Four States Small Business Blog

Advertising has certainly come a long way over the years and nowhere is that more evident than in digital marketing. Advertising tools continue to become more complex and intuitive, allowing your advertisements to be both more effective and less expensive at the same time. One of the big recent shifts is in the migration of many marketers away from paid advertising and towards display advertising. Many marketers are finding that keyword-based display advertising is helping improve their overall ROI and keep costs under control.

How amazing would it be if your advertisements traveled throughout the internet, seeking out people who recently visited your website? Letting them know that the special product or service that they recently reviewed was now on sale, or was running low on inventory? This may seem like a far-future functionality that sounds cool but isn't available. For marketers -- it's just called retargeting or remarketing, and we do it every day. This relatively new feature allows you to wrangle those individuals who didn't quite make it to the finish line on their purchase back into the fold, and back into a measurable customer journey. Retargeting is perhaps the best way to help prospects walk through the entirely convoluted sales process, as each lead may interact with your business in a slightly different way. Retargeting allows you to reach out with the most relevant message to a prospect who is already engaged, making your advertising dollars work harder and smarter! See how you can use retargeting to boomerang new customers straight back to your website.

Creating a stellar website is only the first step in getting people to find your business online -- your site must also be discoverable. The process of creating a website that's appealing to search engines is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. In its simplest form, SEO is defined by industry-leader Moz as "the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results". This sounds fascinating, but what does it really mean? The rules around SEO can be complex and are changing on a regular basis. Here are the top five ways that search optimization practices have changed in the last decade.

Since the 1950s, Zimmer Radio has been creating and broadcasting free entertainment in the Four State Area, but we don't stop there! Our marketing experts stay up-to-date on the latest tactics for reaching a broad spectrum of individuals in a variety of audience segments. We are always looking for new ways to help businesses grow in the digital age. Our in-house advertising firm, Zimmer Digital Solutions, is excited to announce that we are adding a wide range of advertising solutions to our digital tool belt.

So, you’ve already discovered the benefits of working with a professional radio partner. Fantastic decision! It relieves a burden on your time and resources. Unfortunately, if your radio partner doesn’t also bring digital solutions to the table, you may be inadvertently undermining your results, holding your brand back from achieving the best possible ROI.

This time of year in Joplin can bring to mind images of storms and tornadoes that wreak havoc on our communities. In the not so distant past, storms have been utterly devastating. As a local business, you need to stay prepared, but you can also play a role in helping your community and your customers be better informed and stay safe.

Putting all of your eggs in one basket can be a costly mistake for advertisers if you lack proper strategy and focus. For example, some might think all they need is traditional. Maybe radio or TV has worked before, so why complicate things by adding digital to the mix? But in reality adding digital could mean updating your website and making sure you’re following SEO best practices. On the other hand, younger marketers who gravitate primarily towards digital (it’s what they know!) are missing out on traditional opportunities.

In a recent post, we shared questions to ask to determine if your digital marketing is working or not. If you’ve had trouble answering those questions or you’re dissatisfied with the answers you came up with, there are a number of potential factors that could be at play.

Digital marketing is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes, and you’ve already taken the leap and made investments to run digital campaigns for your brand. The question is, is it working? Do you actually know how to recognize if it is or isn’t working? You need to be measuring your progress, and if you’re not, you might be wasting your money or failing to reach your true potential.

You may have heard that Facebook is making changes to its news feed algorithm. Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, says the changes are designed to give priority to content with “meaningful interaction” and reduce what he calls “passive content” such as videos, where users tend to sit back and watch, then move on, as opposed to interacting with the content. According to Zuckerberg, these changes in the Facebook news feed come in response to user feedback that indicated branded content was overcrowding posts from friends and family, reducing users’ ability to connect with others.