Proliferation

May 27
0

Fusion 360: A New Generation of Revolutionaries

By | content marketing, digital marketing | No Comments

In the year 1776, a piece of paper signed by 56 men started a revolution. Sure, there’d been other revolutions before, but the world had never seen a revolution like this. This was a group of colonies with relatively nothing to their name rising up against the most powerful country in the world, and for what? For an idea that had never been tried before and, as far as the world was concerned, probably wouldn’t succeed. But it did.

That’s the thing about revolutionaries. They can see a future in the distance that others just can’t grasp. With creativity, hard work and a little bit of luck they don’t just embrace the new world. They create it. At Fusion 360, we are revolutionaries.

Fusion 360 doesn’t seek to be on par with the best marketing agencies in the world. We want to lead them. When other marketing agencies reach an advertising peak, we’ll be waving to them from the next summit.

You see, there’s a revolution happening right now. The world of digital marketing is changing and developing and growing, and we were there to sign its declaration of independence from the marketing strategies of the past. Other marketing agencies are joining the fight, but we’ve been out on the front lines for years, right where we want to be.

We’re a tight battalion of marketing soldiers. We collaborate together, eat together and fight many a Nerf battle together. This environment enables us to be creative and formulate innovative strategies. We’re not afraid to share new ideas — because at Fusion 360 ideas aren’t rejected, they’re improved. We work hard, and we play hard because that’s how you keep the spark of revolution burning.

Why are we like this? Why do we insist on rising up for ideas that have never been tried before? Because we are Fusion 360. We are the agency for the digital revolution.

May 27
0

Seven of the Best Easter Eggs on the Web

By | content marketing, digital marketing | No Comments

The Internet is a beautiful thing. It’s a place where ideas flow freely no matter how bogus, and the bizarre and ridiculous are welcomed with open screens. Everyone from digital marketing companies to your weird neighbor down the street who lives in his parents’ basement can take part in the worldwide Web. But there are secrets lurking in the hidden corners of your favorite websites. They’re called Easter eggs, and they are amazing.

We’re not talking about the hardboiled eggs you dye with your mom and hide in the backyard — which, let’s be honest, is a weird tradition no one seems to understand why we do. These Easter eggs are hidden “surprises” coders embed within websites and programs just because they can. Even digital marketing companies have been known to hide a thing or two in their websites. Now, we know you’re entering Nicholas Cage in “National Treasure” mode as you read this, so we’ve assembled a list of a few of our favorite website Easter eggs to get you started.

1. Wikipedia’s Easter Egg

Search “Easter egg” on Wikipedia. Check out the image of two rabbits in the right-hand corner. See the hedgehog? Click it. It’s basically Easter egg inception.

2. Buzzfeed’s Wilkie Takeover

Mark Wilkie is the chief technology officer at Buzzfeed, and clearly someone in the Web department loves him very much. Click anywhere in the white space of the Buzzfeed homepage, and then, type the Nintendo Konami Code (UP ARROW – UP ARROW – DOWN ARROW – DOWN ARROW – LEFT ARROW – RIGHT ARROW – LEFT ARROW – RIGHT ARROW – B – A). Suddenly everything’s coming up Wilkie.

3. Google Images’ Atari Breakout

Feel the need to travel back to 1976? Search for “Atari Breakout” in Google images, and you can play the game to your heart’s content.

4. British Vogue Dino

Even the British digital marketing companies love a good Easter egg. Visit British Vogue’s homepage, click the white space and type in that beautiful Konami Code. You’re welcome.

5. The Bacon Number

Even digital marketing companies love a good web gimmick. They also love Kevin Bacon, though they might not admit it. Someone at Google also loves Kevin Bacon because that person had a brilliant idea called “The Bacon Number”. Bacon Numbers operate under the theory that all celebrities are connected to Kevin Bacon by six or less degrees of separation. Each celebrity’s Bacon Number reflects that degree. Google search “Bacon Number” and the name of any celebrity to find out how close each has come to the incomparable Kevin Bacon. 

In case you were wondering, Chris Pratt’s Bacon Number is 2.

6. Pirate Language

Change your Facebook language settings to “English (Pirate).” Never gets old.

7. Earl’s Court Station

Here’s one for all you “Doctor Who” fans hitting a slow day of work at your digital marketing companies. Head over to Google Maps and search for “Earl’s Court Station.” Entering street view lets you catch a glimpse of a particular blue police box. You can even go inside by dropping your yellow street view dude right on the pin in classic map view or by double clicking the box from street view level.

May 25
0

The Facebook Metrics You Should Care Most About

By | digital marketing, Facebook, marketing, Utah | No Comments

Facebook boasts just over a billion daily active users, making it a huge storehouse of potential customers that businesses can pursue. Since most businesses and digital marketing firms are onboard the Facebook train by now, the next step for them is understanding some of the metrics Facebook provides — and how those metrics can be used to improve posts.

Page Views

Page views refer to how many people have visited your Facebook page. This is useful because it can show you how many people were either curious enough about your brand to look you up, or wanted to interact with more of your posts after seeing them on their news feed.

Reach

For Facebook, reach refers to how many users viewed your post. This helps digital marketing firms because you can see which posts gather the most reach, compared to which aren’t doing so well. While this information is useful, it it’s not nearly as useful as seeing how many people engaged with a particular post.

Impressions

While reach refers to number of people who saw your post, impressions refer to how many times your post was seen. This is different, because the same user can see your post more than once if one of his or her friends shares the post. Impressions are a useful metric because they give you a clearer picture of how many times your message is appearing to your audience — and can be a good indicator of how shareable it is.

Engagement

For digital marketing firms in particular, the keyword for social media is, of course, “social.” Engagement measures the percentage of people who interacted with your posts, either through commenting, liking, sharing, etc. This is one of the most useful metrics — because the best type of content is the kind that’s interesting enough for people to share with their friends. The beauty of Facebook is that if you’re sharing something your audience likes, they will do a lot of the legwork for you.

Videos

A major focus for all digital marketing firms is video. If you’re posting videos to your Facebook page, you’ll want to know how many people are actually watching them, right? What’s more useful, though, is seeing how long people have watched your video. Facebook will provide you with the number of times your video has been viewed for at least ten seconds. If videos consistently underperform and people begin to watch but quickly bounce, that’s a solid indicator that your videos need some improvement.

In Summary

Facebook provides these statistics for a reason, so don’t forget to make studying them a regular part of your social media strategy. Only by analyzing stats and understanding how your posts are performing can you continually improve your digital marketing game.

May 25
0

Amp Up Your Content Quality With Good Grammar

By | content marketing, SEO, Utah | No Comments

Content marketing is the driving force behind convincing consumers to use a company’s services or products. Good content marketing gives information to the consumer and that information convinces them to act.

This strategic portion of advertising uses SEO and keywords to draw customers in. Once the consumers find the written content it is important that nothing drives them away — this includes poor grammatical errors.

A good content marketing agency will be able to take care of your content creation for you and with a string of editors double checking posts, grammatical nightmares can easily be avoided.

Avoiding Error

Remembering the little things is key. If your company is located in Utah and it consistently forgets to capitalize Utah in its blog posts, it is likely that your Utah customers will be turned off by the unprofessional mistakes. This could ultimately affect sales.

Many spelling and capitalization errors can be caught by internal spellcheck programs on your computer but there are several other grammatical issues that can’t be resolved by spellcheck.

If your company uses AP Style as your format, make sure that all posts are written after this manner. Inconsistencies within style are confusing within a webpage. Keep style guides handy around the workplace in order to have a quick point of reference when questions arise.

Online sources can also often offer overviews of specific styles and identify commonly made grammatical mistakes. In order to maximize a company’s content marketing reach, refer to these online guides often.

These guides and sources can be found through any search engine. Before your use one though, make sure to check your source and verify that it is a reputable one. You wouldn’t take Jedi training from Chewbacca so why would you take grammar training from dizzyflowerlover454?

After you have referenced guides and established online sources it is always a good idea to have someone give you a second opinion on your work. Content marketing can be tricky so having a second set of eyes catching your little mistakes is important.

With good grammar though, you can keep customers reading and clients happy.

May 24
0

Small Businesses: Your SEO Future Is Bright

By | SEO, Utah SEO | No Comments

Those of us who live in the world of SEO know we bow to the SEO gods — otherwise known as Google. Google dictates what we say, how we say it and whether or not we ever say it again. Most of the time, we’re pretty cool with it. If you’re the owner of a small business, or even a marketing company in Utah with small business clients, the SEO gods are smiling upon your future.

When you examine current trends and speculate on Google’s reasoning in the next several years, it’s easy to see why small businesses will be favored.

Social Media Results

Google is looking towards incorporating social media-based results onto the search engine results pages. More and more social media users are relying on their favorite platform for online content. It wouldn’t be surprising to see content on search engine pages based on the interests of the consumer’s social media contacts. Small businesses benefit here because they can create closer relationships with local groups and consumers than national brands.

Long-Tail Keywords

Voice-to-text technologies create more conversational searches. People speak in long-tail keywords, not broad generalizations. More users are searching for a larger group of specialized phrases. Instead of searching “Utah lawyer,” consumers are searching, “Where can I find a dog bite lawyer near Farmington, Utah?”

Long-tail keywords give small businesses a chance to optimize SEO and gain better search visibility, versus before when larger companies used big SEO budgets to bury smaller competitors.

Searching Local

Google has been perfecting the local search algorithm for quite some time. It’s just going to get better over time, and consumers love it. What tourist in St. George, Utah hasn’t searched, “Best hamburger near me?” Most local businesses are small businesses, so local searches should inevitably boost responses for these groups.

Personalization

Personalization is the new frontier. The more personalized the user experience, the happier consumers seem to be. Digital assistants like Siri and Cortana are gaining popularity because they can gather large amounts of personal behavior information and create the ultimate personalized experience. An easy way to personalize is to use location and purchase history. Both of these elements favor businesses that are small and local.

SEO Is Easier

The more advanced search engines like Google become, the easier it is to enter the game. It sounds counterintuitive, but overall SEO is becoming less scary. Keywords are easier to use. This means instead of spending all your time trying to decipher the complexities of SEO, small businesses can spend more time building relationships with consumers.

May 19
0

Personalization: A Call for Deeper Content Marketing Metrics

By | content marketing | No Comments

Content marketing is all about making things personal. It’s about providing the information consumers need in a way that helps them see the benefits of your goods and services. It’s about reaching both an advertising executive in Utah and a mommy blogger on the West Coast.  It takes a lot of work, and after all your time and effort is put into personalizing and optimizing content marketing strategies, how do you know if any of it is paying off?

What’s the Deal With Metrics?

Content marketing metrics allow marketers from Utah and around the world to quantify and visualize the success of each piece of content. There’s just one glitch. A recent McKinsey survey shows that only a third of marketers report they really are able to quantitatively show how effective their marketing is.

How to Dive Deeper Into Analytics

This dilemma is creating an industry-wide call for deeper content marketing metrics. These forms of deep analytics don’t just show return on investment. Deep analytics enable marketers to improve future content. In order to get this type of information, marketers must invest in emergent content technologies that turn consumers into active participants by delivering each consumer a custom, interactive experience.

How does this differ from traditional content marketing approaches? Well, most content marketers work under a distribution point model, meaning they try to collect consumer data when the content is delivered to the user, like selecting ads based on search history. This is all good, but too many marketers stop there. There’s limited personalization, so you get limited engagement and limited insights into the consumer.

We’ll Say It Again: Give the Customers What They Want

To continue to improve and develop, content marketing professionals need to bridge the gap between creating personal content and improving data analysis and collection. This means investing in a personalized customer experience, or simply put, giving the customer the content they actually want. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Utah or in the Big Apple. Increasing personalization means more insights into each customer and deeper metrics overall.

May 18
0

Social Media in the 2016 Presidential Election

By | public relations, Social Media | No Comments

It’s election season. Some of you may feel like your voice is finally being heard — and others may feel straight outta options. That’s the beauty of the American election system. It’s what makes the United States great. For 240 years, Americans have been throwing aside old ideals and starting revolutions.

One of those revolutions took place in 2008. That year, Barack Obama made history as the first United States presidential candidate to use social media for a campaign advantage. The Obama campaign harnessed the power of social media to reach young voters. Marketing agencies say the strategy was so effective because Obama supporters didn’t just send out a few clever tweets; they used social media to start a movement, with Barack Obama as the leader.

The 2008 election cycle forever changed the way presidential campaigns are run. Candidates today must scramble to find the best marketing agencies and consultants to help them connect with the masses. They look to marketing agencies to tell them how their messages are received. The 2016 presidential candidates are no different. Social media is the new political bread and butter.

Figures current as of May 28, 2016.

Facebook

Facebook is a staple of any social media campaign. It’s an oldie but a goodie — kind of like the presidential candidates (though goodie is debatable depending on your political inclinations).

Donald Trump by far leads the pack with 7.8 million likes, more than double Hillary Clinton’s 3.5 million likes and well ahead of Bernie Sanders’ 4.2 million. Why the huge difference? Marketing agencies will tell you that Trump uses the platform to his full advantage. His posts feel real, helping potential voters form a connection to him on a personal level. Other candidates’ pages feel like someone else is writing for them. Some of Trump’s Facebook posts may come off a little brash, but you know he’s the one writing them.

Twitter

Trump takes the cake again on Twitter with 8.27 million followers to Clinton’s 6.28 million and Sanders’ 2.2 million and for pretty much the same reason he rules Facebook. Both Clinton and Sanders disclaim that tweets come from staff members. Clinton does sign personal tweets so followers know when something is coming directly from her, but many marketing agencies would agree this might do more harm than good. It shows followers that Clinton only tweets personally every 4-7 days. Trump on the other hand, well, that dude is always tweeting.

trump twitter

Instagram

Instagram is the new social media frontier for this election cycle. All three candidates dance around 1.5 million followers, and it seems they are all trying to work with their staff and marketing agencies to figure out how to best use this platform to further their campaigns.

YouTube

Hold up! You are now entering Bernie-town. Bernie Sanders leaves the other candidates in the dust when it comes to YouTube subscribers, coming in at 132,362 subscribers to Clinton’s 46,139 and Trump’s 36,568. Sanders simply posts more videos than anyone else. His official YouTube channel has uploaded 513 videos compared to Clinton’s 164 and Trump’s 45. Video is the future, so good for Bernie.

bernie webpage

Snapchat

There’s not much to say about Snapchat because the platform doesn’t release information on how actively users snap, but we do know that Hillary Clinton is by far the most vocal lover of this social media channel. She even snaps during interviews.

May 16
0

How to Make Public Relations Work for Your SEO Strategy

By | SEO, Utah, Utah SEO | No Comments

Public relations is an integral part of any full service advertising campaign. A public relations campaign improves the company’s relationship with the local community. These campaigns can work in a way that not only improves your relationship with the community, but also increases your SEO.

SEO often has its own strategy — and by manipulating your public relations (PR) strategy to fall in line with SEO, businesses can achieve maximum reach. Professional SEO specialists can help companies develop a clear vision of how PR and SEO can work together.

What Does Public Relations Entail?

Many people believe that PR is as simple as image management and restoration; while this is certainly one function of PR, there are many others as well. These facets may be known as something other than PR, but with such a wide variety of avenues it is likely that your company is participating in some form of public relations — whether you know it or not.

Social media marketing for example is certainly a form of PR. Presenting your company to the public on Facebook and Twitter and interacting with customers and the general public is not only a good PR strategy, but it works great for SEO as well.

Understanding the multiple facets of PR helps companies identify new avenues in which to implement their SEO campaigns.

Now Add the SEO

Making your keywords match your philanthropic ideals is one key way to align your public relations campaign with your SEO strategy. This general tactic can be implemented everywhere from blog posts to Facebook.

Say your company wants to gain public favor with local Utah residents. As part of this outreach effort your company decides to help raise awareness of endangered Utah wildlife. By involving other Utah businesses and developing a cohesive PR strategy, your business can help Utah wildlife and your company reputation at the same time.

Through the use of relevant keywords in your blog and social media posts about your wildlife outreach efforts and by adding links to these articles, you can increase brand recognition and Web page traffic.

Making room for SEO in your content calendar helps companies to expand their reach. As PR broadens a company’s digital horizons, SEO helps target those horizons and send a company in the right direction.

May 13
0

Combating Google’s Ad Increases

By | SEO, Utah, Utah SEO | No Comments

If you’ve conducted a Google search lately, you’ve probably noticed things have changed. Google has done away with side-rail advertisements and increased the number of advertisements that appear at the top of the search results page.

The changes hope to better match the vertical layout of smartphones, but they also mean subsequent changes in the way companies approach SEO. Ranking in about the top five search results used to be enough to get you on the first Google search page. With the new ad changes, as many as seven ads could appear on page one of search results, which means as few as two organic search results could make an appearance on the same page.

So, what does all this mean for you? Well, it could mean that if you are the third-ranked steakhouse in Utah, customers looking for dinner choices may never even know you exist.

How can you combat these ad changes and make sure your services are seen?

Hire an Awesome SEO Manager

Unfortunately, there is no magic solution. Better SEO is always the answer. If you want a guaranteed spot on the first page of search results, you need to be the best-ranked search result. Investing in an awesome SEO manager can make all the difference. 

Use Informational Search Terms

Google’s new ad system places more advertisements on “highly commercial queries.” Getting fewer ads to appear when users search for your product or service, say your Utah-based steakhouse, could be accomplished in part by changing the keywords you use. Work with your SEO manager to identify search terms that are important to your business but also won’t set off a large number of ads. Lean more toward informational content than commercial.

Buy Ads 

If SEO and informational search terms aren’t getting the job done, you can always buy ads. Ideally, this would be your last resort; however, a well-placed product listing ad (PLA) could put your Utah-area steakhouse at the very top of page one. With the new Google layout, it might be worth the investment.

May 11
0

How to Hire the Best SEO Manager

By | SEO, Utah, Utah SEO | No Comments

SEO is essential for survival in a digital world. It brings a new spin to the old question about the tree falling in a forest: If your company doesn’t appear on the first page of search results, does it really exist? A first-rate SEO manager is the key to success, but it seems like every person in Utah and beyond is calling themselves SEO experts these days. How do you sift through the novices to find a SEO manager who can truly make a difference for your company?

Look for Someone Who Lives for SEO 

An effective SEO manager will live and breathe search engine optimization. You can be confident that a person who is passionate about SEO will stay current on trends and want to produce visible results.

When looking into possible candidates, see if they practice what they preach. Did they attend the latest digital marketing conference in Utah? Do they post about industry trends on their social media accounts? Ask if they have a personal website or blog you can visit; see what they write about and how they write about it. Someone who lives for SEO will spread energy and passion to the rest of your team.

Look for Someone Who Learned From Experience

The best SEO managers will come from diverse backgrounds. They’ll be knowledgeable about all areas of digital marketing and understand how the different elements work together to produce optimal results. You can tell which candidates are experienced SEO managers by asking what their approach would be for two different clients, maybe for a small business in Utah or a large corporation on the East Coast. Experienced managers will be able to present a specialized approach for each client instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to every topic.

Look for Someone Who Can Communicate

The ability to communicate well with individuals at all levels of the company is crucial for a SEO manager. He or she will be coordinating with and teaching everyone from the CEO to the entry-level interns. If a SEO manager can communicate ideas clearly, effectively and with a good attitude, overall efforts to enhance search engine optimization will just keep getting better.