Diving Into SEO – A Visual Guide

By on   /   Blog, Education and Training, Marketing, SEO, Strategy  
SEO guide

Our clients love this SEO visual guide. We think you will too! SEO guides are abundant and ever-changing.  Some are useful while others tend to create more confusion than help. With our clients, we’ve created a simple SEO visual guide to help them in Web site development and management. The guide offers a unique perspective to working with your Website as a “Landing Zone” for those jumping into Google (or other search engines) to search for your products or services. At the 10,000 foot view, you have the basics: Do your keyword research Creating a sitemap.xml for your site Submit

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A Day of Brand Marketing and Digital SEO Discovery

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Branding, Education and Training, Marketing, SEO, SPOKE News  
andrew b. clark spoke communications des moines iowa

Boy, did I miss the days of frequent public speaking. At one time, I had as many as 2 speaking engagements booked for each month of the year (2005, 2006, 2007). While I was starting up SPOKE Communications (previously CreateWOWMarketing), it was a great way to hone my marketing and branding processes through “Live Engagement and Research” and build a resource for client development for the business. Of course, it’s a true testament of the love I have for what we do at SPOKE when I get to stand in front of a group to share marketing communication tips, tricks

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Playing Like The Big Dogs – Make Marketing a Priority

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Branding, Education and Training, Marketing, Strategy  

What’s the difference between your brand and that of, let’s say, Coke? Size? Sure, but you don’t think Coke has always been a billion dollar a year company do you? What else? Budget? Staff? Investors? All acquired through growth. So maybe the question should be, “Why aren’t you as big as Coke?” What would be your answer? Without a lot of drama and fanfare, the answer is simply marketing. Coke made (and still makes) Marketing a Priority. (Here’s their 2013 annual report just to verify.) And you can look at the annual reports of Pepsi, Doritos, General Motors, IBM, Apple,

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Beware The Social Media Spell

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Branding, Education and Training, Interactive Media, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Strategy, Technology  

Unfortunately, this is Social Media Marketing for many: Look deeply into my eyes… you are feeling veeeery sleepy… sleeeeepy… deeeeper… deeeeeeeeper… relax and let the social media mystique take you to a happier place. Deeeeper… Dee… Yeah, sometimes I feel like social media has cast some kind of spell over businesses, specifically throughout the marketing departments of some companies. It’s easy to be seduced. It’s easy to be swayed by viral videos, tweets, and blogs with thousands of readers. It’s easy to think that social media can be the magic pill to fix marketing mishaps. But in our passionate pursuit

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Five Web Marketing Questions You Need to Be Asking

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Branding, Education and Training, Interactive Media, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Strategy  

Okay, this set of five questions starts with one MAJOR Web marketing discovery question: “How successful is your Web site at accomplishing your marketing goals?” If you don’t know the answer, you need to stop reading now and set proper goals goals.  Only through goal-setting and tracking will you know if you have an effective strategy in place. Once you have that established, work through the following five simple questions to gauge the effectiveness of your Web marketing efforts. When your visitors see your site (and your business) as value-added then doing business with you is an opportunity, not a

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The Entrepreneur Brand

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Branding, Education and Training, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, SPOKE News  
branding entrepreneur des moines iowa marketing communications

I had the honor of heading down to southern Iowa last night to talk to the Entrepreneurship students at South West Iowa Community College (SWiCC). My charge was easy enough; explain the steps I’d taken through entrepreneurship and how branding affected my decisions and the development of my business. But then I thought a bright-eyed group of burgeoning entrepreneurs deserved more than my typical “TRUE Branding 101” spiel. This presentation required a little “from the heart?” A little “I’ve been in your shoes?” Maybe this needed to be a little more personal. Of course, branding for entrepreneurs is paramount. “Without

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#6SecondMarketing – Vine 002 – Basic Web Marketing

By on   /   #6SecondMarketing, Blog, Brand Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Web Video  
vine marketing #6SecondMarketing

Vine Marketing – #6SecondMarketing by The Brand Chef. Vine-002 – Basic Web Marketing To play the video with sound, hover over the upper left corner and turn it on. 😉 If you have to be reminded to have a PHONE NUMBER on the front page of your website, you might need something more than just marketing help. We just earned a client because of that reason (as well as being generally awesome). The client actually said, “We had 4 marketing companies we wanted to call this week and yours was the only one with the phone number readily available on

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#6SecondMarketing – Vine 001

By on   /   #6SecondMarketing, Blog, Web Video  
vine marketing #6SecondMarketing

Vine Marketing – #6SecondMarketing by The Brand Chef. Vine-001 To play the video with sound, hover over the upper left corner and turn it on.  😉 https://vine.co/v/Mwh77JaJJ93/ Comment below to discuss your #Marketing and #Branding questions. I’ll be picking topics from the comments and other discussions throughout the weeks to share here! And what ever you do… Keep Cookin’ The Brand Chef #Vine #Marketing

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