Brand & Capture

Owning a business can be overwhelming and time consuming. It's easy to get caught up in day-to-day tasks and let ourselves go. As months go by, we forget to take care of the obvious, our core. What’s the core of your business? Your website. No other facet of your business works as hard as your company website. It’s the spokesperson, lead generator and community engager of your business. Here are a few healthy ways to get your website back into shape for summer.

Why would you ever consider paying more than a few bucks a month for a website? It seems like a new low-cost alternative-in-the-cloud pops up every week. Most of them have a nice, easy-use-use CMS and plenty of bells and whistles to make your inexpensive website "pop". Most either allow you to blog or are centered around a blog, like Wordpress. So why not jump on one of these low-pain, low-cost website solutions?

I can’t tell you how many people I hear grumbling about their website’s inbound marketing bounce rate.  It’s always too high.  It doesn’t matter if it’s 10% or 90% the bounce rate is never good enough.  The question I always get asked is “what should it be?” My answer is always the same, “Well, that depends.”

Whether you’ve had the same website since 1999 or you just dropped $15k on a shiny new one if any of the below describes your company’s website you could be in trouble.  Internet marketing has become so advanced and competitive that businesses can’t afford to get it wrong anymore.

As a graphic designer, we all strive to provide our clients with the most effective and up-to-date website designs, but, over time, there is a need to come back and look at how we can change the elements, content and design to keep our clients’ online image from becoming stale.

We recently completed rebuilding our website using the Hubspot Inbound Marketing software platform. That’s two complete website makeovers in the course of one year. Why did we decide to rebuild, and why did we choose Hubspot?

In my recent post “Time to Change Internet Marketing Horses” I talked about the ineffectiveness of using single methods, such as SEO by itself, to accomplish marketing goals. I suggested that Inbound Marketing provides the best alternative, by connecting the dots between great content, social media marketing, SEO and lead capture. Let’s take a closer look at how this works.

As small businesses learn about and begin to employ inbound marketing and social media sites for branding and customer relations, it raises the question "where does my website fit in?" A new strategy is emerging, one that emphasizes a multichannel approach to marketing through social media and blogging. The traditional small business website is being overhauled to become a focal point for this consumer-centric strategy.

We're all obsessed with "metrics" these days, and rightfully so. Marketing that doesn't produce results is worse than doing nothing, because it costs you time and/or money. So here are the early results after one week of working on inbound marketing, all results are compared to this week last year (shown in parentheses).

Now that we have our Web site looking and working better, and we've started blogging regularly, it's time to go social!