Three Strategic Factors to Successfully Integrating Video Marketing

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Education and Training, Interactive Media, Marketing, SEO, Strategy, Technology, Web Video  
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Video marketing has become the hottest trend in communications strategies. With the world turning to live streaming and video conferencing during the pandemic, it’s no wonder video has become the smart marketers’ communications tool of choice. Video’s intrinsic entertainment value and increased engagement potential is an audience’s most natural connection to you and your brand outside an actual face-to-face meeting. Now is the best time to kick off that video marketing program. So, how do you get the ball rolling integrating video marketing into your marcom strategy? While you may be a fantastic communicator, quickly adapting to social media, integrating

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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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3 Easy Steps to Better Marketing Communications

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Listen, marketing communications isn’t rocket science. While I’ve seen CMOs and and entire Marketing departments wringing their hands over the most inane of situations, I try to explain, “If we do a bit of strategic thinking to create a program that uses dollars efficiently and produces quality leads, we’ll be well on our way to being a marketing communications stud-bolts.” So below are three easy steps to building confidence in your marketing communications efforts as well as your team, your company, and your customers. 1) Define the Players The primary step in shaping a successful marketing communications plan is to

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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  
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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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Happy GOOGLE Mobile-Friendly Day!

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Branding, Design, Education and Training, Industry News, Interactive Media, Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, SPOKE News, Strategy, Technology  
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Mobile-friendly? What, you say? Yes, over night, the powers at Google changed their algorithms for search to require all sties to be “Mobile-friendly” or be excluded from mobile search. You can read more about their changes here: http://cre8wow.me/1yLU6XM This change is a great advantage to you and all of those that keep their sites current with search compatibility best practices. As Google enacts these changes, sites NOT mobile-friendly will no longer be indexed for mobile search results. Yes, you heard right… NON MOBILE-FRIENDLY SITES WILL NOT SHOW UP IN MOBILE SEARCHES AFTER TODAY! While standard desktop search will not be

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3 Simple Tips for Making Your Email Marketing Campaigns Better

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‘Tis the season for pointless Email … Email Marketing! Email, email everywhere, but not a click to link… Okay that sounded better in my head… We have a love/hate relationship with email. Marketers love it for it’s economy, it’s simplicity and it’s tracking potential. Consumers love it for about a day and then get irritated when their in-boxes are swamped with “Awesome Offers” and “Amazing Deals!”  Marketers and business owners also wring their hands and fret over each and every email they send, wondering, “What do I write about next?” or “Does it say the right thing,” or “…make the

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Website Security Updates – An Open Letter To Spoke Clients

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Website security is no small part of providing great web development for clients. As a service to our customers, Spoke Communications is constantly striving to protect not only the aesthetic integrity of your Websites, your communications and connectivity, but the data therein. In recent months, the “hacking world” has become very aggressive with attempts on accessing the servers, Content Management Systems (CMS), and data within Websites around the Internet. These attacks have caused immeasurable amounts of damage to websites all over the World, and in turn the ability for companies or individuals to be effectively, efficiently, and economically represented online.

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