I don’t need to give you a statistic to tell you that these days it’s hard to find a person without a mobile device in arm’s reach. As a culture, it is now more socially acceptable than ever to always have your cell phone with you; according to Zenith, mobile internet use is expected to reach 80% in 2018. Let’s talk the fastest way to lose your users, as the world jumps from desktops to the palm of your hand.

• 57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly-designed mobile site.
  • A website not optimized for mobile traffic is no longer an option if you want to keep your audience happy.
• According to comScore, users spend 69% of their media time on smartphones on average.

For an audience spending almost 70% of their time on their smartphones, it makes sense to make sure that the experience is a good one. How do you do that? How do you make the jump from a web browser on a 17-inch screen to a 5-inch screen seamless?

Make sure you’ve got the following basics covered:

• Is the site mobile responsive? A mobile responsive website is a website that scales to the size of the device that is being used to view it.
• Make it easy to read.
  • No one wants to struggle reading the copy on the site. Make sure it’s large and legible!
• Does the site load quickly on mobile?
  • According to Google if a mobile site doesn’t load within 3 seconds, yes I said seconds, 53% of people will leave. Make sure you test load times.
• More pictures, less text.
  • People digest content differently on mobile. Tell your story with images rather than text, do it. It’s important to note that you must still maintain an image that fits with mobile and that it is branded accordingly.
• Is the experience seamless?
  • If you have videos on the desktop site, can they still be viewed from mobile? How about your live chat? Do people struggle to click on the menu? You’ll want to be sure that everything on the site is still accessible on mobile, not offer a stripped down site.

The future isn’t mobile marketing, it’s now. Don’t lose opportunities because you’re not prepared. Do you have any tips or tricks you’ve found that work well? Leave us a comment!

You can’t escape the need for a blog on your website anymore. Prospects expect that you will draw them in with creative, engaging, original content that they can’t pass up reading, and if you’re like most people, that can be daunting. Don’t let the act of writing a blog fill you with dread and anxiety. We’ve compiled a few tips to help you fill the page with valuable content, rather than stare at the page and hope words materialize.

• • Audience is everything. As a marketer you should already be cognizant of who your audience is. Write for the person you know is out there, typing furiously into the search bar, hoping to find your blog. If you’ve read our blog How to Create Your Ideal Client Profile, you can use that persona as your jump off. Hopefully you’ve created profiles for all your prospective audience members and you can use the profiles to help you understand your blog’s audience as well. Knowing the audience helps you to craft your content in a more conversational tone for the millennial, then turn around and write a solid technical piece for the more advanced reader.
  • Pick your topic. Staring at a blank screen is bad for your eyes and bad for your moral. Sometimes you know right away the topic you want to cover, while other times your topic eludes you. It doesn’t hurt to keep a notebook with you and write any topic ideas as they come to you. It’s also important to keep the following in mind:
    • Don’t write about a broad topic – narrow your focus to make the read more valuable. Not sure how to narrow the focus? Ask yourself the one thing you want individuals to take away from your blog, then focus on it.
    • Create an outline and fill it in as you research your topic. There are countless ways to create an outline. You just have to make sure you’ve included all the important parts: a beginning, middle and end. Be sure to have an introduction, and an ending (with a call to action), as well as a body that really explains the topic you are writing about.

• Write. It’s important to realize that it’s ok to not like what you’ve written. Write out your first draft, keeping in mind that you want to connect with your audience. Take a break and then come back and review your copy. As you edit it, try to tighten your language and make sure you’ve stayed on topic. Ask a friend or coworker to review it and then make the corrections. Get that copy on your site and start blasting it through your social networks.

The more you write, the better you’ll become at it and there are countless resources out there to help you hone your skills. Do you have any tips to help overcome writer’s block or writing nerves? Share them in the comments.

Can you name someone in your life, over the age of 18, who doesn’t have a mobile device?

With 60% of all online searches carried out on a mobile device, and some sectors (like food and beverage) now reaching 72%, Google now takes the user’s location into consideration when determining search results.

No one needs to tell you that ranking at the top of search results is incredibly important! The question becomes, how do you improve your local search results? One way is with local citations.

What’s a citation?

Simply put, a citation is your business’ information (particularly name, address and phone number (abbreviated as NAP)) in any combination listed accurately (this is super important!) on the web. These listings can occur in a variety of formats such as directories, websites, apps or social platforms; they are a significant contributor to local search results.

The benefit of having your business listed means that search engines will look at a user’s search query and determine the businesses that are local to the individual. Being local to the user means that the search engine is more likely to award the website with a higher ranking on the search results page. Just having your business’s NAP on a website isn’t enough anymore, you’ll want to list your business in other strategic places as well.

Where do I list my business?

The best places to list yourself are websites like Yelp, Facebook and Yellowpages (you may be familiar with them). These pages are highly rated as they tend to be used most often by people searching for businesses. Other directory sites that don’t have the same popularity are still useful but aren’t as valued as the bigger ones. It is best to start with the most valued sites, and branch out from there.

How do I list my business?

It’s super easy to collect the information you need to create a local citation. You just need the following:

1. Name, address and phone number of your business.
2. A link to the homepage of your website.
3. An email address – bonus points for an email that is domain-based. (Ex. You@digitalmarketingbusiness.com)
4. A category that accurately describes your business such as ‘restaurant’ or ‘auto dealer’
5. Links to your social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc…
6. A short description of your business that goes into detail about what it is that you do.

Having this information available will allow your business to be listed accurately and consistently. Search engines love that accuracy and consistency.You’ll want to make sure you’ve listed yourself consistently and correctly because any discrepancy in information can hurt your ranking! If you ever change any of your business information you’ll need to update it as soon as possible in order to keep your search engine rankings up.

The future is mobile and the future is already here. Local search results are more important and competitive every single day. A citation can help you climb the search engine results page and connect your business to nearby customers. So get listed and get found!

Raise your hand if you love the flexibility of working from home! I think we all envision working from home as this great thing where you do all the work in your pajamas, while your cat follows you from room to room and you make yourself a four course meal – each meal. All while you answer calls and complete all of the tasks your clients pay you for.

One of the realities of working from home and being your own boss is that it can be exhilarating having no one there to tell you what to do. It can also ruin workflow when your cat keeps jumping on your computer, or you watch your significant other sleep in or run off to go hang out with friends. Staying productive can be difficult, so here’s what kept me sane and productive when I worked from home.

• Set a Schedule. It seems like common sense, but setting a schedule and adhering to it is one of the things that will help you to remain productive. I’m an earlier riser, so I go for my run and then start work right at 8 am. This helps me remain on point with my tasks, lets clients know when they can reach out to me and stops my family from calling or showing up.
• Get out of your pajamas! Would you wear your Iron Man onesie to work? I mean I would be tempted to try to get away with it on Halloween, but no. Get out of your pjs and get into actual clothing and this will help your mind go into work mode. You may only be going over a room, but you’re dressed for success!
• Have a designated space. Maybe you’ve created a home office for yourself. If you haven’t be sure to check out our tips for creating your home office. Don’t have a space set up? No worries just get out of bed. You don’t want to associate a place of rest, with a place of work. I’m fortunate to have a spare room that doubles as my office and guest room. If I wasn’t I’d be making an office space against a wall in my living room. Clean off the kitchen table and use that if you need to. Just make a space. You don’t want to start on the couch and fall asleep. Again, it’s a mind thing. Having a designated space will also help get you in the right headspace.
• Minimize distractions! For me that means not letting the cat get up on the keyboard and ignoring him when he wants to play. For you that might mean finding child care, or avoiding your tv. Whatever you have to do, do it. The more distraction you have, the less you’ll be able to accomplish.
• Prepare. You may work from home, but that doesn’t mean you can eat junk or get up every 10 minutes to look for office supplies. First thing I did when working from home was to decide if I wanted to continue to meal prep for the week. The answer is yes, yes I totally did. Meal prepping on Sunday’s meant that I had breakfast, lunch and dinner, either totally ready to go, or with very little prep time. I know not everyone is a huge fan of meal prep, but making sure that you have adequate food supplies that offer quick and healthy meals will be needed. You also need to anticipate your needs from an office perspective. You’ll need to make sure you have enough pens, paper, ink for the printer at all times and in the space you inhabit. There isn’t an office manager to ask for extra pens. You can’t run to the store everytime you need something. You need to organize yourself and make sure you’ve got what you need – no one else will.
• Have fun. Some mornings you wake up and you just aren’t mentally prepared to inhabit the same space you live in for work. Get out and go to a coffee shop. Make sure there is wifi, but don’t stay contained, adventure and recharge yourself. It can get boring sitting around alone all the time. Use the time in the coffee shop wisely, maybe hold off on calls, but focus on writing instead. Whatever works for you.

These tips work for me, but obviously you need to do what works for you. The longer you work from home, the more you’ll figure out what works best for you. Do you have any tips or tricks you’ve found helpful as you work from home? Drop them in the comments!

It can seem baffling when you’ve decided to start your own digital marketing agency. At first you may have no idea what steps you need to take, and you can feel very overwhelmed, very quickly. We’ve compiled a list of the basics, to get you started and moving in the right direction.

• You need to open a bank account for the business. If you intend to stick it out as a sole proprietor you don’t legally need a separate bank account but it is recommended. In the United States LLCs, partnerships and corporations are required to have separate bank accounts.
  • Play hard to get! Don’t just go down to your local bank and open an account though. Look around at many different banks and see what benefits a business account, at that location offers up.
  • You’ll also need to be aware that in order to open a business bank account you’ll need to have your business registered with the state (unless you are doing business as yourself). Head over to the Small Business Association to see the steps you need to take.
• Tracking your expenses is a cumbersome but critical step in recording keeping for the small business. You should lead right off the bat with putting together a process for keeping track. This can be digital or manual (place receipts in a folder and pull them out to track at the end of each month) but there are a few types of receipts to pay close attention to:
  • Entertainment/Meals: If you conduct a meeting and eat out at the same time this is something you can claim! Be sure to keep the receipt and note what the meeting was and who attended.
  • Vehicle related (if applicable): This requires you to track where you where, when you were there, and why you used the vehicle for business.
  • Gifts: If you purchase a gift for a client you can also claim it as a business expense but you have to be careful. A great example is if you purchase tickets to a broadway show, if you attend as well this is no longer a gift expense, but instead and entertainment expenses.
  • Home Office: Having your office at home can really cut down on your initial expenses. You will need to keep track of usage of the business side of things however.
    You can deduct your internet, business phone, and more when you work remotely. If you share something so the use is half business, half personal you’ll just need to keep track of that as well.
• Keeping the books in order! This is a system you need to also put in place from day one. You’ll need to decide if you’ll use a third party software (there are many), or if you’ll use a local bookkeeper. The decision is up to you, it’s just a decision you’ll need to make.
• Sales Tax is something you pay everytime you go to the store on certain items. You’ll need to look into your state and see if you’ll need to charge and collect sales tax. You can learn more at the SBA regarding sales tax.
• Taxes! Depending on how you structured your business, depends on how you’ll pay your taxes. If you chose to structure as an LLC., partnership or sole proprietor you’ll be considered self employed and you’ll pay the business taxes on your personal claim. If you structured as a corporation you’ll need to do a separate filing.
• Revaluate and Reinvest. Starting out it’s totally ok to use a spreadsheet to track your expenses, but as time goes on and the business grows you may need to change up your methods. Don’t be afraid to realize you need to change your methods or get outside help. Your business will be stronger because of it.

Starting any new business can be hard, but following the basics laid out here will help you to build a strong foundation for your business. DMTG is always here to lend a hand as well. What do you wish you had known as a new business? Drop us a comment with your tips!

In the world of digital marketing, a landing page is a page designed specifically for a marketing campaign. A potential client “lands” on the page from another source and is generally directed to take some sort of action.

Generally speaking, a landing page is not designed to net you organic traffic, the traffic generated to the page comes from paid advertising, or a campaign of some kind — whether it be social or email. Once you manage to get people to the landing page, it’s incredibly important to get them to convert. Read on for some tips to keep in mind when creating your landing pages.

• • • Headlines. Don’t lead a horse to water and hide the water. You want to make sure that your headline on the page matches whatever you used to draw people to the page. Otherwise people can feel like they were mislead and bounce off the page – before they convert.
    • CTA’s (or calls-to-action) are generally an image or bit of text that drives a user to perform a specific act, usually along the lines of “click here”, “download now” or “sign up now”. You may have a CTA in a button; “Click ME NOW”, or it may be a line of text on social media, “Follow the link to get the ebook now”. You want your cta to be direct, and clearly inform the viewer of the action you attend to take.
    • Offer. You’ve gotten people to your landing page with the promise of something, a free audit, a checklist or ebook, so you’ll want to make sure that the offer lines up with the means you used to get folks there, just like you did for their headlines.
      • • You want to make your offer educational and sell the value of what you are offering so that people willingly give up their information for it. People guard their email address fiercely, so make it worthwhile to them.
        • We know that the attention span of the modern human is 8 seconds or less. You need to make sure the copy on your page is short and sweet. If you can use a video, do it! Video on landing pages improves conversions by 86%. Make sure you keep the video short though so not to drive people away. If you can’t use a video make sure that you’ve included a picture of the item up for offer and quickly summarize what the viewer can learn from it or solve with it. Make a point to direct them to the form.
    • Turn the menu off on your landing page! You drove your audience to the site. Don’t let them get distracted and click off your landing page by keeping the menu on. Make sure your copy catches the eye and don’t let them get away without doing what you sent them there to do. . . fill out your form.
    • Above the fold. You may have heard people talk about keeping things above the fold. It use to mean putting your important information above the fold of a newspaper – but who reads those anymore? Nowadays, above the fold means placing your important information on the screen before a user has to scroll down. There are some things you MUST keep above the fold. Your form. Your CTA. Your copy. Users bounce if they get to a landing page and have to scroll. Don’t let them.
    • Forms, forms, forms. Destiny’s Child may have sang about bills, but marketers sing about their forms. You want to keep your form above the fold. You also want people to fill out your form so you need to keep it short. Capture the bare minimum of information needed; company, name, email, phone number. If you make your form too long you’ll notice it’s not converting, because people don’t want to fill it out. People bounce without making the conversion because you ask for more information from them than they are willing to give. Don’t make it complicated.
    • Say Thank You! The last thing you’ll want on your landing page is the thank you page or success page as it’s also know. You want people to have confirmation that you’ve received their form submission and will be reaching out to them. If you have a download this is where they will receive it. You will also want to make sure that you add a personal touch. “Thank you for your interest in our ebook. A team member will be in touch shortly. In the meantime check out our blog and follow us on…”. Don’t leave people hanging.

Things to remember when you set up your landing page: people value educational information and people like free stuff. Make sure your landing page succinctly gets your message across and always be innovating. If you find that your landing page isn’t converting, start testing out variations, don’t leave the page static and hope for the best. Keep working on it until it converts.As always, reach out to DMTG if you have any questions about setting up landing pages, or need help getting yours to convert.

Not all digital agencies are created equally. Take a moment and check out 5 of the best practices that anyone running their own digital agency should adhere to.

• You’ve identified your ideal client. Knowing who’s out there looking for you and your services makes marketing yourself a bit easier. If you have existing clients, you’ve profiled them and pulled out the qualities you need to look for in potential clients. You’ll use this information to create more targeted content, increase personalization in your marketing efforts and hopefully draw in more of your ideal clients.
• You have an established way to qualify leads. One sure fire way to improve conversion rates and lower the amount of time and energy spent by your sales guy is to have a set in stone way to qualify a lead. This goes hand-in-hand with identifying your ideal client. Create a list of ideals you want in a potential client – oh wait, you already did. Then make a list of other characteristics you need in a potential client, i.e what’s their timeline? Do they have the budget for you and the authority to make the call?
• Set Goals. If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you get there? Setting goals will help to drive your agency to innovate and remain on the cutting edge. It will force you to get out there and set sales goals, and meet those sales goals. It will let you know if something isn’t working, because you won’t be hitting those goals. Sit down, brainstorm, write out your goals and get hustling.
• Organize. Be organized fresh out of the gates. Have your processes in order from the beginning, both internally and externally. Know how you’ll keep your records, as well as how you’ll pay invoices as well as send them. On the client experience side of things, make sure you’ve built out those processes. How will the client on-boarding go? How will the client know how to reach out if a problem arises. Have you built out timelines? The sooner you’ve created these processes, the more smoothly your agency will run.
• Build the Brand. Build the brand with everything you do. Listen to what people have to say and get yourself out and in front of people whether you’re walking the dog, or standing in front of the local Chamber. Make a point to know your business from the ground up. If you don’t know your product you’ve got a problem. Have a great interaction with a client? Ask for a testimonial. Build the brand and get social proof every step of the way.

These are by no means a comprehensive list of best practices a digital agency should follow, just some of the more important ones. Be sure to follow our blog for more information on all topics marketing and business. Do you have a best practice to share? Leave it in the comments.

You’ve made it through training and now you’re ready to take your new digital marketing agency to the next level. You’re ready to start bringing on clients and successfully running your new business, but where are you working from? The coffee shop – that will get old quickly; maybe your kitchen table – you’ll find that you’ll be distracted easily. Maybe it’s time to think about putting together a home office. Below are 7 tips to keep in mind when pulling together your new home office.

• • Do you have the space? Ideally you’d want to take a spare bedroom that isn’t in use and create a home office there. If you don’t have a spare bedroom, Apartment Therapy has a ton of great articles about carving out an office from the space you do have.
    • Make a list of needs. This is important because you have to make the space you have suitable for your needs.
    • What equipment will you need to work comfortably from home?
    • Do you require multiple monitors? Will you need a desk large enough to accommodate those monitors?
    • Will you have clients come to the office to meet you? Will they require a place to sit?
    • Do you need storage space?
    • Above all make sure you pick a comfortable chair!!
  • Before you hang out the welcome mat, this step is an important
    • Get a separate line for the business phone number. You don’t want to compete for the line with your household, so don’t. Go VoIP!
    • Sign up with UPS for a business mailbox. This isn’t a P.O. Box and it’s not your home address, so you look even more professional.
    • Check your insurance. You’ll want to check that you and your equipment are covered by your renters or homeowners insurance policy, since you’ll be working from home. If you find that to not be the case, you’ll want to get covered a.s.a.p.
  • Lighting is incredibly important. A quick web search will net you various blogs about setting up the office lightning in your work from home. Ideally you want to use daylight bulbs and you don’t want to use fluorescent. If you have to use fluorescent lighting, don’t hang it directly above your computer set up. You’ll reduce glare that way.
  • Separate Yourself
    • You may work at home, but this work. You need to separate yourself mentally and physically off the bat. Get dressed every morning – don’t work in your pajamas. Make it clear to the others in the house if you live in a shared space that you are working when you are in the office so they can be respectful of this.
    • Create and Follow a Routine
    • Establish Office Hours
      • This will let your clients know when they can reach out to you. Yes, the point of working from home is the flexibility, but your clients will generally run on a normal business hours schedule. By laying out when your clients can reach you, you’ll set yourself up for success. Setting office hours can also help reduce distractions and prevent friends and family from dropping in unannounced.
  • You’ll need to set up a process for paying bills and sending invoices. How will your record keeping take place? You are your own boss now, so no one is going to tell you how or when to do these things. The responsibility falls to you.
  • Decorate! This is another step that I feel is super important. You are going to spend a large quantity of time in your office so make it a space you enjoy. Paint the walls if you can. Remember that purple inspires creativity, while blues, green, and violets, are soothing and relaxing. Grab attention with yellow, energetic with red, or minimize distractions with white or black. Put some artwork on your walls.

Make the space a space you enjoy. Have you created a home office? Do you have any tips or tricks you’ve found along the way to help? Leave us a comment with them below!

In the marketing world there is tons of talk about knowing your ideal client and using that to your advantage. What if you don’t know who your ideal client is or how to build a profile of one?

Not to worry, DMTG has you covered! Read on and learn.

First and foremost, what is an ideal client and why should you know yours? An ideal client profile is nothing more than a list of criteria that allows you to look at a sea of potential clients and know who would be a good fit for your business and who wouldn’t.

There are tons of benefits to building out your ideal client profile, namely allowing you to target a specific type of client and will save you time, money and energy. Once you know who you want to target, you can begin to build out content that will engage those prospects, as well as personalize it.

You can build out segmented lists and use them for email marketing, social media marketing and more. You can also use the profiles to help you gauge where the particular prospect is in the sales process and how they will make their next move.

Now that you know what an ideal client profile is and how it can help you, let’s talk how you build out yours. It’s pretty simple once you understand what you are looking for and you’ll be able to build out profiles moving forward for each step of the sales cycle.

• First, you’ll need to look at your current clients and do some research. Look at your existing best clients and see what they have in common. Do they all purchase the same services? Do they have the same monthly spend? Are they located in a certain area or a specific industry? How many employees does the company have? Do they have a person in house for marketing? It helps to list out these qualities.
• The Individual:
  • Ask them if they are the decision maker and what their title is. What their skills are, and how long they have been with their company. What is their role, what do they do, what tools do they use and who reports to them/do they report to?
  • What are their goals and challenges in the role? What publications do they look to keep up to date?
  • How is their job measured and what do they feel their priorities are?
• The Company:
  • Who makes decisions regarding marketing? What industry is the company in, and what is their marketing budget? Do they have in house marketing or do they typically use vendors (like you)?
  • Do they belong to any industry groups? I.E local chambers, trade organizations. Do they attend any industry conferences?
•  You:
  • What do they like about working with your company? What pain points does it resolve?
  • How did they find you? What does the decision process look like on their end?
  • What do you think the 3 most important qualities in a digital marketing agency are?Now that you have your list, it’s recommended that you build out of a list of questions to ask your customers. This is by no means a comprehensive list, feel free to add your own qualifiers.
• Compile all the information you’ve just gathered! With the research you did, the information you’ve compiled from your interviews, you should be able to build out a solid profile of your ideal client. Your profile will want to cover:
  • Background
  • Demographics
  • Communication/Personality Style (of the decision maker)
  • Goals
  • Challenges and how your agency will address them and showcase how they can correct them.
  • Objections you may during the sales process and how to acknowledge them.
  • The clients purchasing journey
  • Your sales pitch to the profile

You can repeat these steps to build out profiles for each potential client you may come across in your target market. This will help you to not only make decisions regarding who to target, but also how to target them moving forward. Have you build out your ideal client profile? Tell us how it went in the comments!