Detati Blog
Google’s Mobile-First Indexing
Google announced in 2016 that they were changing the index algorithm to be more focused on mobile users. Well, the shift officially happened in March 2021. If your site is not mobile-first ready, it runs the risk of not being indexed or blocked. What does being mobile-first ready mean? The mobile version of your site needs to be as content [...]
Re-opening Your Business: Is Your Website Ready?
Although the recent months have been both economically and emotionally challenging for small businesses and consultants, it has also given us time to re-evaluate and work on our own business and marketing plans. The world has changed and that means thinking about how our business needs to change as well. Most small businesses do not regularly review or update their [...]
How to Grow Your Business When Referrals Slow Down
Networking events and conferences are great for meeting potential new business contacts, but there is only so much time in a day and, for most small business owners, workloads demand that the majority of the day is spent in the office. We know. We are a small business ourselves. The key is taking steps to move some of your business [...]
5 Ways to Improve Your Website to Generate More Leads
If the goal of your website is to turn your visitors into new business leads, it has to be strategically designed for that purpose. It needs to do a great job of engaging the visitor, enticing them to give you their email and encouraging them to connect with you. 1. Give customers the information they seek. A clearly articulated value [...]
eNewsletters: Are They Still Worth it?
You know you need to keep in touch with your contacts year round and may be wondering if an newsletter marketing is worth the time and effort or if people even read them anymore. The answer is YES!…but…they need to provide value. An e-newsletter can be a great tool for building trust and expertise with your current and prospective clients [...]
What the Heck is a “Marketing Funnel” Anyway?
In general, people don’t make snap decisions — they need to do research, gather information, compare options and get validation before they make a purchasing decision. Going through this process is often described in sales and marketing as going through “the funnel”. Most have three basic stages (some use four) referred to as Top of the Funnel, Middle of Funnel [...]
Is SEO Really Needed for Small Businesses to Get Results?
I generally avoid writing about SEO since there are so many articles, ebooks, blogs, etc. already out there, but I am more frequently hearing from my small business clients that that they want to “rank #1 for this or that keyword” without really understanding how the new world of SEO works. Yes, keywords were important years ago for ranking—and they [...]
What to “Know” When Redesigning your Small Business Website
Many small businesses start off the New Year evaluating their marketing – and their website in particular. But redesigning or doing a major refresh to your website can cause your rank and search value to decline if you don’t plan ahead. This happen more often than not, and we often get a call AFTER the new site is launched — [...]
Ten Things Every Small Business Website Needs
I was asked to give a presentation to small business owners at a local conference but before I selected a topic I asked them what they want to learn more about. The majority wanted to do better with their website and understand some of the “gotta haves” so that their websites could do better. This presentation consists of 10 things [...]
Your WordPress Site is Launched, Now What?
Party! Well, maybe. High fives. Definitely. It may seem like the work is done, but there still is plenty to do after you launch your site. For any business (and especially a small business) having a good website is generally the number one priority for marketing. Creating a truly great site takes time, planning, and often a good chunk of [...]
Seven Steps that Will Make You Stand Out This Year
In December we all start to looking ahead to the new year and thinking about resolutions and goals for the coming year. If you are like me you avoid personal resolutions because chances are they probably will not be kept as we all get busy and lose the motivation — then we just feel bad. However, when it comes to your business, having goals and [...]
Strategic Alliances — Not Just for the Big Guys
Small businesses have many challenges in sales and marketing and often times struggle to build adequate pipelines for new business. Many spend hours out “networking” only to be disappointed that the leads they get are not qualified, and let's face it, are just bad or not a fit. With all the things a small business owner or manager has to [...]
Start-Up Marketing: Three Things You Need
Living and working in Silicon Valley, we get quite a bit of exposure to “start-ups”. Of course there seems to be many definitions for start-ups since I have talked to some that have been in business for more than 7 years and still consider themselves a start-up. I think some of it has to do with the “sexiness” of saying [...]
What Does a Can of Spam Have to do with Email Marketing Anyway?
Well, nothing really, but the explosion of the use of email also means there was an explosion of unwanted marketing messages in our inboxes. So Congress enacted the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM) with the intent to regulate unsolicited commercial email. Two things are important to note here. 1) the regulation applies to both commercial [...]
Seven Things Your Site Needs for Optimization
When we hear “I need to work on SEO”, most people are referring only to their page rankings and increasing their position in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Although this is important, there are 6 other areas that also need to be addressed to fully “optimize” your website. Depending on your site, target audience and content, some areas may need more attention because they [...]
10 Branding Tips For Small Businesses and Start Ups
I came across a one-page handout that I created a few years ago for a workshop with these 10 tips for small businesses on branding. I started to read through it thinking that with the pace things move in marketing, it would not be relevant anymore and was ready to hit the delete key. I was surprised when I got [...]
Your Marketing Emails in an Outlook World
Whether sharing company news, special offers or even coupons, email continues to be a key component of the marketing mix for many companies. But successfully delivering an HTML email to a highly fragmented email client environment resident on smartphones, tablets, desktops or laptops can prove almost as challenging as staying awake during a screening of Maleficent. Outlook has the Word Perhaps [...]
Good Marketing is Not for the Lazy Either
In a past issue of Target Marketing, Bob Bly wrote an article titled “Sometimes Old-School is Better”. The main point of the article was that as journalist and writer, he promoted the importance of checking facts – and that doesn’t mean just doing a Google search, compiling numerous resources and just reinventing the same content assuming someone did the fact checking previously. [...]