Effective Strategies with Digital Marketing Tools

If an agency's website has a bunch of photos like this...run. Every guide to find a marketing agency lists the same five generic questions: what's your experience, can I see case studies, what's your pricing. Real agencies with something to hide answer all five smoothly, because those questions are easy to prepare for in advance, sometimes with an answer written by the same copywriter who did the case study. The questions that actually separate a trustworthy agency from one r

Fractional CMO Results: The $24M Campaign That Started With a Broken Department When I walked into Carson-Newman University as AVP of Marketing, I didn't inherit one marketing problem. I inherited several of them running simultaneously. Seven vendors with nobody coordinating them. An enrollment campaign four years past its expiration date still running. A brand untouched for thirteen years. A marketing department with a campus-wide reputation for missing deadlines and underde

You for sure always want your charts going Up and to The Right. Most businesses measure the wrong things with great precision. They know their impression count to the decimal. They track click-through rates by campaign, by day, by device. They get a monthly report with 14 graphs, most of which trend upward, none of which explain why revenue is flat. Learning how to measure marketing ROI means building a different question into every campaign, every channel, every reporting cy

Does your marketing often feel like its on an island, completely isolated from the rest of your business? The short answer: A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader who runs your marketing strategy part-time, for a fraction of the cost of a full-time executive. You need a fractional CMO when your revenue has outgrown your marketing decisions, you're spending money on vendors nobody is supervising, and there's no single person accountable for whether any of it works. If t

Purely a notalgia photo. We had this exact same setup- wired Apple mouse, Wacom tablet, in 2007. Ah, college graphic design classes. The short answer: AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity recommend businesses they can read, trust, and verify. If you're invisible in AI answers, it's usually because your site doesn't state plainly what you do, where you do it, and who you do it for, in language a machine can lift word for word. The businesses getting recommended a

If your SEO folks can provide a dashboard that looks like this, they probably know their stuff. If they can't...or it's a mess, well...you got got friend. The short answer: A working SEO agency produces three things you can verify yourself. Rankings for terms your customers really search. Organic traffic that turns into leads. And reporting that connects their work to your revenue. If your agency can't show you all three, or answers questions with jargon instead of numbers, y

This empty jar is a metaphor. A metaphor for what? Not entirely sure. Probably the void into which your marketing money goes every month. You've spent money on ads. You've hired help. You've posted consistently, optimized your website, and tried at least three things your last agency told you would move the needle. And you're still not sure if any of it is working. That's not a spending problem. It's an audit problem. A marketing audit for small business isn't about adding mo

I hadn't talked to this medspa yet. But the owner's biggest concern was 'not enough new clients' Before the first call I spent about 30 minutes looking at their digital footprint. Website, booking flow, store, staff page, social, map pack placement. No login credentials. No inside access. Just what any good former journalist turned marketer would do. Investigate the issue. What My MedSpa Marketing Audit Found Finding 1: A WooCommerce store with no products. The store architec

When I walked into Carson-Newman University as AVP of Marketing, I didn't inherit one marketing problem. I inherited several of them running simultaneously. Seven vendors with nobody coordinating them. An enrollment campaign four years past its expiration date still running. A brand untouched for thirteen years. A marketing department with a campus-wide reputation for missing deadlines and underdelivering. A website that was, to put it plainly, a certified catastrophe. The st

Facebook Ad Performance: Overview of on-Facebook leads showcasing varying results, reach, impressions, and costs per lead, with the...