The pandemic has prompted businesses to put longstanding assumptions to the test. Quarantine has revealed that many operating principles were more like unquestioned habits. Companies are reconsidering everything—including where they get the marketing help they need.
Category: Business Development
A Path to Rapid Revenue Recovery
In a previous article, we wrote about the McKinsey & Company roadmap as a tool to Rapid Revenue Recovery. Now we’re building on their advice to act quickly by providing five actions you can take now. We believe these are smart investments of your marketing resources that will pay off as we move into the new normal, whatever that may bring.
Planning now for a healthy recovery in the post-COVID era
The world changed and so did marketing. Where do we go from here? First, we were all just trying to keep our balance (along with our health) as the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic sank in. Businesses took defensive measures to limit losses in revenue, employees and customers. Work from home and adoption of […]
Key things to know about PPC keywords.
In order to get the word out about your business, you need to use certain organic keywords to attract the attention of Google and everybody else. But the keywords you use for Pay Per Click campaigns (e.g. Google Ads) could be different from the ones you use for organic search engine optimization (SEO). Below, we […]
Why we diagnose websites before fixing them
It sounds obvious—of course we should diagnose first. But many new clients—fed up with their sites—ask us to skip that part because they can just tell us what’s wrong. Here’s why that’s a bad idea. Maybe a product image isn’t showing correctly, or a bunch of links lead to 404 pages. We understand the urgency—but […]
California Consumer Privacy Act Begins in January
This January, the California Consumer Privacy Act will restrict how companies collect and use data. RLM has a solution to help you stay safely in compliance. CONSUMERS ARE INCREASINGLY CONCERNED AND DISTRUSTFUL ABOUT THE COLLECTION AND MANAGEMENT OF THEIR PERSONAL DATA ON THE INTERNET. After headlines about Target, Equifax, Capital One, Marriott, Yahoo, eBay, Heartland […]
5 things to improve your website’s UX in the age of zero attention span.
Website owners must continually improve their user experience by making everything easier, faster, and more rewarding—because people are really impatient. Indeed, a study determined that goldfish can pay attention longer than humans. (No details on the experiment, but if it involved measuring how long a person could focus on a flake of fish food, it […]
Things website owners should know about malware. (And a few notes on those weird names.)
Hackers have devised any number of ways to get their digital destroyers to find cracks in websites. Below we take an illuminating overview of malware, including a few observations on those weird names. Viruses and malware are here to stay. We recently notified our website hosting customers that we were installing crucial updates on their […]
4 Trends that are Affecting Business Planning and Investment in Websites: Trend #4: Competitive Spend is Increasing
Businesses are investing more to acquire page rank and ad position – because it works. In our previous articles in this series, we cited 3 important contributors to the need to budget for ongoing website maintenance and marketing: increased security requirements, expanding complexity in website structure, and rapidly evolving SEO. Each of those factors demand […]
4 Trends that are Affecting Business Planning and Investment in Websites: Trend #3 – SEO is Harder
The secret to SEO is that there is no secret. Doing it well means doing many things well—consistently. “I used to outrank all of my competitors,” a prospective client told us. “And now I’m barely on page one. I don’t know what happened.” He wanted a new website, and he wanted it to appear at […]
4 Trends that are Affecting Business Planning and Investment in Websites Trend #2 – More Features, Less Hassle
Your customers expect your site to be a breeze. Here’s how to deliver. Designers and developers are always cramming new features into their sites as bandwidth gets cheaper and devices more powerful. Each feature is an improvement (at least in theory)— but a truckload of improvements can destroy your site’s user experience. We get spoiled […]
4 Trends that are Affecting Business Planning and Investment in Websites Trend #1: Security
Small businesses are realizing that hackers aren’t snobs about who they attack. They just want in. And they’ve learned that small to medium sized businesses are easier prey. Easier because of the dangerous delusion that no cybercriminal would try to hack, say, The Kupcake Korner when they could be hacking Pillsbury and its vast, flour-begotten fortune. […]
4 Trends that are Affecting Business Planning and Investment in Websites
Businesses are waking up to the costs of leaving their websites untended—and the returns they reap when they budget for regular SEO and content updates. The days when you could put a site in place, do some SEO so you’ll show up in a search, and then let it coast, are extinct. This is the […]
Mobile apps can help grow your business. Here’s how.
Not so long ago, only huge corporations and nationally-recognized brands were interested in building their own mobile apps. Nowadays, though, companies of all sizes are using their own mobile apps to keep their customers engaged on the go. With mobile app revenue slated to hit $189 billion in the next decade, there’s never been a […]
Website ADA Compliance: Should You Be Worried?
Understanding website accessibility The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is one of America’s most comprehensive pieces of civil rights legislation. Established in 1990, the ADA lays out detailed standards for public accommodation for the disabled, among other things. As the digital world began to evolve, a new question began to arise: Does the ADA apply […]
How to Drive More Business through LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms
B2B sales get easier with LinkedIn lead generation forms. Ever tried to fill out a long, boring web form on your mobile phone? One glance at a dozen boxes to fill out makes you want to revisit that how-to video on getting rid of carpet stains. That’s why we’re psyched about the new LinkedIn lead […]
Watch Out for “The Guy”
“So, who’s managing the back end of your web site?” “Oh, we got a guy.” And thus strike the gongs of doom. More often than we’d like, clients come to us because they used “A guy.” It conjures images of a self-taught, one-man shop working out of his basement to make websites on the cheap. […]
3 Great Secondary Marketing Research Resources
Research and data are the lifeblood of great marketing. When you conduct marketing research, you can go two ways. You can either gather primary research data, which is new information specifically collected for your immediate research needs. Or, you can use secondary marketing research sources, or data that’s collected by others. The information you need […]
Business Tip: Prepare for the Holidays in Summer
You’re probably familiar with the phrase “Christmas in July”, a phrase used loosely to describe summer indulgences. It holds an actual function for countries in the Southern hemisphere, whose seasons are reversed. And though we find ourselves on the top half of the planet, we are thinking about the holidays even in the 90+ degree […]
Do we ever say no to clients? Yes. Here’s why.
Is the client always right? Well…no. Here’s how to spot when a client is going against their own best interests, and how to say no (politely). How to say no to a client? And when is it appropriate to do so? Sometimes, it isn’t appropriate. For instance, consider this scenario. Client: Shouldn’t the email blast […]
Is a Short-Sighted Marketing Strategy Limiting Your Business?
The most popular definition of marketing, according to a quick Google search, is “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.” This definition, while practical, covers a common, but short-sighted perception of the role of marketing. By this description, companies make a product or service, and it’s the […]
Responding to Client Feedback: Unreasonable Responses to Reasonable Requests
How agencies should respond to client feedback—and how they shouldn’t In our first discovery meeting with a new client, we discovered how badly the company’s previous web design company had treated it. As a new website had taken shape, the client had posed reasonable questions concerning some of the creative decisions made by the designers. Among […]
What is Branding, and How is it Different from Marketing?
What is Branding? Branding is the ongoing activity that creates experiences and strengthens the bonds between people and a company. In other words, it’s taking a brand and making something positive happen with it. It’s a verb. So the deeper question than “what is branding” is, what’s a brand? What’s this thing we’re going to […]
NC Businesses: Today’s Marketing is Complex
We wanted to learn what’s important to NC businesses when it comes to marketing. So we conducted an informal survey to discover common threads of thought. If you’ve ever felt like the tidal wave of new marketing technologies and media is overwhelming, you’re not alone. NC businesses report their top marketing challenges are generating leads, […]
