Digital marketing insights.

In December 1999, I walked out of my final agency into life as an entrepreneur. Flush with $700 in my pocket, I saw nothing but possibilities. Before the door closed though, I learned my first lesson…

When you want to know how well your business website is really performing over time, nothing beats a good review of your analytics package.

Most marketers would say they know a bad website when they see one. The crazy fonts, cluttered layouts, and outdated animations are dead giveaways. And yet, we continually see surveys – like this one from Nielson – that show us how lots of organizations keep frustrating online visitors.

Are you an above-average marketer? Statistically speaking, you probably think so… even if the results of your most recent campaigns suggest otherwise.

If you don’t know a lot about the servers where your website is stored – or even which company you’ve purchased web hosting through – you certainly aren’t alone.

Back in 2013, I co-wrote a book with my friend and fellow Canadian marketer, Sam Fiorella, titled “Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing”.

When we look at human behaviour from the outside in, we come up against a recurring problem: we don’t know what we don’t know.

At some point in the last decade, a critical number of people started thinking about the kinds of side effects that might come with using too many pesticides, antibiotics, and other foreign substances to grow food.

In the digital marketing field, blogging holds a pivotal role. It not only boosts your lead generation and search ranking efforts but also serves as a platform for your voice, a gateway to your community, and a facilitator of communication with the world.

As far as the advice goes, “always look on the bright side” scores pretty well. It’s not a bad song lyric, either. But is there such a thing as too much positivity, especially when it comes to making business decisions?

Stop me when this sounds familiar: one of your colleagues or clients comes up with an idea that sounds mildly intriguing. But, the plan they put together is based on assumptions, the offer they’re making isn’t compelling to customers, or the whole thing just seems destined to go nowhere.

Here at Kayak, we are big believers in the value of content creation and advanced CMS’s like HubSpot. We talk about them enthusiastically, and share the results we see from our own campaigns as well as the ones we deploy for our clients.

As the principle of a web-based marketing company, I’m no stranger to the concept of change. My industry is driven and defined by new ideas, to the point that my colleagues and I are reinventing ourselves on a continual basis.

Most of us dream of writing a novel at some time or another. Who wouldn’t love the thought of sipping a latte, crafting a few words in a chapter of their novel, telling stories, and soaking up a healthy combination of royalty checks and public praise for the effort?

Most business owners and a few of us online marketers as well – who are concerned about search engine optimization and inbound lead generation – will obsess over the titles, keywords, and internal links used in their blog posts. And yet, many never stop to think about a critical conversion element that immediately draws attention and sets the mood: the image that accompanies the post itself.