Can you believe it's already spring? March was an exciting month for digital marketing; here are a few ideas and options to add to your tool belt as you continue to build your strategy.
Peg McDermott
Despite the wide array of new and exciting ways that you can reach potential customers through all sorts of online channels, email (perhaps somewhat surprisingly) remains one of the best tools to reach out to your audience. That said, there's a lot of disappointment to go around when an email campaign fails to achieve the goals you set for it, and even more so when it fails so spectacularly that you start to wonder why you're even bothering at all.
It's always nice to be able to share some good news! For the past two years, COGO Interactive has been honored to be recognized by Expertise.com as one of the top 24 web design agencies in the DC area, and this year we're pleased to 
announce that we have once again been selected as part of this prestigious list.
Gone are the days when having an online business presence was just a matter of throwing a static webpage together and letting it do the work for you - today's consumers (and especially those from younger generations) are accustomed to the internet being a place for dynamic interaction. In terms of lead generation, this means that in order to stand out in a sea of available options, you need to be perpetually demonstrating why your product or service is special. Here are three ways you can start engaging with your audience in real time, to show everyone exactly what you're made of and why they should want a piece of it.
If you've been anywhere near the internet in the past five years, you probably already know just how important video is, and how much it has become a part of the online landscape. As internet (and especially mobile internet) speeds have become faster, the barriers that kept video from dominating in the past have fallen away. People are now watching over one billion hours of YouTube per day, live video streaming is possible even from mobile devices, and the marketing world has caught on to the importance of these shifts.
The first two months of 2018 are already over, and that has provided enough time to see just where the digital marketing road for this year is starting to lead. As we head into spring, here are four things to keep in mind as you prepare your business to have its best-ever year this year.
The SEO game is becoming increasingly sophisticated over time. The earth-shatteringly major Google algorithm updates are coming fewer and farther between, which is great. The trade-off, however, is that the smoother, more subtle changes to how search engines work mean that your approach to SEO also needs to be smooth and subtle. It also needs to be dynamic - gone are the days when you could just set things a certain way and forget about it for a while. To keep on top of today's search results, you need to be constantly re-evaluating your techniques, so here are some things to keep in mind over the course of 2018.
As a business owner, you're always trying to give your customers the best experience. You can't be perfect at pleasing everyone all the time, though - each customer comes to you with different expectations, and it's impossible to predict what all those expectations might be. What you can do, however, is learn how to handle feedback in a graceful way, so that you can turn any negative customer experiences into a positive. Here are five ways to do just that:
Collecting information about online visitors is nothing new - businesses have been doing this for many years as a way to learn more about what their customers want, and how best to serve them. What is evolving with new tech, however, are the ways in which that data can be interpreted and channeled in a useful manner. With the big data technologies that are emerging in 2018, small businesses have more power than ever to adopt an online marketing strategy that not only brings in the right customers, but gives those customers an unparalleled personal experience. If you're new to the idea of big data, find it intimidating, or simply don't see how it can help your strategy, here are a couple of key points that will point you in the right direction.
When it comes to generating leads for your website, high traffic is the main goal, right? Not necessarily. Imagine that you run a site aimed toward retirees, and you see that a lot of people are visiting the site, but when you look at your analytics, you discover that most of your visitors are teenagers. That's not going to lead to many sales! While having a high volume of traffic is certainly a good sign, big numbers are not enough to push your conversion rates higher - you want the right people coming to your site, the ones who are in the target market for your product or service. This is where keywords come into play.
LinkedIn's new interface and upcoming changes may not surprise you, but you will notice them. It will happen sometime in 2017. The redesigned website is meant to bring LinkedIn's desktop experience more in line with its mobile app.
The main changes are to the look and feel. It will cleaner and has more responsive and easier to navigate features, including better search features. There are also some features that they are retiring: