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You just finished tweaking your marketing project plan with the latest timelines. You’ve reconciled your budget for the month. You’ve completed all of your web updates for the week. And you’ve updated the marketing report card for your newest campaign.

It’s time for a walk outside. Maybe even have a latte. Or so you think. Just before you breathe in a sigh of restful relief, your all-too-familiar Outlook reminder pops up. You have 15 minutes before your next meeting. Break’s over.

Everyone reading this can relate. It isn’t a unique problem, as demonstrated by this hilarious video by Tripp and Tyler:

Are you tired of your site not appearing in search engine rankings—or being so buried on the tenth screen that nobody can find it? Are you frustrated because you're not getting any traffic or visibility for your web site or marketing campaigns, even though you've spent thousands of dollars to create them?

You're not alone. Every day, I talk to business owners and marketers who aren't getting enough high-quality traffic and aren't seeing a good return on their marketing investment. But if you're like most people, your eyes start to glaze over when you hear the words "search engine optimization."

I'm here to help. Register for my "5 Ways to Improve Your SEO This Week (Even if You're Not a Developer!)" webinar and I'll walk you through these five steps that you can complete this week to improve your SEO and get more traffic:

There’s a reason SEO is an ongoing challenge for marketing professionals. It’s a fairly abstract concept.

There’s the part that’s easy to grasp—identifying words that resonate with each of our audiences. Now that makes sense. It’s easy for us to understand using the right words when communicating with one another in order to a make connection. That’s just being human.

But with SEO, it gets a little more complicated than that. We’re taking extra measures to ensure these words are identified by inanimate web crawlers. Now that sounds like Stephen King’s next best seller when you really think about it. That concept is a little more difficult to comprehend let alone throw into standard practice.

It's obvious to any marketer nowadays that you should use email marketing as a way to stay connected with your target audience. Despite the wide array of different strategies available to marketers, having a well-developed email marketing plan is integral to your overall marketing campaign. It's an excellent way and the most productive channel for getting the best ROI. 
 
Yet, don't expect the stars and the moon from your email marketing strategy if it's not done right. If you haven't planned out a sustained email marketing effort, it simply won't be effective. You can’t just send out whatever and expect it to get results. A well-planned and thought-out strategy has to take into account your customer's likes and behaviors, and has to then target them efficiently. 
 
Here are some tips about how to do it:

There’s no doubt that social media has become an indispensable tool for business. With the continuing evolution of social platforms and technologies, it’s critical to be equipped with the right social media approaches to meet your goals.

To keep you current, competitive, and equipped, here’s an overview of the latest social media trends and tools:

According to the Radicati Group, email use worldwide will top 3 billion users by 2020. While some industry experts are convinced that social media’s convergence with the ever depleting millennial attention span is going to erode email just as email depleted print, that number certainly presents a very different picture.  

Back in November 2013, Flair Interactive provided tips on building a successful email campaign. While that post is still relevant and accurate, in 2017, there are some definite changes in what defines and drives a successful email campaign.

So, what has changed in the last three years to keep email relevant, effective, and aligned with the technological trends that are impacting marketing as a whole? Let’s take a look:

It's the beginning of 2017 and if you still haven't gotten on board the video marketing train, there's still time.

You may have already used some form of video in your marketing strategy at some point. As the new year begins, it's clear that 2016 was a year of revolution in video marketing and that you cannot survive without video marketing any longer.

Wyzowl released statistics for last year that reported 61% of businesses have used video as a marketing tool and 66% of these same companies never used video a mere year earlier. It's a trend that's progressed rapidly, and keeps growing faster than we think because:

• 75 million people in U.S. watch videos online everyday
• Embedded videos on web sites can increase traffic up to 55%
• Simply having the word "video" in the subject line of an email can increase open rates by 13%
• Nearly 40% of all videos today are watched on mobile devices

Everyone is creating some kind of content, so much so that that the online marketplace is saturated and has become a very crowded place. It's also an environment where old-school methods of marketing cease to be effective, so it's time to put marketing activities like cold calling behind you and tap into the power of content marketing.

Obviously, you have to create valuable content before you can promote it. But how do you create remarkable content to get their attention? Check out this awesome video from Hubspot, which gives you step-by-step instructions to make content the key to your success online.

According to HubSpot, companies who invest in inbound marketing are FOUR TIMES more likely to be effective. Most of us would love to get results that are four times better than what we're getting right now!

Do you have an effective inbound marketing strategy in place?

If not, we can help you build one. In two weeks, we'll work with you to:

• Audit your current marketing strategy
• Compare your web rankings to your competitors
• Identify and develop buyer profiles and approaches
• Bridge the gap with marketing tactics and channels
• Optimize your platforms for inbound marketing
• Design a marketing plan that yields results

Improve your marketing effectiveness through inbound marketing with our Inbound Marketing Game Plan package. Click on the buttons below to download the "ABCs of Inbound Marketing" ebook or to get a free, no-obligation Inbound Marketing Game Plan quote:

Marketing as a discipline has its own unequivocal challenges. The spectrum of skills and knowledge needed to succeed in a marketing role is broader than perhaps any other discipline. Marketers are required to be both strategic and tactical. They can be equally as aggressive as they are diplomatic. And they need to toggle between the lines of creativity and analytics.

So it only makes sense that a marketing team would be composed of a relatively broad range of personalities and work styles. Different team members land on different ends of the spectrum, and they all bring different strengths and insights to the collaborative equation.

While that diversity is excellent when it comes to the many needs of marketing departments, anyone leading a marketing team sits in a very unique and “character-building” position. In Flair Interactive’s October 2016 #TBT Blog, How to Provide Your Marketing Team with Constructive Feedback, Marissa Kasarov gave some excellent insights on managing marketing teams and providing constructive feedback.

The blog is comprehensive and I really have nothing to add to it since originally published. Instead, I’d like to add an addendum: