Marketing Acuity

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…

We get this question a lot, what email service is better for deliverability? Email marketing is a proven tool that will reach customers and drive sales. Perhaps your business has been sending out email campaigns for a while,  you’re looking to reach even more people AND get them to click and buy Hubspot and Constant Contact are two popular email services that businesses can use to customize emails and send them out to their customer mailing lists. Both come with many…

It’s a weekday afternoon and you’re aimlessly strolling through the grocery store doing your shopping for the week. Your eyes are glazed over and you barely even take note of the items you’re putting in your cart. You have a routine and your brain knows what it’s used to. The same box of cereal, the same bag of shredded cheese … you get the picture.  The questions now are, why is your brain maintaining this routine? Why are you able…

How to ensure your site has the right kind of security, plus keep your critical web & domain credentials secure and accessible. It’s Sunday evening and you get a text message from a friend of yours who is also a customer. She says “hey, thought you’d like to know your website is down!” What do you do? Call your hosting provider. Most likely there is a simple, fast fix for this. However, we’ve seen too many times where it isn’t.…