LOCALiQ | Columbus Marketing Blog

    Why The Midwest Is About To Become America's Next Silicon Valley

    My boss sent me this article recently and thought it was worth sharing with you. It's about how the Midwest, specifically Ohio is rapidly becoming a hub for startups & venture capitalists alike, especially in the tech industry. The article, originally posted by Peter Lane Taylor of Forbes shares some eye-opening stats and figures about the growth and opportunities in Ohio & Central Ohio. I've included the image below and a PDF for you to download if you'd like a copy. Please read the full article HERE.

    Dowload the image below as PDF

    Image Courtesy of VentureOhio

    Four Companies that Reinvented their Employees Performance Reviews

    By: Dona DeZube

    Companies of all sizes and across industries are successfully replacing their employee performance reviews with more frequent results-oriented conversations. These four firms tackled the challenge of engaging employees with aplomb: 

    A Simplified Social Media Strategy for Your Business

    Originally posted by: Catherine Conlan of Monster.com

    Tips for Optimizing Your Small Business Marketing Budget

    Most small business entrepreneurs think they don’t have enough funds to create and implement complex marketing strategies, so they stick to handing business cards to customers and boosting one or a few posts per month on Facebook.

    Since insufficient budget is usually the biggest issue for small business marketers, we’ve decided to help them with the marketing budget guide that focuses on channel optimization. This is not one of these articles about cost-cutting that will tell you to shift your marketing to the digital sphere since the secret of marketing budgeting lies in choosing the most appropriate marketing channels. So, which channels are those? They are the ones that can be optimized & customized to best reach your target consumer.

    The best way to determine this is to use the Pareto principle. Find 20% of the channels that bring the 80% of the leads and sales. Businesses that use small marketing budgets can make this even narrower and choose 10% of all the channels they use. For most small companies, these would be the channels that allow them to target their best consumer in the local community.

    US SMBs Plan To Increase Social Media Budgets in 2017

    More than half of US small-business owners anticipate increasing their social media budgets in 2017, according to a recent study. Social media led the way with over 56% of SMB's planning to increase their budget. Digital Advertising, SEO, Email Marketing and Print Ads / Direct Mail and Content Marketing also show increases for 2017.

    What you can learn from a 7-year-old girl’s application to Google

    She didn’t get the job—yet—but we outlined a few key takeaways for writing a cover letter and even applying to Google.

    When you were seven years old, what did you want to be when you grew up?  An astronaut? Perhaps a rock star? Maybe a professional athlete? Or did you want to be just like dad and follow in your parent’s heroic footsteps doing whatever it is he does?

    Well, 7-year-old Chloe Bridgewater wants a job at Google—but she doesn’t want to wait until she’s grown up. She’s asking for one right now.

    She first learned of the job opportunity after an inspiring career chat with her father, Andy, a refrigerator parts sales manager in Hereford, England, in which the curious first-grader asked about his job and if there was anywhere else he’d want to work, Mashable reported. That’s when he told his daughter about the real-life fairy tale company named Google in a faraway land called Silicon Valley. She was so captivated by the bean bags, slides and go-karts at the California Google campus that her dad suggested she apply to the company.

    With some help from dad, Chloe wrote a cover letter addressed to “google boss” asking for a job. A few days later, she received a rare response from the tech company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai.

    In his letter, which wasn’t exactly a rejection, but rather a supportive message, Pichai wrote, “I look forward to receiving your job application when you are finished with school!” He added encouragement for the girl to keep learning about computers, robots and technology, saying, “You can accomplish everything you set your mind to.”

    Choosing the Best Advertising Channels for Your Small Business

    By Emma Miller (guest DMG Blogger)

    Choosing the best advertising channels for a product or a service is one of the most important tasks for every marketing professional. In recent years, marketing agencies have managed to incorporate the digital channels into their marketing mix, and now they are efficiently targeting their audience with both online and offline techniques.

    Small business owners, on the other hand, are left stranded and confused. In most cases, they don’t have the means to finance complex marketing campaigns, so they use only the channels that offer free or affordable promotion. This kind of thinking affects their marketing ROI and slows down the development of their business. In this article, we are going to explain the process of choosing the best advertising channels for small business entrepreneurs.

    What’s the Value of a Like?

    The blog below from the Harvard Business Review looks at Facebook "likes" to determine if they are an effective tool to generate revenue. As a markerter, I found this post to be extremely interesting, especially since Facebook is a key component of any marketing strategy.

    In a series of experiments, the researchers tested four increasingly interactive ways in which Facebook might affect customers’ behavior. First, they explored whether liking a brand—passively following it—makes people more likely to purchase it. Second, they examined whether people’s likes affect their friends’ purchasing. Third, they looked at whether liking affects things other than purchasing (for example, whether it can persuade people to engage in healthful behaviors). And fourth, they tested whether boosting likes by paying to have branded content displayed in followers’ news feeds increases the chances of meaningful behavior change.

    The results were clear: Merely liking a brand neither increases purchasing nor spurs friends to purchase more. Supporting likes with branded content, however, can prompt meaningful behavior change. This shouldn't discourage you from using Facebook as part of your marketing plans, but should, however help you to understand it's role in the overarching theme of your marketing strategy. It IS important for your brand to engage on Facebook since those who "like" your brand often times spend more money than those who don't. But, your strategy shouldn't stop at gathering "likes". Amplifying efforts with advertising can provide higher returns on investment while creating an opportunity to connect with the most-loyal customers. Read the full article below...

    Contact Us to for a free consultation on social media marketing. DMG/Propel is a Google Premier Partner and was recently named 2017's Best Digital Agency from the Local Media Association.

    Six Ways to Improve Employee Engagement with Email (Yes, Email)

    By: Graham Ericksen, Chief Strategy Officer of Modus

    Once upon a time, a company’s intranet was a place where HR and legal documents went to gather digital cobwebs. Not so today. 

    The modern intranet is the backbone of the digital workplace, an online destination where employees can go to collaborate, crowdsource ideas, engage and interact and find important information. 

    Companies that effectively use their intranets see strong boosts in employee productivity and employee satisfaction. (Innovative leaders like IBM, Oracle and Cisco report the ROI on their intranets to be greater than $1 billion.) 

    Yet despite these many benefits, not every company -- especially small or medium-sized businesses -- have the resources needed to do a full intranet overhaul. 

    If that’s the case for your company, then consider an often under-utilized tool that’s an effective, engagement-driving, low-tech version of a corporate intranet. This tool is familiar to every business. It’s called email. 

    Email? Isn’t that the thing that is adding noise to our employee engagement channels? On the contrary. It’s not about getting rid of email. It’s about getting the right email.

    After all, your organization is already focused on the inbox. When done right, email can deliver info in a concise and relevant format that busy people will pay attention to.

    Here are six strategies to make email a key building block of your own company’s internal communications and your employee engagement efforts.

    Consumer Trust Is Evolving in the Digital Age

    More than 8 in 10 users trust print ads when making a purchasing decision.

    Jeremy Kressman of eMarketer.com recently posted an article with research indicating print ads are what Internet Users trust most when making a purchase decision. This insight indicates print advertisements are still very much alive and a valuable part of any marketing strategy. But because of the shear number of advertising channels available these days, print ads work best when paired with a strong digital marketing plan. You benefit from using a trusted source and mass reach vehicle, as well as the targeted capabilites of digital assets. And, as a Premier Google Partner, we can offer you and are experts in both!

    Talk to a Multi Media Sales Executive today! We offer free consultation and a digital audit of your digital assets to make sure you're getting the most out of your marketing efforts.

    Full Article...

    As the recent rise in spending on influencer marketing suggests, the methods and sources consumers use to vet products online is undergoing a significant shift.

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