The 12 Best Small Business Spotlight Quotes [Slide Deck]

May 1st, 2013

small business marketing spotlightsWhy should you care about content marketing? Lexion Capital Management, Console & Hollawell, and CBG Benefits have seen results.

How can email marketing increase sales without even offering a coupon? StorkGifts explains how it works for them.

Why is it so important to have a robust presence on search engines through PPC and SEO? Go Get Funding and MyBinding.com explain it perfectly.

For the past few months, eZanga.com has been interviewing small business marketers about their experiences with online marketing. Twelve quotes in particular stood out to us, and we wanted to collect them all in one place to make it easy to learn from these excellent marketers.

About Small Business Spotlight: Since we love small businesses and online marketing (so much so that we have a new product just for them), we decided that small businesses who rock at online marketing deserve more attention. So for the next few months, once a week we’re going to feature a Q&A with a small business that has a great online presence. It may be social media or PPC, but all of these small businesses are doing at least one thing right!

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Introduction to Twitter Lists

April 29th, 2013

introduction to twitter listsMy personal Twitter account doesn’t necessarily have a large network, I follow a mere 314 users. Yet I’m still overwhelmed with content as I scroll through my stream throughout the day.

Log in to your Twitter account. What kind of tweets pop up on your timeline? After pulling up my account, I encountered tweets about food, daily complaints, promotions and gossip.

If only there was a way to separate the small businesses tweets from large corporations blasts, or connections I’ve made at conventions from college classmates. Oh wait, there is! If you’re not familiar with the Twitter lists feature, you have been missing out on connecting more efficiently.

We have a few posts coming up soon about how to make Twitter lists work for you. But first, you need to know how to use them. Here’s a little introduction on what a Twitter list is and how it functions.

So what are Twitter lists?

Twitter lists allow you to curate groups of users, so when viewing that list you’ll only be able to view their tweets. The list’s stream will appear just like any other stream on Twitter. In addition to creating your own lists, you can subscribe to public lists created by other users.

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10 Super Useful IFTTT Recipes

April 26th, 2013

best ifttt recipesTechnology can make us crazy. It makes our lives so much easier in so many ways, but it can also complicate them. So when a service’s slogan is “Put the internet to work for you,” I get excited. I first signed up for IFTTT (which stands for “if this, then that”) about a year ago so I could schedule MyPermissions.org reminders, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Think of IFTTT as a shortcut creator for different online services. Whenever a certain action (called a trigger) occurs, IFTTT automatically sets another action in motion. “If this, then that.” There are 60 services, called channels, that integrate with IFTTT, including Facebook, Twitter, email, RSS, SMS, and more. For each channel, there are several triggers and actions. You use these triggers and actions to create recipes, or the actual “if this, then that” sentence. Sometimes recipes have other ingredients or pieces of data, like an email subject line or text of an SMS message.

I’ve been spending some time lately mining for the best IFTTT recipes and trying to create some gems of my own. They range from the best lifehacks I’ve ever seen to truly random and bizarre, yet awesome. We also have a guest post over on the Formstack blog with 5 IFTTT recipes for social media.

But every time I write one list of great IFTTT recipes, I find more. So here are 10 recipes I think you’ll find helpful:

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Small Business Spotlight: Go Get Funding

April 25th, 2013

small business spotlight go get fundingThis week’s Small Business Spotlight is a special one: it marks the tenth week of the series! To celebrate, after today we’ll be taking a few weeks to wrap-up all the knowledge that these businesses have shared with us over the past few months. Stay tuned for a few summaries of the previous Small Business Spotlights.

As for this week, we’re talking to Go Get Funding, a website for personal online fundraising. People can create pages on the site to fund-raise for causes like paying medical bills, flying a talented kid out to meet his idol who he imitates perfectly, funding a youth leadership program, and raising gas money for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles party van. The company’s motto is “spread awesomeness,” and they seem to be good at it. Take a look at this infographic to check out everything the site makes possible.

Online marketing is especially important to Go Get Funding because the more visibility it gets, the more visibility the fundraising projects on the site get. They really are about the user. They talk to the users and share fundraising tips and advice through Facebook and Twitter. They also showcase successful fundraisers on their blog.

So, let’s learn more about what they do to help others raise money:

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The Dos and Don’ts of Retargeting Campaigns

April 24th, 2013

retargeting best practicesA few weeks ago, we defined and explained the different types of retargeting. By the end of the post, you hopefully understood the different ways you can re-engage your website’s visitors and the best situations for using each. In case you forgot:

“What is Retargeting?

Retargeting aims to reconnect a site visitor with your brand, based on their recent online activity. Whether it’s activity on your actual site, or a keyword that is similar to products or services that you provide, various types of retargeting can help to usher potential customers back to your page. Many times this occurs in an automated fashion.

How It Works

By adding a code to your website/URL, retargeting “tags” can be pinned on website visitors with a “cookie” or pixel. Then, they will be shown relevant banners, video ads, or text (which you are able to create) as they continue to browse the web. The ads will promptly remind them of your product or service and redirect them back to your page.”

Retargeting can be a powerful tool, but it’s not foolproof. If implemented incorrectly, instead of bringing back visitors and turning them into conversions, money can be wasted and the brand’s image can be tarnished.

Below is a quick list of dos and don’ts to keep in mind when running retargeting campaigns.

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The Ingredients to Tasty Search Engine Optimization [Infographic]

April 22nd, 2013

ingredients of an seo strategySearch engine optimization is a process that needs to be handled with care, much like grilling up a large, tasty, succulent burger. (Tweet this)

You will reap the benefits of SEO if you take the time to gather all the right ingredients, let it marinate, and cook it to perfection. On the flip side, SEO can be overdone and cooked completely wrong.

But most important to this analogy is the fact that different things work for everyone. Some people might find a burger with just a slice of cheese and some ketchup to  be the most mouth-watering, while for other people, cheese does nothing.

In SEO, it’s important to find a mix of what strategies work best for your site. Maybe you don’t have a lot of links back to your site, but a ton of reviews and social signals.

In SEO cooking, it’s important to know what ingredients bring out the burger’s taste best. Don’t try to drown it in ketchup if the burger seems to taste better with just a little ketchup and a whole lot of pickles. Also, don’t be afraid to test out other ingredients, toppings, and condiments, even if they’re not found in traditional recipes.

To make sure your SEO strategy is done just right, let’s go over all of the essential ingredients with this infographic:

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Grouped In: 5 Tips for Networking in LinkedIn Groups

April 19th, 2013

tips for linkedin groupsAre you in any LinkedIn Groups? If you answered ‘No,’ or ‘Yes, but I don’t really participate,’ then it’s time for a change.

LinkedIn Groups are arguably one of the professional social network’s best features, yet also one of the most underutilized (Tweet this).

They’re a place to find help, information, and meaningful connections. One of the best perks, from a networking perspective, is that sharing a group with someone allows you to view their profile without being connected and even send them a message without being a first-degree connection. Have I drawn you in yet?

I could go on to explain exactly why you should join groups on LinkedIn, but several people have already done so: Miles Jennings convinced people on the LinkedIn blog, HubSpot talks about LinkedIn Groups in their guide to LinkedIn, and Power Formula has shown you how to find relevant groups.

This post is for LinkedIn users who have already joined a group or two, and are looking to make more out of their memberships.

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Small Business Spotlight: MyBinding.com

April 18th, 2013

small business spotlight logoHey everyone! We’re back at it with another Small Business Spotlight day. Today we’re here to shed some light on a small online retailer that rocks some online marketing techniques. MyBinding.com, located out of Hillsboro, Oregon, is one of the industry leaders in distributing binding and laminating equipment.

Although the mood may be frequently dampened by the weather in the Oregon office, the sixty-some employees have a very fun working environment. MyBinding enjoys their fair share of office pranks, lunch-ins and parties, much like us here at eZanga. This family-owned company believes that an enjoyable work atmosphere provides for better customer service. They believe that their product is so much more than wire, coil or a $200 binding machine; it’s their means for building and maintaining strong relationships.

MyBinding.com has an excellent online marketing strategy that leaves no ground uncovered. They’ve dabbled in paid search, SEO, comparison shopping engines, video marketing, article marketing, blogging, social media, and online marketplaces. Their content marketing is what interests us the most. MyBinding manages to discuss office supplies without boring readers. Did you know there are seven different ways to fold a letter? They also stand out with their video marketing strategy; they record product demonstrations, reviews, tutorials, and more.

By adjusting to customer needs and marketing themselves well, they have experienced substantial growth within the last 30 years of their establishment. Check out our interview with MyBinding.com to find out more how this small business has prospered.

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25 Marketing Quotes to Inspire [Slide Deck]

April 17th, 2013

marketing quotes to inspireAs marketers, we spend a lot of time reading. We read marketing blogs, books, case studies, whitepapers…we read a lot of stuff. We read most of this content hoping that we will find some information that can directly impact our marketing strategy, perhaps a new idea to look further into or an important piece of news that impacts the industry.

But what about things that can indirectly impact our careers? Like inspiration and motivation? What about the stuff that keeps us going when we’re knee deep in data wondering if we even know what marketing is anymore?

The slides and quotes below may not have any statistics or case studies, but they may make you a better marketer by inspiring you and changing the way you approach your job. Traditional and new media marketing are both represented, with sources ranging from “The Father of Advertising,” David Ogilvy, to inbound marketers like Brian Halligan and Dan Zarrella. There are even quotes from people who weren’t explicitly marketers, although they definitely knew a thing or two about the industry.

If you enjoy the presentation, feel free to share it. We want to make it as easy as possible to share this inspiration. We’ve included links to tweet each quote, you can embed the SlideShare on your own website or blog, or share it on social media. If there’s a particular slide image that you fancy, you can share it from our Pinterest board. We’ll also be sharing the images on Facebook, Twitter, and some of our other networks.

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10 Reasons People Unsubscribe From Your Email Marketing

April 15th, 2013

email marketing unsubscribe reasonsAll of us are far too familiar with the newsletters, promotions, pitches, and other email marketing messages that bombard our inboxes on a daily basis. I have an email account with over 1,000 unread emails, created specifically for junk mail.

Among these 1,000 emails are sure to be great deals that I’d love to partake in. Unfortunately, they go unread because my inbox is way too cluttered to find content that actually pertains to me.

The only solution I’ve found is to unsubscribe entirely. Countless other consumers find themselves in the same dilemma.

If you want to see results from your email marketing, you need to know how to communicate with your subscribers and make sure they’re happy to see your name in their inbox. (Tweet this)

Here are some pretty common reasons people will unsubscribe from your email marketing messages; make sure you’re doing what you can to keep them from wanting to click that ‘unsubscribe’ button.

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