SEO is great for a number of reasons. It delivers cumulative results, makes people feel like they’re choosing you, and requires a melding of creative and technical skills. “But SEO has also taught many of us some pretty terrible marketing lessons, and we need to be careful to sift those out if we want to […]

By Lauren Alexander, VP of marketing, Underground Elephant

Whatever industry you are working in, effectively using your leads is a crucial part of keeping your business afloat. Acquiring good leads often comes at a considerable expense of time and money. But all too often, leads are squandered because they are lost in the shuffle or go stale before being contacted.

Wishpond, a company that helps run social campaigns, has assembled a nifty infographic showing the state of content marketing in 2013. More specifically, the infographic offers an overview of how companies are using the marketing strategy and how consumers are interacting with it. “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and […]

Local advertising could be a big boon for marketers who know how to do it well. Part of knowing how to do it well is not believing some common myths about local advertising. In a guest post for MediaPost, Lori Chavez, vice president of Marketing Local Corp., clears up four such myths: –

Some companies out there are suffering partly because they spend too much money on advertising and not enough money on hiring help to create landing pages that actually convert and help to achieve desired business goals. Landing pages are necessary because without them, websites can become a bit confusing for visitors. They might click on […]

The rumors were true: Today Instagram announced the addition of videos to its popular photo-sharing app. On top of being an obvious response to the growing popularity of Twitter’s Vine app, this is another confirmation that the era of video is surging. Here’s the skinny: Users of the Instagram app can tap on the camera […]

Constant Contact recently released the findings of a survey of 917 small-business participants to see how running a small business today is different than it was five years ago. One of the major findings is that the use of online marketing tools has grown. The survey, “Small Business: Then and Now,”

Google has made it known that it’s cracking down on link manipulation and poor user experiences by rolling out its Penguin and Panda algorithm updates. Now the search engine is making it clear in their advice to webmasters. Search Engine Land highlights the subtle change in wording in Google’s Webmaster Help section regarding “Ranking.” The […]

Creating a call-to-action (CTA) button is simple enough; creating a truly effective CTA button, on the other hand, is quite a difficult task. It involves a number of factors, including colors, fonts and placement, among other things. To help marketers get a better idea of what they need to do in order to craft CTA […]

Dan Zarrella, the self-proclaimed “social media scientist” of HubSpot, has put together an infographic based on his research on social calls-to-action (CTAs) on blogs, Twitter and Facebook. He’s found that social CTAs yield increased action rates everywhere he’s looked. Here are some of the interesting findings: –