Nearly everyone and their nephew can make you a website these days, but will it accomplish your goals? Only Mary Poppins is practically perfect in every way, so prepare for your web designer’s strengths and weaknesses.

For those who have gone through all of the steps to create a complete social media marketing presence for their business, it can be frustrating when the engagement remains stagnant. So, where do you turn? You can try boosting posts and paying for advertising, but before you start putting more money into your plan – maybe a good approach would be to actually take a step back and evaluate the assets you have around you.

Target audience, call-to-action, reach analysis – you have tons of super-important stuff to consider for successful Facebook marketing. But don’t get so carried away by the big picture that you overlook these little mistakes:

For the New Year this past year, Facebook had a “Year in Review” feature that allowed users to create short films out of the top moments they’d shared throughout the year. This feature was a huge success and wildly popular among Facebook users. As a way to encourage people to share more videos, Facebook introduced a new slideshow feature that takes your photos and videos on Facebook and turns them into a short movie. These short clips can be customized with different themes and with music. The idea was created to help Facebook take a step towards turning the social network into a video-first destination. The result actually has some great potential and benefits to social media marketers. 

I was the "opening act" for NaperLaunch Entrepreneur's Week, and I spoke all about Facebook. If you attended and are looking for the "slides", you're in the right place. If you didn't attend, you missed lots of details, but this might help you too.

How to be social in social media still perplexes people. They’re too busy to post regularly and when they do post about an event, the blast lands with a disappointing thud. “See?” they say, “Social media doesn’t work!” Well, here’s one of our clients with proof social media DOES work for sharing your events:

Now that we’re officially in the fourth quarter of the year, it’s time to take a look back over our efforts from the last nine months to prepare a great strategy for the new year to come. Sure, you can keep your social media marketing and content marketing efforts stagnant, but who is that helping? Who is that hurting? If you look back over what you’ve done in the last year, I don’t think you can honestly say that there isn’t any aspect you wouldn’t change, add, or improve.

If you don’t maintain your marketing, brand awareness starts to decay sooner than you’d think and there’s nothing fun about that. One question you may be asking yourself:  is good enough ever good enough? Read on for some thoughts on how to keep up.

If you haven’t planned your marketing strategy for the upcoming holiday season, it’s not too late for you. Having said that –you should probably start now. We’re right around the corner from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year’s sales and so much more. If your business isn’t taking advantage of the opportunity that these holidays offer, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Online marketing is one of the fastest and easiest ways to reach customers, both existing and new, so why not take advantage?

Yes, it’s still summertime, but after Labor Day folks shake off their vacation mindset and reapply themselves at the office. They get busy and before they know it, 2016 is over. Take some time now to plan the rest of the year’s content for your blog and social media.