As a digital marketing professional, you’ve likely received a host of cold calls and emails during your career about hundreds of digital marketing tools that will “forever change the way you do marketing.” While that can’t be true of all of them, there are some digital marketing tools that are worth paying for.

To many marketers, search engine optimization (SEO) can feel elusive and intimidating. Endless theories are floating around about how to rank higher on search engines and the tools you should use to do so. Some of these theories are contradictory. Throw in ever-changing algorithms of search engines, and strategies for SEO can quickly become outdated.

Blogs are an important facet of any content marketing strategy. When done well, they connect people to your business by way of helpful, entertaining, and relevant writing. But many companies pump out multiple blogs each week, only to find that they’re not seeing the traffic they’d hoped for.

Now that we’ve finally arrived in 2021, there’s cautious optimism for the future. With a unanimously hard 2020 behind us, we look at how the pandemic will affect marketing in the new year, where the advancement of the vaccine is giving many people hope, but there’s still a lot of anxiety and unrest about what’s to come. As marketers, we know that public sentiment and current events greatly affect how we interact with prospects and customers. COVID-19 brought a lot of change to digital marketing in the last year, and it’s important to anticipate what will stay and what will go.

While email may seem an archaic form of marketing compared to social media influencers and newsfeed ads on TikTok, its marketing power may surprise you. As it turns out, two-thirds of customers have made a purchase as a direct result of an email marketing message. And on average, email generates $38 for every dollar spent, leading your business to a better return on investment.

Many sources date the first press release back to 1906, following a Pennsylvania Railroad accident. The agency staff released coverage about the event before journalists could cover it on their own. It's rumored that some newspapers re-published the release nearly verbatim – a brilliant success for the Railroad's PR team.

We all like to think we know our customers. That we have them completely figured out, that surely they think like us, and that we are as familiar with them as we are our own GamGam.

There's an old saying in marketing called The Rule of 7. Discovered by former advertising executives of the 1930s, the Rule of 7 is the average number of times a person must be exposed to your messaging before taking any action. Luckily with a solid social media strategy planned out, this becomes much easier. But it only works if your potential buyer recognizes your brand every single time they see it. For this to happen, your brand needs to be consistent across various topics, no matter the location or situation.

When social media first came out, developing a following and getting likes and shares was the task at hand. It was largely reactive, rather than proactive and responded to the trends of the day, rather than setting trends. As professional marketers expanded the social media space, being proactive and building trends became the pathway for much of the traffic. As this has continued, organic social media has taken a back seat to paid social efforts. As with most endeavors, paid advertising is what grassroots efforts use to go from local hotspot to regional or national trends.

When it comes to a website, many companies either tend to either hammer something out themselves, buy one, and then let it sit. But your website isn't a succulent you buy at the market, set on display, and ignore for months only to find it's blossomed beautifully. Think of your website instead as a garden, one that needs constant tending, with different needs and changes arising with the changing seasons. Likewise, if you ignore its existence, it won't bare you much fruit. But hey, we know you're busy. You don't have time to comb through every possible web factor that could require maintenance.