Smart Marketing Blog

I Launched My Website, Now What?

Data-Driven Web Design and 7 Key Metrics You Should Track You’ve spent months redesigning your website and it’s finally live. While it may be tempting to just launch it and leave it on autopilot and return to your regular marketing routine, the real ROI comes from your ability to make your website work for you over the long term. If your website is the valuable, 24-hour-a-day employee in your marketing organization, you can’t just let it perform on autopilot.

Want to Market Against Your Competitors? Proceed Carefully

Remember when you were young, and there was that kid who spent more time dissing you or others than making something of themselves? Maybe you wanted to let them have it, but you knew (or maybe your parents gave you some advice) that it was best to take the high road and focus on your strengths and success. There is some wisdom in this childhood scenario for grownups running businesses, product lines, and service areas, who are competing for awareness, customers, and marketshare. In every market, every town, every application space, you are going to face competition. And that's a good thing - for companies and consumers. But maybe you are considering making a move to directly market against your competitor. Is this a good idea? The answer is, maybe, but be careful. Let's look at a a recent example to help illustrate some upsides and downsides for consideration: Microsoft's recent ad campaign against Google in the mainstream business press. Here is one of their ads: Microsoft ad, Text to the right

Infographic: Top 5 Findings from the 2019 SMFE Research Report

Planning without researching is just guessing. Strategizing your marketing spend this year without taking a look at what marketing research says is like playing darts with your marketing budget. Smart marketers research their industry, competitors, and customers so they best understand how to reach and sell to them.  

Landing Pages: Best-Practices and Benchmark Metrics

Content may be the foundation of your inbound marketing strategy, but landing pages are the vehicle that converts visitors into contacts and leads. You could have the greatest content offers on your site, but if your landing pages are mediocre, you won’t get visitors to complete your forms.

Why Using a DIY Website CMS Costs More in the Long Run

These days there are almost countless solutions for getting a website designed, developed, and published for the world to see. From companies like Squarespace or Wix that provide easy DIY website building tools to the most popular CMS platforms like Wordpress that power about 28% of all websites, and everything in between; there’s arguably too many choices at first glance when things are marketed as low-cost or “free”. However - it’s tough to trust the future of your company or organization’s digital presence to others that offer those solutions with those pricing structures when what’s needed is a singular and truly robust digital marketing platform that you can rely on for meaningful results. Here’s three reasons why those low-cost or “free” website solutions may not be the best bet for your company or organization.

Domain Authority: What It Is and How to Improve

One of the foundational marketing projects TREW recommends to our engineering clients before ever writing a piece of content or website code is SEO strategy and topic cluster development. With an inbound approach to marketing we typically want to see your organic traffic comprising of at least 50% of your overall site visits followed by direct (brand awareness) and referral (earned inbound links) traffic. Because of this, your content plan and web pages should be informed by your topic cluster development.

How SEO Results In More Than Just Web Traffic

In the beginning of search engine marketing, marketers stuffed their websites with keywords and links, attempting to convince Google to place them at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) goals consisted of getting found online and getting clicks. Traffic was key, and lead generation was an afterthought. A decade ago, the creation and manipulation of content on a web page was based on what Google wanted to see, not necessarily what readers wanted to see.

7 Best Practices for Using Imagery on Your Website

The biggest web challenge today is designing for a dwindling human attention span. Thanks to smart phones, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds from 2000 to 2015 -- according to a study by Microsoft. The effective use of graphics on your website can immediately grab users attention, communicate to your audience what you stand for, and present your company’s personality. In addition, imagery SEO (search engine optimization) done right can boost your search engine rank and actually attract new organic visits to your website.

What to Expect During a Website Redesign

You've finally decided to bite the bullet and redesign your website and you're ready to dive right in and get it done. The last time you updated your site (10 years or more ago), it was a fairly simple task. Pick a WordPress template, hire your nephew who's in college to develop it, purchase a domain from Go Daddy, slap up a few pictures and voila -- your new site was live in a matter of weeks. Easy peasy!

Measuring Website Performance Through Web Analytics

If your website is a valuable, 24-hour-a-day employee in your marketing organization, you can’t just let it perform on autopilot. You need to keep track of your web metrics and analytics and spend time analyzing what these metrics mean. Before making any changes to your site's content, navigation or design, you want to dig into your analytics to measure how well your site is performing and identify areas you could improve to give users a better experience.