Digital marketing insights.

Amongst experienced online marketers there is an ongoing debate about whether short or long form landing pages are more effective.

Mr. Spock famously decreed that "the needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few." It's a great quote, and a rather selfless philosophy when you're trapped next to a spaceship’s overheating reactor. However, in the world of online marketing, it's quite an outdated point of view.

Clients generally love us, and our competitors generally hate us. Oddly enough, most feel the way they do for exactly the same reason...

It can be tough for marketers to balance the need for doing with the necessity of thinking and planning, which is why so many companies have great strategies that they never really get around to executing.

In the last few months, we've shared some of our thoughts around the process of moving websites from one domain to another, and even when to start over altogether.

Since our launch in 2011, we've been able to overtake an impressive list of established digital agencies and SEOs on Google's rankings, and helped the vast majority of our clients to dramatically increase the numbers of leads they're generating through their own sites as well.

Inbound lead generation campaigns look a lot like fishing trips: build a great website (find a stream), attract traffic (cast your lure), get visitors to sign up for offers (set your hook), and then cultivate the relationship (reel time). It's a format that has worked for thousands of companies, including our own online marketing clients.

We have shared a lot of advice lately about marketing personas, and specifically how we use them to get to know more about our best customers, and how the insights we gain from them affect online marketing messages.

If you are familiar with our blog, or our approach to online marketing, then you already know why we attach so much importance to marketing personas.

Having your website cultivate new sales opportunities, automatically, is what we think online business is all about.

Traditionally, the process of generating leads through search engine optimization looks something like this: figure out what keywords your potential customers are likely to search for, make pages that are easy for Google to find, and then make some kind of offer on the page that convinces them to take the next step.

In some of our previous posts (not to mention our highly recommended e-books, now available on Amazon), we've gone into a bit of detail describing our process for creating marketing personas – profiles of our best potential customers that allow us to communicate with them in a way that speaks to them.

It has been known for some time that mobile devices like smart phones and tablets are being bought and activated at a frantic pace.

Images have always had a unique kind of sales and marketing power, if only because the human eye is trained to pick up on visuals faster than on text or abstract ideas.

With the initial rollout of the Google Penguin update more than a year behind us, you would think it would be "old news," especially in the rapidly shifting world of Internet marketing.