Your Marketing and Design Reading for The Weekend

Another good point is that "Your online presence is your key to success no matter what your business sells--no matter if all your transactions are done face-to-face--no matter if you don't yet see a way to get a return from your Facebook page--no matter if you've never bought an online ad." Not all the finance people buy into this but we can hope!

The seven stages of a Total Online Presence are: content platform, organic SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, online advertising, mobile and location, and analytics and conversion.

As you would construct a building, you have to go floor-by-floor in a specific order or in stages. But where you are today determines where you start and you have to go back and revisit, as well as evolve over time. As the conclusion states, "Even something as overwhelming and complex as the changing face of marketing online gets just a bit more manageable when you start to view it as a system."

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Best Practices for Engaging Messaging

If you need to improve your social media marketing as part of your Total Online Presence, specifically with Facebook, this is a helpful place to start. You'll have to sign up to get the paper but it is concise and offers examples from real businesses. Overall, it suggests there are certain messaging strategies that consistently prove to increase engagement regardless of the type of content you post.