The holidays are around the corner, and now is the time for business owners to appear to all those holiday shoppers looking for the best gifts. It is a highly competitive time of the year, and business owners work very hard to craft holiday marketing strategies that will help them stand out and increase their sales. There are many things you can do to make sure you also drive sales by appealing to all those holiday shoppers.

Here are four tips that will help you gain exposure and sell more this season:

1.    Plan and Start Early

Did you know that 20% of consumers start their holiday shopping in September? That’s why starting early may be the best way to tackle the holiday season and get more exposure! SEO can take time to update and refresh rankings, so planning ahead and crafting your content early will help you gain exposure right when holiday shopping starts. You can build a strong holiday marketing strategy by choosing the right keywords, creating the best content, and making appealing ads!

2.    Create a Seamless Mobile Experience

It is no surprise that more and more shoppers choose to do their holiday shopping, read customer reviews, and compare products through their mobile devices. This year, it is estimated that over 45% of online holiday traffic will come from mobile. That is why you should make sure that your website, store, and user interfaces are mobile optimized. Giving shoppers a quick and seamless navigation can be make a difference when choosing to make a purchase.

3.    Build Seasonal Paid Search Campaigns

Paid search is one of the most important ways to increase brand exposure during the holidays. Shoppers constantly search for the best gifts, make product comparisons, and look for the best prices on search engines. That is why ad impressions see a 50% boost during the holidays! Building a seasonal campaign, adding some holiday keywords, and making creative descriptions and headlines can help you stand out, especially if you use holiday sitelinks with a specific holiday landing page!

4.    Use Available Data to Make Strategic Decisions

Last year’s data is fully available, and you can use it to make sure you craft the best holiday marketing strategy. Do some research to find out what keywords worked best, how much they cost, and which ones may work well for your products and services. Having this information can help you put together a strategy that will get you in front of holiday shoppers and ensure an increased number of conversions.

Happy selling!

How Content Marketing Makes Every Other Marketing Channel More Effective

Sponsored by MOJO Small Business Partner: Scripted

It’s a digital world and today’s marketing professionals know that if you don’t make an impact online, you don’t exist. Staying relevant is more difficult than ever. The search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that worked last year are obsolete. Social media strategies that once brought in the crowds now barely register a blip. Search engine marketing is getting more expensive and less efficient as more competitors learn how to use it well.

Fortunately, there are still great tools to dramatically improve the effectiveness of your marketing. Content marketing is one of those force multipliers that unleashes the potential of the rest of your marketing operation, making it cheaper and more effective – if you do it right.

Good Content Naturally Improves Organic Traffic

The key word here is “good”. If you are still filling your site with bold, underlined keywords that are completely out of context, you can be sure your site’s rankings are negatively impacted. Today’s search engine robots can spot keyword stuffing at a glance.

Adding useless links to your page is another antiquated digital marketing method. You will no longer get credit for quantity over quality. Search engines are interested in your ability to add value for web users, which means your links must guide visitors to relevant, useful information.

When you do it right – by creating useful and interesting content – those pages will rank well on search engines for relevant keywords, which is the best way to create reliable organic traffic. As you collect pages that rank well, you’ll also see better SEO performance for your website’s main pages. Congrats! You’re collecting “Domain Authority”, which means that Google and similar services see you as an authority in your field and are more likely to rank any page on your site higher.

Higher Domain Authority Equals Cheaper SEM

Improving your domain authority is great for bringing in organic traffic, but it also has other fantastic benefits. One of the biggest benefits is cheaper SEM.

Google uses a wide range of factors to decide whose ads will appear for certain keywords, and whoseads will appear at the top. These factors are summed up in the quality score of your ad, and one of the most important contributors to your quality score is domain authority.

Think of it this way: Even if I purchase ads for a quick blog post on Medium about the latest events in Iraq, Google doesn’t want my little blog post to outrank a recent article on the same subject from the New York Times.

When you use content to establish higher domain authority for keywords that you’re targeting in ads, your quality score will go up, which means that you’ll pay less for higher placement and more clicks. More traffic, less cost – what’s not to love!

Good Content Makes Great Social Media Marketing Collateral

You put out your content and everyone loved it. After a few days of praise, your great post settles in for a long life of bringing in a continuous trickle of leads through organic traffic. It’s a good retirement.

Except that’s not the end of the story, or at least it shouldn’t be. Once you create a piece of content that people respond to, it’s time to find ways to repurpose it.

Whether it’s a blog post, video, infographic, or even just a nice image, good social media strategists know that if it’s worth posting once, it’s worth posting again. They’ll also tell you that posting to social media isn’t just about courting existing followers. Good content can be converted into ads and promoted posts that will attract new visitors to your profile and website.

Turning social media into an effective marketing channel requires good collateral anyway so you’ll hit two birds with one stone by investing in good content

Strengthening Your Brand Through Content Marketing

Content that people love doesn’t just drive traffic to your website, it inspires the people who enjoy it to share with their friends and colleagues. Innovative content marketers know that the likelihood of social media shares increases dramatically with the quality and variety of content. For example, a useful video, a funny image or a well-written blog post is far more likely to gain traction than an amateur attempt at content creation.

There are some striking statistics that SEM experts are incorporating into new content creation:

• When a colorful visual aid accompanies text, the likelihood of users reading the text increases 80 percent.
• Content published with accompanying images typically gets 94 percent more views that text-only content.
• According to 51.9 percent of digital marketing experts, video content enjoys the best return on investment.

The vast majority of those people won’t turn into customers right away. In fact, you might not see even a blip in sales the day after a post gets 10,000 unique views.

But now there are 10,000 people who know the name of your company who didn’t before, and they associate you with an expert piece in a relevant industry. That’s brand strengthening in action.

Large companies pay millions of dollars for television and billboard ads to do the same thing that you just did with a blog post. You’ve seeded those 10,000 people so that, when they see your next post or ad, they’ll already trust in your brand and be more likely to click.

Investing in content marketing isn’t just about making a cool blog, it’s an essential tool in the modern digital marketer’s arsenal for increasing efficiency across a range of marketing channels. And remember, the sooner you get started, the quicker you’ll see an effect. So what’s stopping you?

As we were building the Golfoholics community on Facebook (facebook.com/golfoholics), we quickly became aware that the posts that generated the most engagement – by far – were static images. So we did some homework to see if that’s what other brands were experiencing and found a study by SocialBakers that looked at the top 100 pages on Facebook and found that static images generated 87% of all engagement.

And when we sat in on a Twitter webinar last year, they told us that tweets with images generated 313% more engagement than those without. But we’re Mad Men by trade, and our advertising instincts told us that if that is so, we damn well better be branding those images or we were missing out on a huge opportunity.

Now in advertising, you usually work in creative teams that consist of a copywriter and an art director. More often than not, the copywriter comes up with the words, and the art director is responsible for the design of the ad. But in social media, that’s terribly inefficient, particularly for small businesses. Content creation for social is often a one-man or woman job, and you don’t have the luxury of an art director spending weeks crafting a well-designed post. So you’ve got to do it yourself.

And I’m not one of those folks who is well-versed in Adobe InDesign. I needed a tool that would let me quickly and easily brand our social visuals. So I put together a brief business plan, went out and raised some friends and family funding, and found myself a good development partner. Months later we gave birth to a prototype of what we called PostCreator, and put it up on Facebook for free to see if people might like it.

Turns out they did, so we raised a bit more money and developed a pro version that lets you upload an image, overlay a headline, embed your logo and post directly to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Today, PostCreator has more than 5,000 subscribers, creating engaging branded social visuals for authors, bands, realtors and eye doctors to national retailers like Brooks Brothers.

And our Golfoholics community has swelled to more than 68,000 golf addicts who are highly engaged in the content we create and post through PostCreator. You can take a look at the types of posts subscribers are creating here

PostCreator in Action