With an average 200% return on investment, it’s not surprising that Google Ads is one of the most popular—and most competitive—paid advertising channels for businesses large and small. This is reason enough for advertisers to stay on top of their performance, but with our latest benchmark study showing that cost per lead has increased for 91% of industries year over year, it’s more important now than ever. Read on to get the insights you need so you can stay competitive with your holiday campaigns, plan your 2023 budget, and navigate the challenging economy. Key trends Our latest Google Ads i ..read more

Growing your business is all about finding ways to widen your reach but refine your touch. Social media and search engines are great for reach, but personalization is tough. Email is great for personalization, but inboxes are crowded. SMS marketing is the perfect solution for this, giving you wide reach but also the ability to deliver customized messages to your target audience on a channel they use all the time. In fact, Americans check their phones 96 times per day. In this post, we’ll go over the basics of SMS marketing, why content marketers love to use it, and how to use SMS marketing to ..read more

I love the Smudge cat memes. I also love creativity. So when I came across this Smudge pie Thanksgivmeme, I was deeply, deeply grateful for humanity. Speaking of creativity and the annual day of gratitude, we need to talk about Thanksgiving Instagram captions. If you’re looking for creative ideas, you’re not going to find any in the generic “Time to pumpkin spice it up” or “Gobble til you wobble” lists the internet is rife with. But you will find them in this post because I’ve compiled a collection of ideas, prompts, and original examples you can steal or use as a springboard. Table of conten ..read more

The holidays are just around the corner, which is great! But this can be the hardest time of the year for attracting prospects and capturing attention. This leads many businesses to wind down their lead generation efforts and instead focus on Q1 of next year. But that doesn’t mean you should. Your prospects are still online, looking for solutions to their pain points. That’s a lot of potential customers that could slip through the cracks if you take your foot off the gas! So this year, don’t let the holidays slow you down. We’ve got five ways to keep your leads and sales pipeline flowing thro ..read more

You nailed your Halloween costume. You’re on track to hit your Q4 goals. You’ve even gotten some holiday shopping done. Then it comes time to create all your Thanksgiving-themed collateral and it’s coming out nothing like you had envisioned… You do some Googling and find AI-generated mumble jumble like “Wishing you a Thanksgiving with the highest peaks of your achievement…” And then you find this post: A list of real-life, human-generated Thanksgiving greetings, phrases, and words you can use to craft the perfect message—for email, social media, text, landing pages, ads, and more. And you fin ..read more

It is relatively safe to say that many advertisers don’t give much thought to Facebook (Meta) ads bidding strategies. However, there is much more to the platform than the “set it and forget it” attitude that the majority of novice marketers carry. I’ve stated before that putting all your trust into these digital ad networks (tech giants) to make decisions for you is a slippery slope, but how much of this is true when it comes to Facebook bidding strategies? In this post, I will shed some light on bidding on Facebook and what I believe is necessary in order to properly compete. Table of conten ..read more

Are you struggling to amplify your business and increase its visibility to attract more customers? You may be missing out on one essential ingredient that could change the game for you: partner marketing. The right partnerships can help you increase brand awareness, reach untapped markets, and open up new revenue streams, but they can be tricky to crack. So let’s dive into how to form a profitable marketing partnership—with examples to learn from. But first, the basics. What is partnership marketing? Partnership marketing is a collaboration between two companies or brands to reach a broader a ..read more

I’ve got good news, bad news, and great news. The good news: Google Ads yields an average ROI of $2 for every $1 spent. Not surprising since 89% of buying journeys begin with a search engine and that for commercial intent queries, 64.6% of the clicks go to paid ads. The bad news: This is not a secret and everyone wants a piece of the pie. According to Hanapin Marketing, 93% of businesses are allocating budget to search engine marketing, making it the top paid channel. The great news: You don’t necessarily have to keep hiking up your bids to compete in Google Ads. In fact, bidding higher does ..read more

Ah, November. Summer is long gone, it feels like fall has only just begun, and yet winter and holiday vibes are starting to trickle in—sort of like the guests that arrive before your party starts and you’re not quite ready. Except it’s not a party, it’s your business and you’re trying to brainstorm creative ways to market it. Well, you’re in luck because you’re about to discover 67+ creative November marketing ideas to use for your website, blog, social posts, events, promos, and more. Table of contents Holiday lists November awareness causes November national days Full list of November nat ..read more

SEO is multidisciplinary, meaning working on other areas of our digital marketing strategy can have ancillary benefits to our web pages’ performance in the SERPs. This includes your social media strategy and the effort to improve the social signals of our web pages. The connection between social signals and SEO is an indirect relationship, meaning improved social signals will not result in higher ranking positions. However, the efforts to improve social media visibility are certainly correlated to our SEO efforts, which is why the relationship is important for digital marketers to leverage. T ..read more