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Just when you thought you had search optimization all figured out, now marketing analysts are telling us that search optimization is out and content strategy is in! This doesn’t mean that you should throw out everything you know and have invested in search optimization. What it does mean is that content strategy is becoming one of the most important means of converting users to customers. People are quite comfortable and accustomed to searching for a specific need and expecting to not only find it but also find it quickly.

According to Youth Employment Decade, there is one thing that binds Generations X, Y, and Z together. What is that, you ask? The nickname, “Generation Mute,” which refers to the way young individuals are almost addicted to using their phones. However, as many surveys have found, this Generation Mute detests one basic, founding function of the phone – audio calls. Here are some surveyed results¹ on why the younger generations hate talking on the phone, and what that means for your business’s website.

“It’s on the cloud.” I’m sure you’ve heard that term a time or two and you all know that the cloud refers to the internet. Here’s a fun fact! Did you know the cloud was first used to reference the telephone network? Whether it be CRM mechanisms, file sharing, team communication, sales management, project management, data storage or something else, cloud computing has become the standard for most businesses. The convenience is second to none offering businesses the ability to allow their employees to work in various offices around the globe accessing data that once required employees to be in one central-local chained to a personal computer. However, with that convenience and limitless possibilities comes some concern for security breaches and hacking. A couple that you may be familiar with are (www.spinbackup.com):

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My husband gets up a half hour before I do, but every morning before I get out of bed I hear, “Alexa start my day.” She then gives him his schedule, traffic, and weather. Then, I hear Alexa tune to CBS. Every. Single. Day. Alexa keeps my husband organized and ready for his day. In addition to the morning Alexa routine, I would venture to say that he and both each use voice search at least once a day. He probably uses it more than that because his job requires him to be in the vehicle a lot of the day. Voice search is not only convenient, but it offers a certain level of safety allowing him to remain hands-free and keep his eyes on the road. Voice search is here to stay and it has had a profound impact on search optimization and digital marketing.

Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” Let that sink in for a bit. It doesn’t matter if you have endless dollars for marketing including the best website you could possibly imagine, because if you don’t service your clients well resulting in a bad reputation, you may as well light that budgeted money on fire.

Do you ever wonder how in the world you will ever keep your marketing or any business projects straight? After all, there are so many things to keep up with as a business owner, marketing manager, salesperson or general manager of a company and keeping up with them can get to be quite overwhelming. The key to maximum productivity is staying organized. A little work on the front end will make things run much smoother. Many successful businesses are using a great FREE tool called Trello. Trello is a powerful tool used for project management. It is versatile enough to be used by a small business used by one person or a powerful engine for large companies where several hundred people use it.  

FOMO…. Have you heard of it? Do you suffer from it? You know that anxious feeling that an exciting or interesting event is happening somewhere else, typically documented by social media. If you have ever experienced this, then you (along with myself) have suffered from the fear of missing out at one time or another. A marketing strategist, Dan Herman, claimed to be the first to identify FOMO in the 1990s, but it really wasn’t even a major “thing” until social media has become so dominant in our lives. Businesses can use this phenomenon to create desirable marketing results…enter Facebook Live!

I am sure you have all heard the term “bean counter” or the phrase “it looked good on paper”. They aren’t just funny comparisons; both have a lot of meaning and truth. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a numbers person at heart. Heck, I even have an Accounting degree, so I guess, technically, I’m a bean counter. I love a good Excel spreadsheet because they can tell a great story about a business and how they are doing. Speaking of a spreadsheet, successful marketing is more than just a formula and analytical analysis. Yes, you need all of these tools to know how successful a campaign is, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in the numbers and forget that they actually represent a real human being. This is an especially easy mindset to fall into when you don’t have a brick and mortar store and sell almost exclusively online.