Marketing Acuity

Several months ago, we carried out a study by examining the email deliverability of two very popular email services; HubSpot and Constant Contact. You can read that blog here where we broke down the data we found and what pros and cons each program offers. Fast forward a few months and we are now presenting you with updated data from our study where we sent numerous emails using both services and can now provide even more accurate data. Here is the…

Improve email deliverability to your customers by adjusting your DKIM and SPF records at your Domain  and hosting providers. The tech secret of email deliverability is that a few settings can dramatically improve your chances of your email landing into your customer’s inbox. 2024 update: Google’s Gmail will require your business have DMARC (not just DKIM and SPF) in place to deliver email to your customer’s inboxes who have gmail addresses. This is huge! Two (fairly simple but slightly scary…

Creating a streamable video channel for your business We all love video. Every one of us has spent time streaming content from Netflix, Amazon and YouTube. Creating entertaining, informative, streamable content for your small business is not only easier but also more important than ever before. Our small business guide to video marketing is designed to teach you the basics so you can learn to set up your own streaming channel on YouTube. From giving your customers content to absorb…

A go-to-market plan is a plan for the first 3-12 months of any new business or new product launch. Simply put, it’s the high level financial and business planning tool that keeps your eye on the things you need to do to successfully launch your new product or business. It is not the “launch plan” that you see online consultants pitching you in Instagram. That is focused entirely on marketing and social media. While this is a component of a…

Three types of story-based content that you can develop now to inspire, motivate and connect with your customers to increase sales. Educational, inspirational and personal (experience-based) content. And as a bonus, we add a fourth, data-based insight content!  Educational content (that you can’t Google) If you’ve done a Google search lately, the results, shown right in the Google search engine result page (SERP), are taking over. The “Alexification” of search – smart speakers speaking your result – is taking a…

The state of social media for ecommerce retailers in 2020 has changed. When we first authored this blog (based on awesome data from the industry leading Social Media Marketing World conference in San Diego in early March), the world was still upright. Shopify, Inc. reported revenue increases of 97% in the second quarter and 40% higher than expectations. That’s huge. They also note that new stores on the platform rose 71%.  SquareSpace store setup is up. And WordPress.org (Automattic) is…

Developing a website is a lot of work – that goes without saying. WordPress is a free content management system that allows you to build a website. Here at Marketing Acuity, we utilize WordPress for a lot of our clients’ sites.  We get asked all the time “ what are the best free WordPress themes?”. If you google it, you’ll get a usually biased report of free themes (written in not-exceptional English) prepared by a theme developer who is (naturally!) promoting…

Understanding the mystery of DNS, domain registration, domain pointing, hosting and other mysterious, behind-the-scenes web tech stuff is important. Your entire business rests on the good foundations of hosting, domain management and if you’re not aware of these things (or in control of them) your business could be at risk. URL: Most of us get this one, it’s your .com or .biz, or .org. It’s the single most important thing that you have to manage. If you forget who ordered…

What’s a proforma? A proforma is a business financial statement that is based on future, planned income and expenses. It’s not based on actual sales and it is not a sales forecast, but is used for brand new startup companies, for those that are expanding in to new product or service lines. It’s required to get bank loans for your business, when you don’t yet have a business started.  https://www.inc.com/encyclopedia/pro-forma-statements.html A proforma looks at both income AND expenses (it’s more…