Ann Siegle

Want to increase traffic to your web site? Write a company blog. But, don’t just blog about any thought that pops into your head. Purposefully craft blogs on topics your customers are searching for and traffic will skyrocket! We have two client examples today of Michigan businesses (one, software, the other business to business services) that have seen traffic jump up significantly in just one month of blogging regularly (at least weekly.) How can your business learn from these examples? Let’s break them down: The first…

Starting January 1st, 2015 , Facebook’s algorithm – which determines what posts get shown to users – will be rewarding less promotional, more valuable content posts. Guess what, so are the actual humans participating on social media! Including you. By now, many businesses have heard the news: your promoted sale posts on Facebook are about to drop precipitiously off an effectiveness cliff. This should not be a surprise to anyone. Facebook is a social media network where the primary driver for use…

Email marketing is still one of the most viable and successful business tools out there. Whether business to consumer or business to business, email still drives a lot of our commerce. Email has matured, but some companies have not matured with it. What constitutes a good marketing email? Let’s break down the top six ways you can craft a better marketing e-mail: 1. Recognize your customers are on their mobile devices more than their computers. Making sure your email template delivery is NOT crafted in…

How to evaluate a landing page, ad or billboard in 3 seconds or less! The effectiveness of your marketing communications all depends on how effectively the message is being communicated. As marketers, we all know this. So why is it we still produce materials that contain too much copy, don’t put the key message right in the headline and use obscure photo or graphic messages as visual references? When you evaluate your next marketing piece – whether that be an…

Measuring marketing effectiveness has always been somewhat of a fuzzy math problem. I hate fuzzy math. As a fairly analytical marketer, I love the numbers. We once decided what job my husband should take – which would have radically changed our lives in it’s decision – by using a spreadsheet (with weighted factors to even the playing field in our decisionmaking.) So what’s normally fuzzy? How many of those people visiting your web site are actually doing something useful. Like…

Optimizing your web site for search engines is a smart idea that most business owners have at least heard about. But most businesses go down a rabbit hole of search engine optimization voodoo by thinking that your site needs to be super-search engine friendly to drive traffic. The truth is, your site needs to be searcher friendly. As in, friendly to the humans who are actually doing the searches (and reading your content.) Once you’ve identified whom are your best clients and prospects, interviewed…

Many clients are asking us what is inbound marketing thing we keep talking about?  Just google inbound marketing, and after you see there are 5,310,000 results (the first couple thousand related to industry leader HubSpot – Spoke8 Marketing is a HubSpot Channel Partner) you’ll have some idea of how important this inbound marketing stuff is. Further, does inbound marketing for Lansing businesses work? When was the last time you picked up a direct mail piece out of your mailbox (or…

How do you tell if your marketing strategy or tactical plan is out of date? 1. You don’t have a plan. The first problem with any plan is having one in the first place. Plans can change, and should change often. It’s important to have one so you don’t succumb to the small business peril of “machine-gun marketing”. Machine gun marketing is firing marketing at every target that comes up – whether it be a random phone call from a vendor selling…