Brew City Marketing

2017 Digital Marketing Forecast

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Without a doubt, digital marketing is one of the world’s fastest growing and most exciting industries. With only a few months left in 2016, we thought we’d help our readers plan ahead by giving our best predictions for 2017’s top digital marketing trends. Check out our list below.

Video content – If content is king, then videos are making a slow, but sure ascent to royalty status. These days, you can’t scroll through your Facebook newsfeed without catching a video cooking tutorial or news post. We fully expect video to continue its dominance in 2017 and beyond.

Mobile Message Apps – Mobile messaging apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp allow users to communicate on platforms outside of traditional social networks. While many in the digital marketing world were initially wary of mobile messaging, it’s proven to be an effective business tool that helps expose brands to new audiences.

Continued Mobile Dominance – Speaking of mobile, expect it to maintain its dominance through 2017 and the foreseeable future. Experts predict that 1 out of 4 users will have a wearable device by the close of 2016, which means that companies should allocate marketing funds to ensuring content is optimized for mobile platforms.

Cross-Device Marketing Optimization (CRO) – Mobile device use is increasing, but many users continue to visit the web on their desktop or laptop. This is why companies should employ a multi-channel approach to marketing in order to enhance the end-user’s experience on all devices, not just one.

Experiential Marketing – Experiential marketing, or marketing that directly engages consumers, is set to take off in 2017. We fully expect brands to leverage 3D and VR (virtual reality) and other technologies to fully immerse users in their brand and their products.

Hyper-Personalization – Expect brands to laser focus on hyper-personalizing products and services. Applying a similar tactic to your marketing strategy will help increase trust in your brand and help you build credibility amongst unknown audiences.

These trends won’t just benefit you in 2017, you’ll feel the reverberations for years to come. Wondering how to capitalize on these digital marketing trends and help your company succeed? Call us. 414-208-0700.

5 Eternal SEO Truths

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Search engine optimization is a complex field that’s constantly changing. But in an industry of ever-changing algorithms and almost no guarantees, it’s reassuring to know that certain eternal SEO “truths” persist.

Here are our top 5 Eternal SEO Truths:

Results are not immediate, nor are they permanent –  Search engine algorithms take time to index content, which usually means you won’t see a return on your investment for six months or more. Additionally, because search engine algorithms are constantly evolving to bring better and faster results to the end-user, your results may vanish overnight and force you to start over with a new SEO strategy.

There are no short cuts – Yes – “black hat” tactics such as duplicate content, unnatural content that’s overstuffed with keywords, and spam comments do produce results. But these results are typically short-lived and almost always result in penalization by the search engines.

You’ll never know for certain how Google works – The algorithms behind major search engines are constantly changing in order to deliver best results to the end user. This might seem discouraging, but look on the bright side: if you don’t know exactly how Google works, your competition won’t, either.

Quality content always wins – This may be an obvious one, but having quality content on your website will always factory heavily in search rankings. If you want your site to generate traffic and perform well, create good content that your audience will find valuable.

The human element is the most important factor – It’s easy to forget that without people, SEO would not exist. Our advice? Keep the focus on the human element, and the search engines will undoubtedly notice.

It’s great to know that there are still a few things we can count on despite how nuanced and complex SEO actually is. Have questions about SEO or need help crafting a results-driven SEO strategy? Call us today at 414-208-0700.

5 Signs It’s Time for a Website Redesign

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We’re in our seventh year of business and we’re hard at work on the 6th redesign of our website. While we don’t advise that our clients get a new website as often as we’ve done, it’s never a bad idea to consider an update. But when’s the right time to make a move? Here are 5 sure signs it’s time for a website redesign.

Your website looks outdated – Visitors have certain expectations of company websites, including a modern look and feel and user-friendly navigation. If your website still runs on Flash or it’s difficult for visitors to find what they’re looking for, it may be time for a redesign.

Your website isn’t responsive – These days, more Google searches happen on phones, tablets and other mobile devices than they do desktop computers. If your website doesn’t automatically adapt to the device it’s being viewed on (also known as responsive design), then you risk losing major business opportunities. A non-responsive website is a major reason, if not one of the most important reasons, to consider a website redesign.

Your website isn’t generating any leads – Your website serves one main purpose: convert traffic into leads and sales. If your site isn’t providing you with valuable leads, then your website is simply not doing what it’s supposed to do.

Your website isn’t user friendly – It goes without saying, but your website should be user-friendly. At minimum, this means your site should be readable and load relatively quickly. Additionally, your website should make it easy for visitors to find information about your company, including your services, prices and history.

Your website ranks low on the major search engines – Older websites tend to suffer from old technology, outdated content and content that’s overstuffed with keywords. None of these things endear your website to Google’s ranking algorithm. If your organic search engine rankings are low, then your website isn’t working for you. In other words, if your site shows up anywhere beyond page one on search listings, then it may be time for a website redesign.

If any of these five signs describe your website, it may be time for a makeover. The good news? Your reputation and search engine rankings can only improve from here! Are you ready for your update? Call us today at 414-208-0700.

How to Optimize Your Content for Social Media

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We often hear about website and search engine optimization, but social media optimization (SMO) has not quite reached the same level of importance or urgency. But make no mistake: optimizing your website’s content for social media is an important step in building brand authority and increasing awareness of your business or products.

Steps for Optimizing Your Content

Follow these steps for optimizing your site’s content for social media.

  • Prepare your site for sharing on social media channels – The first step to optimizing your content for social media is making sure your site itself is shareable. One way to accomplish this is by setting up a blog on your site which would allow users to link back to you. Once your blog is set up, take it to the next level by making tagging and bookmarking easy for users. Connect to bookmarking sites, social news sites, and social event sites.
  • Add social networking features to your site or blog – Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn offer free widgets that you can deploy on your site to connect users back to those same social networks. These widgets allow users to take polls, share media, and otherwise interact with the social network without ever having to leave your site.
  • Create content that people will want to share – While there are certainly no guarantees online, it’s important to create content people will want not only want to read but share. You can create shareable content by sticking closely to these three general guidelines: keep your topics simple and focused, keep your sense of humor, and only publish content that’s credible, not obvious click bait.
  • Discover what content is popular with your audience – Seems simple enough, but the pages that get the most likes, shares and comments are the pages your audience is most interested in. Spend time analyzing the types of content that attract readers and emulate their formula. Knowing your audience will allow you to increase those likes and shares and build brand awareness organically.

Curious to learn more about social media optimization and how a sound strategy can help increase traffic to your site? We can help. Call us today at 414-208-0700.

Why WordPress: It’s Open Source

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Thanks for reading the final post in our Brew City Marketing original blog series Why WordPress. From the ability to have multiple users to 100% customizable design, we hope you’ve enjoyed learning all about what makes WordPress an exceptional CMS. Miss a post in the series? Head to our blog to catch up.

WordPress is an Open Source Project

WordPress doesn’t belong to any one person or company. Instead, the platform is an “open source” project that’s constantly being maintained, tested, and improved by hundreds of developers around the world. Licensed under the GNU General Public License, WordPress is free for anyone to build as many different types of websites as they wish.

The Benefits of Open Source

But wait: what’s so great about open source? Unlike some proprietary content management systems on the market, the open source aspect of WordPress allows users many invaluable freedoms and benefits. Need some examples? Here are just a few.

  • It won’t lock you in – Unlike a proprietary CMS, WordPress offers you a ton of flexibility…especially when you want to make a drastic change in design, content or even hosting. This is tough and sometimes near impossible to do with a proprietary CMS.
  • It’s constantly being updated – One awesome aspect of WordPress being open source is that it’s constantly being updated and improved by the community. Because so many people are working on it at a given time, bugs and security issues are addressed quickly. With a proprietary CMS, you’re at the mercy of the company or individual to update the system should things go wrong.
  • It’s safe and secure – Like most open source platforms, WordPress is incredibly secure. Security is bolstered by the hundreds of WordPress volunteers around the globe who are constantly working to solve known security issues and mitigate others.
  • It’s on a long list of open source success stories – Still not sure of the viability of WordPress? Consider other open sources success stories like Firefox, Wikipedia, OpenOffice, Android and more. These companies are juggernauts in information technology and are used by millions around the globe.

Open source means users are afforded a measure of flexibility, freedom and security that’s unmatched by proprietary software solutions. On this and more, WordPress delivers.

Why WordPress: Multiple Users

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Tune in for our final post about what makes WordPress great: it’s open source! Miss our last post? Head to the blog.

Multiple Users

These days, website administration is a team effort. Instead of having one person be responsible for updating content or design, multiple team members play a role. Luckily, WordPress easily accommodates this modern workflow by allowing for multiple users.

As an administrator of a WordPress site, you can set-up multiple users for your website and assign access levels or capabilities to each user. Having the ability to set up multiple users benefits you in a myriad of ways, including:

  • Greater accessibility – With a computer and an internet connection, you can make changes to your website or update content no matter where you are in the world. Effectively, this means that multiple team members can be logged in and working on different aspects of your website at once, from anywhere on the map!
  • Increased collaboration – WordPress is a great platform for multi-author blogs and other projects that require collaboration and teamwork. In fact, one of our clients runs a travel blog where many contributors update the site in real-time as they go about their travels. WordPress is the ideal platform for them as they can all be logged in and blogging at once.
  • Ease of creating a membership site, if you wish – Multiple users also applies to website visitors. With a little help from plugins, your WordPress website can become a full service membership site with as many or as few levels of accessibility as you like!
  • Ease of updating – Because WordPress was built with multiple users in mind, the interface is very easy to navigate. Not only does WordPress make it easy to train multiple users, it also makes change management a cinch.

The ability to add multiple users to a WordPress website is a benefit that is often taken for granted. But when you stop to consider that most other CMS’s charge for this simple and important functionality, it becomes a yet another reason to–you guessed it–choose WordPress.

Why WordPress: Your Website Design is 100% Customizable

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Thanks for reading the latest post in our original blog series Why WordPress. Next up, we’re talking about how WordPress increases the efficiency of your website by allowing you to have multiple users. Miss our last post? Head to the blog!

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Scrolling through our portfolio, you may notice that some websites are image-heavy while others are sparser. Some feature rich typography, while others showcase the work of a talented digital artist. Every website is different, creating a unique visual link to each brand represented. What makes this uniqueness possible? WordPress. WordPress websites are 100% customizable, allowing for nearly limitless design possibilities.

The customization process begins with choosing a template. Other CMS’s use templates, but WordPress definitely wins in terms of the sheer number. To date, there are thousands upon thousands of templates to choose from–and all are easily customizable. Curious about what you can customize on a WordPress website? Here are just a fraction of the elements that you can manipulate on your own, or with the help of a talented designer knowledgeable in CSS:

  • Font
  • Images
  • Colors
  • Menus
  • Layout
  • Videos
  • Widgets and more

By contrast, DIY website builders often limit you to a template that, while beautiful, can be difficult to customize to your exact specifications. Additionally, the templates are often proprietary; so even if you do manage some level of customization, it’s quite limited. We found this out the hard way with a client of ours who had a beautiful website she created on a popular website builder. Though we ended up having to design her website from scratch, she was much happier in the end. Not only did she have complete creative control over how her website looked, she also had the same level of control in how her brand is portrayed.

In a world of quickly changing tastes, your website needs to stand out. Luckily, WordPress allows you to be as original and innovative as you want to be. Of course, it makes sense to follow usability conventions. And naturally, the more time spent on design, the higher the web design cost. But the ability to customize your website to your exact specifications is definitely there, and that, in our opinion, is just one more thing that makes WordPress great.

Why WordPress: Powerful Plugins

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This is the fourth post in Why WordPress—a Brew City Marketing original blog series about what makes WordPress such a outstanding content management system (CMS). Keep an eye out for our next post about how WordPress trumps the competition in terms of design and customization, and head to the blog to read our last post!

Powerful Plugins

If you ask a developer what they like most about WordPress, chances are pretty good that their answer will be plugins. Not only are plugins typically a breeze to upload and maintain, they truly give your website limitless functionality. Best of all, a lot of great plugins are free, with more and more plugins being developed and added to the WordPress database each day. Still need convincing? Read on to learn more about the power of plugins. 

What are plugins?

Plugins are bits of software that enable your website to do anything—and we do mean anything—you want it to. Plugins can be easily added to a website in order to expand functionality or to add new features, and contribute to a rich and robust browsing experience for website visitors.

What type of plugins are available?

To date, there are over 29,000 plugins in the WordPress database, with new ones being added every day. Do you want to add a video gallery, Twitter feed, shopping cart, or more to your website? There’s a plugin for all of this and more!

Popular plugin uses include:

  • Social media
  • Spam or traffic management
  • Multilinguality
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Backups and more

What if the plugin I want doesn’t exist?

It’s unlikely, but in the event that the plugin you want does not yet exist, it can be created for you by anyone who is familiar with the PHP programming language. Brew City Marketing ran into this scenario when a client of ours, Real Time Automation, requested an advanced product selector as part of their website redesign. Existing plugins missed the mark, so we custom-built a product selector plugin for them that would allow their clients to choose the best possible connector for their needs.
As with anything, plugins do have their caveats. Still, we think the positives of plugins far outweigh any negatives. Plugins are cost-effective, plentiful, and scalable, and contribute in large part to the excellence of WordPress as a CMS.

Why WordPress: Your Website Can Grow as Your Business Grows

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This is the third post in Why WordPress—a Brew City Marketing original blog series about the benefits of WordPress. Watch out for our next post about how plugins expand the functionality of WordPress websites! Missed our last post? Head to the blog.

Grow As Your Website Grows

Do you have ambitions of growing your business from a small operation to a full-scale enterprise? If so, fear not: your WordPress website can grow right alongside your business.

Scalability may seem like a no-brainer, but many content management systems (CMS) on the market today often miss the mark. With that mind, let’s explore the ways WordPress trumps the competition when it comes to growth and expansion.

It’s Not Just a Blogging Platform Anymore

WordPress began as a blogging platform in 2003, but eventually evolved into a powerful CMS. Today, WordPress websites run the gamut in terms of scope and complexity, with some like the New York Times and TED featuring thousands of pages of text, media, and other content. Despite the large size of a WordPress website, performance is never compromised.

Plugins Offer Limitless Functionality

We’ll expand on this more in our next post in the series, but the thousands of plugins in the WordPress database offer your website nearly limitless functionality. Perhaps you started your business out of your home, but now you’re in need of a full-fledged e-commerce shop. Never fear: there’s a plugin for that! And if there isn’t, one can be built for you by a skilled developer or programmer at a reasonable cost. The same cannot always be said for other content management systems.

It’s a Non-Proprietary CMS

Speaking of content management systems, there are many out there today that promise long-term scalability. But in our experience, this isn’t always the case. For example: when a client of ours started her business, she opted for a proprietary CMS. To her delight, her business began to thrive, which lead to the opening of two more stores. Unfortunately, her CMS couldn’t keep up. They wanted to charge a host of fees to add or develop new website features that weren’t part of her original plan. With WordPress, it’s a completely different story: if your business needs happen to change, you never have to worry that your website will outgrow its’ functionality. Your website can change and grow as your business does.

Start small with WordPress and you won’t regret it. Not only is it cost-effective to actually scale your website when the time comes, performance is always tip-top in the hands of a skilled developer.

Why WordPress: Search Engines Love WordPress

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Search engines love WordPress websites.

This is the first post in Why WordPress?, an original blog series about the benefits of WordPress and how it’s “gone to work” for actual Brew City clients. Next time, we’ll be talking about how WordPress allows your website to grow as your business does. Follow our blog to keep up with every post in the series!

Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo love WordPress websites. Why? To put it simply: WordPress was built to encourage search engines to crawl your website for content–and keep them coming back for more.

Here’s how WordPress does it.

Search Engine Friendly URLs
A client of ours chose to go with a DIY-website builder, but needed help with on-site SEO. When we logged on to help with on-site optimization, we quickly realized that it wasn’t anywhere near the level of optimization that can be achieved with WordPress. Specifically, we couldn’t create permalinks for each blog post and page–a must for SEO. In contrast, WordPress allows for the creation of permalinks or search engine friendly URLs, making for very precise search engine optimization and easy indexing.

Clean Code
The code behind WordPress is flawlessly “clean”, making it super easy for search engines to read and index a given website’s content.  Additionally, each page, post, and image can have it’s own meta tag, keywords, description, and title. These same items can also be optimized for specific keywords.

Automatic Pinging
Wordpress automatically “pings” search engines to notify them of any updates or changes you make to your website. Pinging gives your website visibility and ensures that new content is indexed quickly.

SEO Plugins
Wordpress has an extensive plugin library with many more new plugins being added everyday. SEO plugins, in particular, help to extend the built-in SEO capabilities of WordPress. At Brew City, we often use Yoast SEO, but there are many out there that help improve search engine indexing and performance.

Powerful Content Management
Wordpress was originally created as a blogging platform, which is great for SEO. Search engines love the type of fresh, new content that’s frequently shared on blogs. WordPress makes it easy by having blogging capabilities already built into the software and allowing for easy integration.

Other platforms do a great job of making your website visible to search engines, but in our experience no platform does it better than WordPress. When it comes to clean code and built-in SEO capabilities, WordPress is definitely king.

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