4.5 Tools To Get Digital Marketing Right

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des moines digital marketing tools

This is the industrial age of digital marketing. What’s hot today will soon be yesterday’s cold fish. It seems like just a short 12 months ago, we were working on Vimeo engagement strategies and backing off email campaigns. And now, well, email is back on the table and Vimeo is no more than a greasy skid mark on your iPhone. Digital is fickle at best. But as new tools and new technologies are developed, the opportunities to build customer connections are better than ever. Digital marketing is still marketing. It’s just a variety of new tools that make it different

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Facebook’s Little Advertising Shell Game: Why You Should Do More Than Boost Post

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It’s tempting. There it is, click it. “Boost Post.” – C’mon, BOOOOOOOST IT…  Everyone is doing it. I triple-dog dare you! Or… should you take the leap with bigger Facebook Advertising strategies? Yes, it’s the Facebook Advertising one-click answer – like peer-pressure. In one simple click, you purportedly get a “boost” to your business post; promising more eyes, more action, and more customers.  But if you’d paid attention to recent changes on Facebook, you would have witnessed the “Business Management” interface updates as well as the focus put on actual Facebook Advertising through the platform. Considering the abundance of recent

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A Day of Brand Marketing and Digital SEO Discovery

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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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VIDEO: Quick SEO Tips for Speedy Ranking Success

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SEO tips marketing des moines iowa

Are there SEO tips for better search rank that actually work? For a lot of marketers, search engine optimization (SEO) is a mystery. From small businesses looking to make a bigger impact through SEO to mega-corporations doing their best to dominate search position, just HOW to achieve better search rank in Google, Bing and other search engines is often a challenge. SPOKE Communications works with clients to achieve the best success possible through content marketing strategies and organic search engine optimization. We’ve seen some tremendous successes as well as experienced the challenges mentioned above, but through some tried-and-true SEO practices,

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Three Strategic Factors to Successfully Integrating Video Marketing

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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

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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

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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

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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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