Posted at September 04, 2013 10:00 AM in Agency
So your company has finally seen the light and stuck a toe in social media waters by launching a blog. Welcome to the party! It's a terrific way to market what your company does well, connect with like-minded people (customers), support search engine optimization (SEO), and establish it as a subject matter expert standing head-and-shoulders above the crowd. Many businesses new to blogging believe that creating captivating content and posting it on a content management system are the two most important steps to take. However, there’s a third step that many neglect: How to promote your blog! The greatest blog content in the world does your business -- plus all of those customers you want to attract -- no good if they can't find it.
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Posted at September 02, 2013 10:00 AM in Agency
Naming your company may sound like the easiest part of starting a business, but it’s a crucial piece of the equation that’s actually quite challenging. Your name is often the first impression people receive of your brand, and it instantly conveys a message about your industry, services, and values. It’s important to be creative, but it’s easy to go off the deep end and choose a name that’s meaningless. How can you make the name gives people the right brand message and identity? It’s key to put immense amount of thought into what your name communicates about you. Here are 10 key questions to ask yourself when it comes to how to name a company. These are also things to consider when naming marketing campaigns.
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Posted at August 30, 2013 10:00 AM in Agency
Let’s begin with the basic question: what is social media? The simplest and most sensible definition is that it is a place where all types of individuals come to share and interact with other users. Given this definition, there are two important insights we need to understand about the users of social media.
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Posted at July 31, 2013 11:11 AM in Agency
There’s an old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and that may be sage advice for health care managed care organizations (MCOs) seeking to offer insurance plans on the “Obamacare” Health Insurance Marketplace in fall 2013. It seems that a key to the balancing act of insuring older policyholders (more likely to file claims for care) is attracting enough younger policyholders whose premiums and lack of claims will provide offset relief. The challenge for health care marketers is that these two different age groups learn and communicate differently, so MCOs must take this into account when developing their health care marketing and communications plans.
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Posted at July 29, 2013 10:23 AM in Agency
A June 2013 article written by Anna Gorman that appeared in the LA Times highlights the challenge facing managed care organizations (MCOs) across the United States as the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) enrollment opens in October. Specifically, the reluctance of young adults to enroll in a health care plan and how it makes health care marketing difficult.
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Posted at July 24, 2013 10:00 AM in Agency
Our recent Stephen King-inspired post about writing anything centered on one indispensable golden rule: Read and lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcuts. Last time, the feeding of your head -- reading anything and everything you can get your hands on (time permitting) -- was the primary goal of the successful marketing writer. Again, it's not nearly as sexy to most as the real work of writing, but it's so necessary if you want to be a good and resourceful scribe. Today's post takes the opposite tack with a list of eight actionable writing tips -- some unusual and others quite familiar -- that will inspire you to become a better writer right now.
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Posted at July 22, 2013 10:00 AM in Agency
Looking for pictures of Spain from before the year 1970 on Facebook? Graph Search can help you answer impossible searches like these. Facebook’s Graph Search rolled out earlier this year in March and it immediately hit the digital marketing world with a storm. With this new feature, marketers can now understand their customers and prospects better than ever before. What is Graph Search? It is essentially Facebook’s very own Google search network that allows users to find content within Facebook much more easily. By gathering data from billions of users and external sources, it is essentially a library of everything on Facebook. Looking at just how rich this database is, there are many creative ways we can use this to better our marketing efforts. Here are five ways to get started.
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Posted at July 17, 2013 10:00 AM in Agency
The mission of social media is to create a vibrant community. Advertising on Facebook can really jumpstart this process. When seen from the surface, advertising on Facebook looks simple. You create an image, write the headline and ad copy, choose your target audience and budget, and you’re set. Right? Well, not quite, at least not with Power Editor. Facebook’s Power Editor is a Google Chrome add-on you can install to your Facebook account that can greatly improve the quality of your advertisements. You can view the installation guide on Facebook’s Help Center.
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Posted at July 15, 2013 12:09 PM in Agency
This is the second of a five-part series on how to repurpose content to save time and increase exposure. Today, we’re going to explore how to repackage content that originates with a blog post. Check out our last post about how to repurpose Facebook content. 
Creating stand-alone content for every medium is time-consuming and exhausting. There's no need to waste time generating separate ideas for dozens of different mediums. Using social content marketing to repackage this material across mediums increases your efficiency and multiplies your chances of earning exposure.
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Posted at July 10, 2013 10:00 AM in Agency
Previously, we have brought up the idea that companies should include social media into their marketing strategy. However, perhaps that alone is not enough anymore. According to Harvard Business Review, 79 percent of companies currently have or are going to add social media to their marketing strategy. According to the same study, however, only 12% of these businesses feel they are effective users of social media. Obviously, there is a disparity here, and many businesses do not seem to be getting the results they want through social media.
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