Your Marketing and Design Reading for The Weekend

Do you find yourself at the end of each week with a virtual or literal pile of insightful articles and white papers to read? I'll bet you were super excited to delve in when you first saw the links but, as the material piled up, you realized there is no possible way you can actually read everything? Well that is how my weekends typically begin.

With that in mind, we're introducing a new feature that is a weekly compilation of the best industry articles we have read in the past week. Instead of wading through your ambitious collection, you can simply scan our highlights.

Enjoy the reading and please share with us any articles you think are on point or SMB marketing topics you want us to cover.

How to Breathe New Life Into Your Marketing With Visual Content

This was very timely because we are always trying to turn words into visuals to improve our online marketing. Recently, we spent extra time and attention on PowerPoint presentations. We are on the same page with Allyson Galle, who notes that "Most people don't have any trouble coming up with ways to integrate visual content into their social strategy . . . But you should be thinking about the role visual content plays in all of your marketing channels." That includes organic search, email marketing and more. The cliche is that a picture is worth 1,000 words but it is more true than ever today with our increasingly short attention spans! Thank goodness for Mel!

Seven Effective Ways to Integrate Social, Local, and Mobile

Social media is being accessed by mobile and searches for local businesses are being conducted on mobile phones. As Tom Shapiro notes, "People are not just social or local or mobile, they're all three, so your efforts must be integrated accordingly." But how do you do it all at the same time?(Note my persistent theme of not enough time!) He offers seven tips such as customize, be searchable, encourage sharing and more. He makes the juggling act seem fairly straightforward.