Author: Dan Morris

This author has written 644 articles

Using Hashtags in your Marketing Plan

Are hashtags part of your annual marketing plan? Have you ever even considered doing something more proactive with them than just using your normal ones? If you spend any time preparing for holidays, seasons and events, then you should actively market with hashtags.

[stextbox id=”black”]In case you missed the memo, a hashtag is a set of characters used to organize content in social media. Typically a hashtag starts with the pound sign (#) and is followed by some characters. Since common English words don’t start with a pound sign, using a hashtag means you can easily search for content that contains that unique phrase. Both on Twitter and Instagram, for instance, you can click on the hashtag and find everything else using that tag.[/stextbox] (more…)

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3 crazy ways to get customer feedback

Getting customer feedback is sometimes hard. People are busy, they forget, they don’t want to or they just don’t care enough to take the :30 seconds to do it. But it is oh so important to get customer feedback.

Customer feedback makes me think of index cards on a bulletin board, doesn’t it?  Or comment cards attached to the bill at a restaurant. Sometimes companies solicit feedback in an email survey. For the most part those don’t really give you the kind of information you need.  They’re great for graphs in the newsletter though, aren’t they? (more…)

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Awesome Commercial, but oops! a Marketing Mistake

I went and saw a movie this weekend and was excited to see a Mayonnaise commercial featured before the previews even started.  Let me re-word that. . . I was excited to see what the Mayonnaise folks were doing in a commercial before the movie started. I can’t say I cared one way or the other that the commercial was about mayonnaise.

So just as the commercial started an icon floated into the bottom right corner of the screen that said “Shazam for Free Sample” I looked at it for a second and realized that the commercial wanted me to use the Shazam app at which time I would redirected to a webpage where I could order myself a free sample of mayo. (more…)

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Recovering from Google Penguin, Fast!

On FreeWeeklyMastermind.com a friend asked a question about recovering from Google Penguin. I couldn’t tell from her question whether she was even 100% sure Penguin was the problem. So here are the steps you need to take in the event you were hit by Penguin and you’re interested in recovering from Google Penguin.

Let’s do this on a Step-by-Step basis to make it easy:

Step 1.

Pull up your Google Analytics and look at April 23 – April 25. If your traffic dropped that day you got hit by Penguin. If it didn’t dive that day, you didn’t get hit. You have a different problem – but the recovery steps may be the same. (more…)

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Using Customer Feedback to Make your Business Better

Using customer feedback is critical to your success. I recently wrote a guest blog post on Savvyblogging.net about making sure you know what actions you’re going to take BEFORE you survey your audience. That kind of customer feedback can help you make changes and take action immediately.

But there are more important reasons to be using customer feedback.

Interviewing Customers

Nothing can take the place of interviewing your customers. What you really want to understand is the process your customers went through to get to you. And then what happened to get them to pull their wallet out and pay you money. Once you understand where they were mentally, you can craft your web copy, headlines and email subject lines. (more…)

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A Marketing Calendar: More than holidays

Every December I see people peddling marketing calendars. Most of them are blank templates which I’ve always called a calendar. Others include lists of holidays to put on the calendar, and places for “important dates”. But planning your business is way more involved than labeling a few holidays.

While an editorial calendar is useful, it should be part of your overall plan – not THE plan. Whether you’re a scrapbooker, a service based business, a holiday decorations website or Nike – you need tie everything you know about marketing to a timeline from which you can plan your success. Assigning dates to your productivity makes you a ton more productive. (more…)

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