Ann Siegle

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How do you tell if your marketing strategy or tactical plan is out of date? 1.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…

Today’s business challenge: how to manage social media marketing and working with social media agencies. For years, industry pros have been singing the praises of social media. However, even the best social media “experts” end up sorting through junk retweets and useless Facebook interactions. They find themselves unable to show real results to their clients, and think “There must be a better way.” Well there is! The problems with social media marketing arise from having to sort through endless social streams…

What happens if you stop developing content on your web site? What happens to traffic to your business web site? In a Russian-roulette-style marketing experiment, we’ll see exactly what happened with a client’s case. In August, this client blogged two or three times a week, and traffic rocketed up 129% in a month’s time. In September, we asked the client to hold on blogs for a few weeks, and these are the early October results: As you can see from the above chart, traffic is…

Effective internet marketing. What does that really mean? What if all of your online activities were aligned to create not just traffic, but leads? What if all of your internet marketing activities drove prospects to your web site (your hub of your hub-and-spoke model of marketing) where you could educate, inform, excite and capture their contact information for further marketing? Let’s dissect these charts below: These are ACTUAL client metrics. Prior to starting an inbound marketing program, this client averaged…

January 1st is the annual Setting of the New Year’s Resolutions. All across the world, people are vowing to work out more, eat more fruits and vegetables, get more work done, take the Facebook app off their smartphone and be nicer to everyone they see. Resolutions almost always get broken, why? They didn’t follow the S.M.A.R.T goal setting model. Specific Measureable Attainable Realistic Time-Bound The S.M.A.R.T framework for goal setting works because it frees you up from the nebulous “I will…

How can content development, lead capture tools, Facebook and Twitter can generate 30 new leads a week for your retail e-commerce store?  Lead generation tools, plus social media marketing and blogging are a powerful small business and retail e-commerce combination that works for e-commerce retailers. Let’s look at the combination that is working so well for a client that they’re generating more than 30 qualified leads a week, on average, and have boosted sales 500% in one quarter. We’ll first…