Directive Blogs

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.

We tend to focus a lot of our time on this blog talking about the technologies that businesses can (and usually should) use as a part of their operations. However, without clients or customers coming in, there’s only so much good that these technologies can do. That’s why we wanted to briefly touch on a few technologies that can help you attract more people to your business so that all the other IT solutions we recommend can live up to their potential.

Innovation is important to businesses because there are advancements in technologies and strategies that are made all the time that help to improve these businesses’ processes. Although there are several niche business communication strategies to consider—which may apply to your business—we’ve listed the top five universal strategies that all businesses should regard as critical:

Ever notice how some websites don’t change much for years or even decades, while others age like milk? Of course, then there is your own website, which, depending on how you feel about it, will either feel outdated after a couple of years, or you’ll love the design so much that, to you, it’s timeless and never needs a change.

We’re going to look at how web design standards have changed, how to stay ahead of the curve to get the most time out of your website, and talk about some of the more frustrating things that you might need to prepare for with modern websites.

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.

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.

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:

The Google My Business application has assisted business owners in managing their online presence for some time now, having gone through numerous name changes in its time. However, Google has one final change planned for its application. 

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.

As a business owner, you’re proud of your company’s logo because of everything it represents. Do you love your logo enough to get it tattooed on your body? What about your staff? Would they be willing to make such a permanent commitment to their job? Yes, tattoo marketing is a real thing. What can your business learn from this bold marketing trend?

While SEO is critical in helping your website rank higher in the search results, long gone are the days where you focus solely on your keywords. Backlinks are one of the numerous SEO tactics you should explore to drive traffic to your site. Take a moment to learn why backlinks should be a part of your SEO marketing strategy. 

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!

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!

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.

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.

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. 

While there are definitely gimmicks when it comes to technology in the small business (for instance, USB-powered staplers) there are many devices and technologies that have far more utility, although they may not seem to be applicable to all industries. One example would be the digital signage solutions that have grown in popularity. While they may seem to have limited uses outside of retail, there are plenty of ways to use them to your advantage.

Facebook is a powerful networking tool that can help you build relationships with new professionals and introduce your product or service to entirely new markets and groups of people. That is if you know how to use it. Here are five steps you can take to get started with Facebook and use it to build a professional network.

With the holiday shopping season winding down, it's the busiest time of the for data collecting companies that compile information on the purchases you make. Are you aware of the extent that your purchases are being tracked? Knowing about data collection may make you want to buy all of your presents with cash.

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.

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.

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?

Authority. Knowing what your business does well, and using that knowledge, experience, and expertise to increase your company’s position within the market is more crucial for the small business today than ever before. This is because, from a competitive standpoint, the small or midsize business is not able to sport the kind of prices that larger firms can, and still make a profit. One way an organization can utilize this talent to increase the visibility of their offering is by using webinars.

Recently, we have been sharing insights on some best practices regarding social media. This time, we’re going to discuss the primary function of social media: engagement. Engagement is simply how you interact with your audience and whether or not you are able to develop a relationship with them. Engagement is also one of the most important and resource-consuming aspects of using social media as a tool for marketing and the promotion of your services.

Social Media is a tough industry - the only way a good social network can succeed is by being extremely popular, and it takes a lot of criteria for that to happen. A social network site either has it or it doesn't, and Pinterest apparently has it in massive quantities.

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? 

Twitter is a fantastic networking resource for professionals, brands, and businesses. Having a strong presence on Twitter can mean more traffic to your website and an easy way to get in touch with customers and prospects. The hardest thing about diving into social media is knowing what to say. Here's a quick list with a few ideas to get you started.

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!” 

Building a social media strategy can be somewhat troublesome for the modern business. Not only do you not know how it can affect your organization, you also know that your competitors are likely using it. To this end, we’ll go over how your organization’s social media practices can influence 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! 

When engaging in business-to-business marketing, your content plays a huge role in your success. Whether you’re creating social media content, blogging, creating articles for your web pages, creating newsletter content, or even working an in-person event, you need to make sure your content is effectively benefitting your marketing.

We’re here to help, so we’ve compiled some key considerations to make as you shape your content marketing strategy through each of the above tactics.

You’re surely aware of how valuable an asset social media is for your brand, but how much interaction are you really getting on your pages? No matter how many views, there’s always room for improvement. Well, you’ll be relieved to hear that even the large corporations don’t get too many hits on social media, despite the massive numbers in their favor.

How bad would it have been if we instead entitled this article, “Don’t Let Poor Grammar Effect Your Business?” Even though it would’ve been a clever way to make a point about the perils of using poor grammar in business, there would still be a lot of folks who would spot the mistake and write off our company as incompetent. Herein lies the power of using proper grammar.

About the same time that the late six-term Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens was proclaiming that the "internet is not something that you can just dump something on. It's not a big trunk. It's a series of tubes", a phenomenon that would transform the Internet was just starting to go mainstream. Virtual social networking, an idea that had been developed for the better part of a decade was swiftly starting to take a foothold on the web.

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.

Chances are, you've sat through some really exciting and useful webinars. But, there's probably more of a chance that you've sat through some pretty dull ones as well. Have you ever considered hosting your own?

At some point or another you will be asked to present information to a crowd of people. Whether you have to give a presentation about how you can best profit from a bake sale for your local PTA or you're presenting a sales pitch to potential investors, vendors, or clients; using advances in presentation technology and methodology to your advantage can help you make a strong first impression and more importantly, a lasting one. Below are some presentation services that can be used to enhance the content of your demonstration.

Speaking to a crowd, especially one comprised of your peers or potential clients, is a nerve wracking experience. All too often, a speaker will put all his/her effort into a PowerPoint with graphics worthy of James Cameron or distracting animations that spin, sparkle, and pop. As the speaker, you're the focus. Here's a few tips to keep your audience captivated:

You've probably seen these funny barcode-like symbols popping up and wondered if they mean anything. These days they are all over the place - on websites, in magazines, and even in television ads. What are these mysterious glyphs? Should we be concerned? And of course the question on all of our minds, how can I use them to market my business?

Foursquare is a social network of sorts that works like a marketing game. Users run Foursquare on their mobile phones. It uses GPS to pinpoint your location and pulls up stores, restaurants, and other public locations and venues in your vicinity. You can then 'check in' to the place you are at, and it will share it with your friends. It's a service that promotes word-of-mouth marketing!

With today’s global economy, the time and money spent on marketing needs to be stretched pretty thin, and results need to  be tracked carefully so you know how to make the most of a limited marketing budget.  Fortunately, we’re experiencing a worldwide revolution in the form of the way people communicate, share information, and how small businesses can reach their customers.  The Internet has opened up huge possibilities, but the real question is how are customers finding YOUR business, and how can you make it easier to be seen.