing purposes using text messages. About 81 percent of Americans use text messaging. Text message open rates are as high as … Continue reading “How to measure the success of your SMS marketing campaign”

It can be so easy to simply send an email, but email marketing laws require you to do more than that. While you might be focused on catching any broken links, typos or other email marketing mistakes, non-compliance with email marketing laws is the biggest … Continue reading “6 ways to comply with email marketing laws”

SMS text message marketing is a great way to reach mobile-first consumers, but you can use it to boost your customer retention rate as well. Customer retention refers to the rate at which customers stay with a business for a given period of time. Increasing … Continue reading “5 ways to use SMS text marketing for customer retention”

Great customer service is never set and done. To be great, you have to regularly improve your systems, train your team and collect feedback for future improvements. The effort is worthwhile. Businesses that deliver excellent customer service can expect sales increases of about 20 percent … Continue reading “5 ways to improve your customer service”

The right SEO strategy helps you optimize for search engines so that your content gets seen by potential consumers. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and an SEO strategy refers to the process of planning and implementing steps to improve your organic search engine rankings.  … Continue reading “8 steps to create an effective SEO strategy”

Event planning is much harder than it appears from the outside. But events can also help your business achieve its goals. In fact, about 89 percent of marketers say that events are critical to reaching business objectives.  Event planning centers on the act of organizing … Continue reading “Event planning: 10 tips for stress-free events”

Reddit doesn’t look like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, so advertising on the social media platform might feel intimidating. The website refers to itself as a “network of communities based on people’s interests.” These communities, known as subreddits, enable members to share images, videos and links … Continue reading “7 tips to successfully advertise on Reddit”

Instagram is a must-have social media platform for many businesses, but do you need an Instagram business account? The visuals-first app generates about 1 billion active monthly users and is particularly popular among consumers 34 and younger. Features have diversified since its founding in 2010, … Continue reading “8 benefits of using an Instagram business account (and how to set it up)”

Your brand is your business’s identity. So, your branding is the reflection and culmination of your business’s personality, appearance, voice and overall vibe. It takes about seven seconds for consumers to make an instant decision about whether or not they like and trust your brand. … Continue reading “5 signs that your branding is broken”

Businesses of all sizes consider CRM software as a near-vital tool because of its ability to make communications more consistent, efficient and relevant. CRM (which stands for “customer relationship management”) software gathers customer interactions in one central place to improve the customer experience and overall … Continue reading “6 benefits of using CRM software for small businesses”

Strong customer retention is just smart business. The cost of losing one customer equates to seven times the resources used to convert them. Customer retention is about maintaining your current customer base and increasing loyalty by offering better products or services and other benefits. Customer … Continue reading “6 tips to improve your customer retention rate”

With shopping habits rapidly evolving, it’s more important than ever for your multiple marketing channels to work together to engage consumers and ultimately lead them to purchase from you. Enter omnichannel marketing. Even if customers are in your physical store, about 42 percent of in-store … Continue reading “5 omnichannel marketing tips to help grow your business”

Often the punchline to a joke, Millennial consumers should not be overlooked. Born between 1981 and 1996, creative and tech-savvy Millennials are transforming our marketplace. Millennials care about saving, peer recommendations, reading and researching before they buy and environmentally rewarding experiences. In fact, Millennials were … Continue reading “6 tips for marketing to Millennial consumers”

Even the smallest mistakes in your marketing emails can ruin an entire campaign. There’s nothing worse than the feeling of hitting “send” and then realizing that you sent the wrong link to your entire contact list. It happens more often than you might think. About … Continue reading “Email checklist: 8 things to check before sending”

Regardless of the type of small business you have, an effective and engaging website is critical to your brand’s success. With almost 2 billion websites on the internet and U.S. users visiting more than 130 web pages per day, you have stiff competition to not … Continue reading “11 steps to create an effective business website”

Growth marketing is all about your long-term strategy, but the term itself can lead to confusion regarding its true meaning. Because marketing is what’s done to grow a business, shouldn’t all marketing be growth marketing? The answer is no. Growth marketing is a strategy-based, data-driven … Continue reading “Growth marketing: What it is and 4 ideas to inspire you”

BeReal is one of the latest social media apps to create a buzz. It generated more than 56 million downloads in 2022, catching the attention of TikTok, which launched a feature (TikTok Now) that is reminiscent of what’s making BeReal popular.  But what is BeReal? … Continue reading “6 things you should know about BeReal”

These days, there are two different types of PR: traditional and digital. PR, which stands for public relations, refers to a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and the public. Choosing whether your business should focus on traditional PR or digital … Continue reading “6 differences between traditional PR and digital PR”

If your business is targeting Gen Z consumers, you likely already know that what might work for most consumers won’t necessarily work for this audience group. Roughly speaking, Gen Z includes individuals who were born between 1997 and 2012 and make up about 20 percent … Continue reading “11 ways to better engage with Gen Z consumers”

No business wants a recession to happen, but they are inevitable.  Any shrinking of the economy can spur necessary changes not just in business plans but in your digital marketing strategy as well. Since 1945, the U.S. has gone through 11 recessions officially. While many … Continue reading “12 digital marketing strategy tips during a recession”