Directive Blogs

Your Google Reviews are front and center when a prospect starts investigating a product or service and those that provide it. For businesses of all kinds, these reviews are more than just a star rating; they're a powerful testament to your brand's reputation.

We’re not just about building sleek, high-performing websites and crafting compelling content; we’re about empowering you to take control of your entire online presence… and that, my friends, includes the good, the bad, and the sometimes-just-plain-weird world of Google Reviews.

Today, email isn't just for internal memos. When used correctly, it’s a powerhouse tool for growth. It is our humble opinion that technology should do two things: keep your business running and help your business grow.

Here are tech-savvy strategies to master your email marketing and make the most of this powerful tool.

Capturing leads is only the first stop. Turning them into clients? That’s where the real challenge lies.

Success isn’t just about making a good first impression—it’s about maintaining the momentum. A well-crafted email nurture sequence bridges the gap between initial interest and long-term commitment, providing a scalable and strategic way to guide leads through the sales funnel. 

Let me ask you an important question: would you find a statement more impactful if it came from a business or if it was presented from the perspective of one of its clientele?

It's probably the second option. It only makes sense… even if it’s the business distributing it, the fact that someone else’s name is tied to a statement adds significant confidence that the contents are trustworthy. This is precisely why client success stories can be so compelling when featured in your marketing.

Let’s talk about how to use these powerful marketing tools for yourself, but first…

Little can be more frustrating than thinking you’re doing everything right, only for your desired outcome to elude you… for instance, if your marketing prospects aren’t being drawn in.

Let’s explore some potential reasons why your prospects aren’t converting and how you can resolve the issues that may be present. 

Success and failure aren’t just about how motivated you are. Most of us who own and/or operate a business are very detail-oriented, and it’s easy to get tangled up in the small details. Sometimes, getting stuck on the minutiae can really get in the way of launching and succeeding.

Let’s discuss some common pitfalls businesses often get stuck in that prevent them from driving their operations forward. 

It shouldn’t be surprising to think that your prospects—or even businesses you already work with—aren’t going to take you at your word that you and your services are the best option for their needs… as easy as that might make things. No, the hard truth is that you need your marketing to communicate the value your business and its services offer. Let’s go over a few ways you can ensure it does.

Email is a hugely effective tool that you can use to boost your business’ marketing efforts, provided you use them correctly. If misused, however, email marketing can be less beneficial (or worse, actively harmful) to your business’ self-promotion.

Your business’ success is heavily influenced by your marketing. Similarly, your marketing’s success is heavily influenced by how accurately your marketing reaches who you want to be talking to… your prospects and even your current clients, your target audiences. They need your marketing to show them that your values align with theirs and that you’ll be invested in their success.

Email marketing remains one of the most popular ways businesses can nurture leads, build the necessary impressions to convert prospects, and maintain relationships with current clientele. With this popularity, however, comes plenty of competition for attention in recipients’ inboxes. This means you must do everything you can to make your email marketing as effective as possible.

Let’s review ten things we recommend you prioritize as you work toward this goal.

While it might be nice to think that your business can serve “anyone”—after all, being able to serve anyone means that you have the potential to work with everyone—this, unfortunately, isn’t the reality. Even the most accessible businesses will have certain clients that are inherently more valuable than others. These “ideal clients” are critical to identify, so let’s talk about how you can do so.

The value of a good referral should not be underestimated. Not only do they help you acquire a new prospect without the typical marketing investments you would otherwise make, but they also typically enter your marketing funnel much closer to the purchase point than the average lead does.

However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that referrals will start flowing in without some effort on your part. Let’s discuss the processes you must adopt to encourage your clients to provide you with referrals.

In sales, context is everything. Crafting a compelling sales presentation remains a cornerstone of successful business interactions. In today's rapidly evolving landscape, merely delivering information is just not enough. The true measure of a presentation's success lies in its resonance with the audience. For everyone involved in the sales process, understanding this dynamic is crucial for driving meaningful engagement and fostering lasting connections.

A marketing strategy is the building block of a marketing plan. It lays out a clear, well-defined big picture plan to attract customers to your business by specifying long-term objectives, actions to be taken, and marketing tactics used to achieve marketing goals. B2B marketers often struggle to develop successful marketing strategies. 40% of the least effective marketers have no defined marketing strategy, and 56% of B2B marketers in the United States find it difficult to build their brand through the strategies they create.

Your website is the roadway for all digital information about your company’s services, products and vision. Leveraging your website to generate and convert leads is pivotal in today's digital landscape. In this article we will discuss six marketing tools that, when utilized adeptly, can guide potential customers directly to your digital doorstep.

Search engine optimization can be a relatively simple concept while simultaneously being complex and nuanced. On the surface, Google advises us to focus on having a quality website and content to match, while behind the scenes, hundreds of secret metrics are weighed and balanced to deliver your ranking. Then there are the experts who have purportedly cracked the code or figured out the “one easy fix that brings instant success.”

Have you been running those free online SEO audits, and have been disappointed with the results? Instead of fearing your website is trash, take a moment to understand the pros and cons of a free online SEO audit.

In order to effectively market any businessmit is important to have a pretty in-depth understanding of the business as it stands. However, this is often easier said than done. That being said, there is a helpful framework you can use to greatly simplify the process and ensure that you accomplish this level of understanding: the five C’s of marketing.

Businesses have been able to create specific pages to represent themselves on Facebook since November of 2007, opening the door for many great opportunities. If you haven’t established a presence for your business on the social network, or you haven’t fully utilized it to this point, you’re missing out.

Let’s run through three reasons that a Facebook presence is an excellent asset for your business to have in support of your marketing efforts.

There is no denying that SEO can seem to be a little... nebulous at times. However, there are many ways to measure if SEO is working for your business: your analytics, search position, and of course conversions. Despite these tangible measurements, many businesses don’t feel their SEO is working. Before you call it quits, here are some questions to answer before you give up on your SEO.

Email marketing is a hugely useful effort when you’re trying to accomplish any of various business initiatives, and there are plenty of ways that you can make it even more useful. Let’s run through some of our favorite email marketing tips that aren’t challenging at all to implement if you’re committed to enhancing your efforts through this medium.

There are a lot of reasons that website traffic can fluctuate. Sometimes, it has little to do with your actual website, and more to do with outside forces. Let’s take a look at some of the things that can cause major ebbs and flows in your website traffic and analytic reports.

If you’ve made it this far into our series, good for you, you’re on your way to finishing mastering your Google Business Profile.  For the last segment of our series, let’s continue our discussion on Google Business profiles and how to really make your profile yours, and how to use it for engagement from your audience!

Recently, Google has updated its requirements to run local ads from 1 review to 5 reviews. If you’ve been neglecting collecting reviews, now is the time to start, as they increase the value of your marketing efforts.

If you’ve been following our series, you're aware we’ve been exploring Google Business profiles and the ways you can best optimize your profile to suit your business’ needs. Now, we are going to explain how to get started with claiming your business’ profile.

Your business’ Facebook Page is about as important of a marketing tool for your business as your website is. For some of your prospects, your Facebook page is their introduction to you and your business. With that being the case, you, no doubt, want to make not only a good impression on your clients and prospects, but you’ll also want a URL that is easy to market and share.

When it comes to Google Business Profiles and Google’s algorithm your business’ visibility may depend on how good your business’ profile is. We further explain how to optimize your profile to not only comply with the practices demanded by the almighty Google Search algorithm but also provide searchers with the exact information they need. 

When it comes to your business’ visibility online, your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy plays an absolutely critical role. While SEO is influenced by a lot of different factors, we wanted to focus on one way you can boost it: your Google Business profile.

Knowing which services your business should market can seem like a guessing game, but it doesn’t have to be. If you understand and take advantage of market trends, you can tailor your marketing strategy to target your audience, drive traffic to your site, and convert leads.

Apple’s release of iOS 15 and macOS Monterey will offer a new feature called Mail Privacy Protection. If an Apple Mail user enables this feature, it will limit the ability for marketing software providers, like Mailchimp, to accurately determine the following:

When we discuss traditional marketing strategies, we usually refer to any marketing that pushes services or products to consumers. This push is accomplished by interrupting what a person is doing to get their attention. For example, a commercial interrupts the show you’re watching, or an article has an ad in the middle of the content, forcing you to read the ad. The goal of these interruptions is to continually push a product in front of you (also known as the rule of seven).

Hopefully, you aren't joining us mid-conversation, but if you are, make sure you get caught up first by reading our blogs "Marketing Guide Part 1 of 4: Your Marketing Budget" and "Marketing Guide Part 2 of 4: The Bare Essentials" before continuing on.

Social media allows businesses to reach millions of potential customers all over the world. However, most people don't want to be 'marketed' to. Moreover, they have various methods to tune out your message and your business from their Facebook feed. Take a moment to learn how to use social media to create leads without giving the impression you're 'marketing.'

The top question many businesses ask is how to find qualified leads. In today’s marketplace, having a website, and expecting the dollars to roll in is a fool’s errand. There is more competition than ever before, and business owners are less likely to seek out new ways to spend money. You need to put yourself in front of them.

Looking to rank your website higher, but not sure where to start? Here are fourteen frequently asked questions that should better help you understand what SEO is and how it can help your business attract traffic to your website, increase your rank, and ultimately generate leads.

Your website is the primary marketing tool for your business, and as such, it must look and operate as expected. It has become a pretty standard practice for smaller businesses to use prebuilt WordPress or Joomla templates as opposed to paying a designer to build a custom website from scratch. It saves money, and it gets you, essentially, the same end result. However, not all templates are created equal. An inferior template or theme will end up costing you in the end.

Many businesses believe that, as long as they have some keywords, they have an SEO plan in place. Moreover, they feel that once they have an SEO plan in place, they are done and if they don’t rise in placement then SEO doesn’t work. The reality is SEO isn’t a strategy, it’s a tactic, and SEO requires the support of other tactics in order to be successful. Here are three reasons why SEO might not be working for your business.

The goal of SEO and marketing is to drive traffic to your website for you to introduce them to your services and convince them to take a chance with you. However, while SEO can drive traffic to your site, it can’t make visitors stay if your website is out of touch with user intent.

Print marketing is alive and well and sending direct mail pieces through the mail can be an effective way to target leads, prospects, and clients.

Continuing our discussion from our previous blog, ”Marketing Guide Part 1 of 4: Your Marketing Budget”, let's discuss the basics of what your marketing should entail.

When it comes to search results, all search is local. The more connected you are to your community, the better your chances are to rank higher in local search results. While there are a variety of steps to increase your local search marketing, the most basic, but critically important, is to ensure that Google knows where your business is. If your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) isn’t consistent throughout your presence on the internet, there is a chance that you may not appear in your localized search results.

In this four-part blog series, we’re going to talk about what it takes to market and grow your SMB. Throughout this series, we’re going to cover the following topics:

Marketing often tends to get put on hold in favor of other aspects of running a business. Doing this eventually costs you later on. If you're going to have to market your business anyway, there is no real reason to put it off. In fact, there are several reasons to market your business. We’ll save you some time and not overwhelm you with all of them. Here are two major reasons why you should be marketing your business:

Is your business website not generating as many leads as you hoped? Chances are your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is focused on what keywords are and not what they do. Keywords are a starting point for SEO, not the end, and certainly not the only factor in making SEO work for your business. Here are four tips to help you better understand how to use SEO as part of your business Marketing Plan.

As the owner of a business, one of your number one tasks is to grow your business. Simply put, without the revenue new contacts bring in, you’ll likely grow stagnant. While word of mouth is great, there is a limit to how many people you can meet. You have to market, advertise, and promote your services to reach a wider audience. In terms of reach, social media can provide access to a nearly unlimited source of leads. 

The world is ever-changing and the marketing world isn’t exempted from that steady change. To keep your marketing up-to-date, we’ve summarized five digital marketing trends that will be key in 2020. Let's look ahead!

When you market your business’ services you want to make sure you are marketing effectively! With too broad a target market, you could be wasting your marketing efforts. You want to narrow your marketing focus - so try target marketing. By doing this you will be breaking your marketing into groups. Then you will narrow those groups down, to those that would need your product or services the most. 

Marketing has two umbrella classification that most methods fall under, inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Here are five inbound marketing methods that we recommend using to market your business!

Marketing your business may seem like a huge endeavor, or that you need to be a marketing mastermind to actually effectively market your business, but that is not true. If done right, marketing can be done without any stress or hassle. Where do you start? With a plan of course!

Marketing is an integral part of the business process. If your business isn’t allocating any time to marketing, then your business isn’t growing. However, if you allocate too much time to marketing, you take time away from other aspects of the business process. You can escape this trap by utilizing your time marketing effectively and efficiently.   

Here are 4 ways you can optimize your marketing to save time!

So, you have a brand new website that offers some pretty outstanding products/services, and now you have the expectation that it is going to sell, sell, sell. Great products, after all, are the best marketing you can have. Let me tell you first so you don’t have to hear it from someone else…that is not enough.

The marketing term “brand” has very literal roots, as it comes from the long-antiquated practice of branding livestock with a symbol that signified who owned that particular animal. Nowadays, however, “brand” implies much more than just a company’s ownership in its name or logo--it also suggests the personality and culture that a company exhibits and embraces. A brand, by design, is meant to shape how a company will be perceived by the public and is therefore a precious and fragile thing that requires careful maintenance. However, once started, developing a comprehensive brand identity and corresponding activity is fairly simple.

Valentine’s Day is a day famous for love, expressions of affection, and chocolate. As such, it may not be obviously apparent how the holiday lends itself to marketing your business to other businesses. However, there is potential for the holiday of love to stir up some action for your company.

Marketing your business is one of the most crucial factors to its success. Unfortunately, it can also be one of the most expensive. To avoid this, you must plan a budget for your marketing initiatives. What follows is a step-by-step guide to crafting a budget that best fits your needs as a company.

If you were to rank the pages of your website by importance to your clients, your first instinct might be to put your more personal pages--like your About Us and Staff pages--somewhere near the bottom of the list.

That would be a mistake.

As the old saying goes, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” However, it may sometimes seem that your clients could use a refresher course in this virtue, especially while they provide feedback into your services. However, if you put it to the right use, even the harshest criticism can be used to help out your marketing efforts.

Having a well-managed list is a critical component to making the most of your marketing strategy. However, building and maintaining a list can be challenging if the right strategies aren’t employed. In order to optimize your marketing, it helps to know how to best put these strategies into play. 

There’s this off-handed idea that you only need public relations if you or your company has made some type of mistake. Kind of how no one knows about a celebrity’s PR rep until they’ve done something wrong - like cheated, lied, stolen, etc. Nowadays, that’s no longer the case. You don’t only want to be seen when something goes wrong and you have to fix it. The trick with public relations is to put enough flame-resistance out there beforehand to help lessen the intensity when something does go wrong. Your public relations are the only way you can have any control over public opinion, so you need to be sure to implement a strategy along with your marketing.

You’ve been nurturing this lead for months now. You’ve spent a lot of time, effort, and money trying to convince the business decision maker of this company to start doing business with you. But, just as you think they’re about to convert, they disappear. After you do some further research, you find out that another local managed service provider snatched them up.

A call to action, CTA, is a clear instruction designed to provoke an immediate response. Whether you say something like “call now” or “find out more”, you’re attempting to convince your audience to delve further into your site or services, without being forceful or demanding. You don’t want your audience to feel like you’re telling them what to do, but rather offering suggestions and assistance to better themselves. After all, when faced with “you’re not doing this correctly so you need to click here now” or “for more information on how to increase your website traffic, click here”, which are you more likely to choose?

Marketing is incredibly important for your business’ success, but only if your marketing is reaching your target audience. How do you do this? You need to relate to your clients and potential clients. It’s like when you’re looking for a new sitter for your child, you don’t pick the first person you talk to and your clients aren’t going to just pick you because they see you first. You’re going to interview and talk to the potential sitters and see which seems like the best fit for your child - who likes to go outside and play, who knows CPR and actually gets along with your child. The same thing goes for your clients and potential clients - they want to make sure you value the same things they do and that you care about them.

Chances are, you’ve received direct mail marketing, and it may have led you to consider utilizing it as a marketing tactic yourself, but you might have questioned how effective direct mail would be, and how you could possibly track its return on investment. The good news is that (if planned correctly) direct mail can have a significant, measurable influence on your marketing.

When marketing your business, the general wisdom is that inbound marketing is a good thing to include in your overall strategy. This is because it effectively draws in your most interested audience, in addition to usually being more cost-effective than most outbound avenues. Today, we’ll focus on what your inbound strategy should be based on, as well as a few actions to take as you implement it.

As any business owner would tell you, a satisfied client or customer tends to be a loyal client or customer. The right marketing initiatives and activities can help to maintain that satisfaction, which is a crucial element in business. In today’s blog, we’ll review why it is so important to nurture your customer/client satisfaction, as well as how to measure it.

One of the best things about marketing is that it is a very fluid process, heavily informed by how an audience reacts and responds to an initiative. This means that it is very important that you identify what marketing choices will optimize your impact. The process of A/B testing can help with this.

Here, we’ll discuss A/B testing in the context of email marketing to set a familiar scene for our examples.

Whenever a major holiday is coming up, you’re likely confronted with multiple reminders of it in your daily lives. You may see commercials on TV, receive emails from companies, get flyers in the mail. You’ll see specialized packaging for brands you buy every day that reflects the upcoming holiday. It makes sense why companies are doing this - holidays celebrated by the general population give a business an excuse to get in contact with the consumer. And, this often leads to an uptick in sales.

You can do the same for your small business. The key to succeeding with holiday marketing is framing your marketing correctly in terms of your language and the imagery you use.

Marketing collateral is a collection of media that is used to support the sales of a company’s products or services. The primary purpose of marketing collateral is to showcase your business’ products and services in an informational but attractive way, while at the same time expanding your credibility. The collateral you use should support your overall marketing efforts.

A logo is one of the most potentially powerful elements of a company’s branding. We say “potentially” because there are many ways that a logo can be designed, and a misstep or poor choice can make it ineffective. However, how can you make the right choice if you don’t even realize that there’s a choice involved?

When enacting a marketing strategy, it is of considerable benefit to pay attention to metrics—key data and measurements that can provide you with invaluable insights. However, not all data qualifies as a metric, and not all metrics will make sense for all of your initiatives. As a result, it is crucial that you identify the metrics and key performance indicators that apply to each initiative.

The 80/20 marketing rule is based on a century-old economic principle that, despite drastic economic and technological changes over the past century, continues to be effectively leveraged by businesses of all sizes and industries. Conceived in 1906 by famed Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, the Pareto principle observed that about 80% of Italy’s wealth belonged to 20% of the population.

Twitter has been transformed by the B2B marketing community by offering another platform to engage with your audience, to address their questions, to contribute valuable knowledge, to accentuate what your company stands for. Every day there are opportunities that you could be embracing from being active on social media. Whether you turn these opportunistic moments into high-quality leads, well that is your prerogative.

After witnessing the viral social media impact of United Airlines most recent disaster involving forcefully removing a passenger from an overbooked airplane -- we figured it would be a good time to talk about what you can do to successfully manage a social media disaster. So, like they always say “Don’t be scared, be prepared!” 

Part 7 of 7 - Expand your Reach with Lookalike Audiences on Facebook [Series]

Facebook Advertising is an excellent resource for business owners. Everything you need to run a successful advertising campaign is all in one place, including your audience. Did you run a successful advertisement, and aren’t sure where to turn? Re-run that campaign to the same audience, well it’s clone, with Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences!

Part 6 of 7 - Which Ad Works Best on Facebook? A/B Testing; [Series]

Facebook Advertising is a great way to raise brand awareness and increase your Facebook following. Sometimes your first advertisement might not yield the response you were hoping for. Wait! Don’t get rid of it, rework it with A/B testing.

Part 5 of 7 - Measuring the Performance of your Facebook Advertisement  [Series]

ROI is always top of mind for business owners. Often it is difficult to calculate an accurate ROI for social media marketing. Luckily, Facebook makes tracking ROI simple with Ads Manager. The following will help you review the success of your Facebook Advertisement using Facebook’s Advertising Metrics (KPI’s - Key Performance Indicators).

Part 4 of 7 - Determining Your Facebook Advertising Budget [Series]

In the first part of this series, you may remember us discussing the affordability Facebook offers businesses. In fact, that is one of the many reasons Facebook advertising has become so successful. Any budget can be supported, but how far can your budget take you? 

A candidate with a great campaign strategy will, more than likely, win the majority vote in an election. The same is true for your marketing campaigns! If you’re not constantly and consistently monitoring and refining your campaigns, it will be incredibly detrimental to your company winning the majority of the clients or potential clients you’re targeting and hinder your marketing success.

Part 3 of 7 - Creating an Ad [Series]

Facebook Ads have the ability to transform your company and dramatically increase your leads without destroying your budget. If you want to reach 1.55 billion Facebook users that could potentially turn into your clients, then Facebook Advertising is right for you. The following will tell you the preliminary steps you need to know to create a Facebook Advertisement of your very own! 

Part 2 of 7 - Terminology [Series]

Even for an experienced marketer Facebook Advertising can be a little daunting without first understanding the basics. The first real step to learning anything new is understanding the terminology. When you’re setting up your first advertisement you’ll hear things like “custom audiences”, “impressions”, and “auto bid” and even in the appropriate context there might still be some confusion. The following is a brief overview of commonly encountered Facebook Advertising terminology to assist you in your Facebook Advertising endeavors.

Part 1 of 7 - Why should I Advertise on Facebook? [Series]

You might be a bit, or a lot, skeptical of Facebook, not to mention using it for Advertising purposes. You’ve probably heard horror stories of a people losing money by advertising on Facebook. If so many people are losing money with advertising on facebook then why has it grown by 680% since 2010? It’s because it works! Want to know why it works?

Your content can serve a variety of purposes. It, of course, pulls traffic to your site and provides value to your visitors, giving them a reason to return and bringing you closer to a contact point. However, content can, and unavoidably will, also give your readership an impression of the “personality” of your company, through a variety of aspects. Of course, as a reasonable person, you want your website to describe your business in a way to make as favorable of an impression as possible on those readers who very well could become customers in the near future. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you wish to get a complete examination of what message you are sending to your readership, here are some steps you need to follow.

There is a misconception that after developing a campaign, your work is finished. People have the belief that once completed they will have the ability to run the campaign continuously, and continue to get leads. Campaigns are essentially a process of tasks that are carried out with the intent of improving the awareness of goods or services. Just like any process, the campaign will need to be refined, and repaired before being used again. The following is a quick look at the cycle that every campaign, regardless of type or size, should go through:

As a business, you know that there are tons of people out there who have no clue about the products and services that make up their daily lives. As a business they trust, you’re responsible for educating your clients about the numerous aspects of your services, as well as informing them about how they are helping them accomplish their business’s goals.

You may have realized that marketing and advertising tactics are shifting toward reaching mobile leads. Even superstar companies like Google and Facebook are delegating more marketing dollars to their mobile marketing budgets after a discovery that nearly one-fifth of Google's revenue comes from mobile searching. Here are three ways your company can start up your mobile marketing initiative.

Mobile technology use is growing at such a fast rate that it's proving to be more than a trend. In the U.S., 56% of adults own a smartphone, and for businesses with an Internet presence, 31% of conversions took place over a mobile device last year. This mobile revolution has huge implications for how your business reaches new customers.