Top 7 New Years Marketing Resolutions For Your Business

New Years Marketing Tips, Tricks, and Ideas by Targeting Pro Marketing

Top 7 New Year’s Marketing Resolutions For Your Business

We know marketing is not easy.  It is one of the most diverse and dynamic parts of running or owning a business.  Knowing when and where to spend your invested marketing money can be nerve-wracking.  With the new year brings great promise of the future.  Many individuals make New Year’s resolutions… to get healthy, to drop a bad habit, to further their education, to step outside their comfort zone, or to simply grow as a person.  What if you apply those to your business?  These top 7 marketing rejuvenation efforts will leave you glowing for the upcoming year!

1. Stop Procrastinating With Your Marketing Plan

We all know how difficult it can be to carve out the time for a Marketing Plan.  This important first step usually hangs up most entrepreneurs, but it is the most vital.  Charting out a course for where your business is headed, what you would like to achieve, and setting milestone goals is imperative to achieving the goals you set forth.  How can you possibly know where you are headed without a road map?  This huge first step is what will fundamentally shape your marketing efforts not just for the upcoming year, but how you operate moving forward.

2. Be Mobile-Friendly

It is not just about the desktop PC anymore… more and more users are gaining access to and using their mobile devices as their main source of information.  Waiting for your gas to pump, in the doctor’s office, getting directions, or simply looking up info while you are watching television, mobile devices have become our pocket window to information.  Countless users are looking on their devices rather than breaking out their laptop or sitting down at the computer in the evenings like they used to.  Creating mobile-friendly information for your clients and customers to consume will set you that much ahead of your competition. 

3. Create a Responsive Website

Continuing with the mobile gateway, it is extremely important that your website is responsive.  That means it will adjust for whatever device the viewer is using at that time – whether it is tablet, iPad, iPhone, Android, or other device, your website can adjust itself automatically for maximum usability for the user experience.  As an example, check out our Marketing Project Gallery most recent responsive website design for The Home Team of North Central Florida. 

4. Say Hello to Inbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is expensive and outdated.  Long gone are the days of cold calls or huge amounts of mass postal mailings to “maybe” reach the customers you are looking for.  Inbound marketing puts a positive spin on marketing.  Don’t just spam customers, create content that they love!  Providing detailed information on goods, services, educational materials, informative articles, and photo galleries gives customers what they want, which is to initially consume information.  Once your customer lands on your blog or website, brand awareness has been achieved.  Move these clients further down the pipeline and you have a lucrative sales process! Need help with a Marketing Plan? Contact us for assistance!

5. Map Out Your Content Strategy

Although many folks may think this belongs under the previously mentioned Marketing Plan, but your content strategy is a part of that.  Your content strategy will specifically target your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, grant you higher placement in the search engines, and you will be providing the content your clients have come to know and love.  Determine what it is you would like to convey in the upcoming year (superior service, outstanding product quality, availability), how you want to market those items (graphics, video, dedicated landing page on your website), and who your target audience is (especially helpful if you are going to invest in paid advertising).  Laying out your ideas, scheduled content, and information aspects of your marketing will better help you prepare for major upcoming events.  If you need help developing a content calendar, contact us and we will be happy to assist you!

6. Adjust Social & Email Strategies

Content is great, well-written and visually-inspiring emails, landing pages, and social media posts are all fantastic… but how effective are they?  What times are working well?  What days of the week work best?  Do certain posts or email releases work better on certain days over others?  How can you track that?  When you sign up with Targeting Pro Marketing, we will do a social media assessment of your current efforts, and where you can improve moving forward.  Contact Targeting Pro Marketing for a consultation today.

7. Consider a Homepage Revitalization

Reinvest in your homepage!  This is literally your digital face to the world.  If it is old, outdated, clunky, hard to navigate, or just plain old unattractive, you can be losing potential income!  You do not necessarily have to get an entire website redesign, sometimes just a little “facelift” makeover will work just fine.  Putting fresh, relative content with up-to-date images can mean the different between a bounced customer that leaves your website or a client who takes the time to browse through what you have to offer.  You cannot sell a client on your professional knowledge, services, or products if they never make it past the first page!  Contact Targeting Pro Marketing for information and pricing on a homepage facelift.

Let’s kick it into high gear this year!

Need help with your marketing promotions?  Feel free to contact Targeting Pro Marketing!


Mark and Christine Barber
Targeting Pro Marketing
Your Ticket To Virtual Freedom 
Virtual Assistant | Web/Graphic Designer | SEO | Drone Photographer | Social Media Expert
Phone: 352-553-8739
Let's Connect!
Targeting Pro Marketing Professional Marketing Website
Targeting Pro Marketing on Facebook  
Targeting Pro Marketing Blog
Targeting Pro Marketing on Twitter
Targeting Pro Marketing on LinkedIn

The Magic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Who, What, Where, When, Why and How

As an Internet Marketing Consultanting company, one of the biggest categories of questions we get come across our inbox is questions regarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Now we can certainly understand why -- as an SEO expert it can be extremely difficult to explain to a potential client (often a stranger whom we have not had the ability to build rapport of trust with through previous projects) that there is this magical set of text, often hidden, on a website that tells those invisible search engine crawlers where to go, what to associate your provided information with (including those hidden components) and how to associate that linked information with your content.  Yes, there is information that can be placed on your website you can’t normally see on the surface that increases your visibility in search engines.  It sounds a little bit like online voodoo…  And we can certainly appreciate the skepticism.  What?  How?  Okay if I hire you, how do I know that work is even done if its invisible?  What exactly would I be paying you for again?  How much does this invisible work cost?  Yes -- We said we can appreciate it!

Search Engine Optimization

We are hoping to clear up a lot of the mystery that surrounds Search Engine Optimization right here, right now. 

First of all, Targeting Pro Marketing specializes specifically in SEO.  There are a lot of companies that both offer and claim to have “certification” -- when the truth is, as of the time this article is published, there is NO SUCH THING AS CERTIFICATION IN SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION!  We know - you're going to want to go and use your favorite search engine to go check that out, which is expected.  Don’t worry, we’ll wait…

Search Engine Optimization Help - Targeting Pro Marketing

See what we mean?  There are not only many companies that offer this “certification” (everything from a one hour online class to webinars to mailing you a nifty piece of parchment paper in the mail that didn’t even have to be tri-folded).  How can a company possibly “give certification?”  There are several degrees behind Targeting Pro Marketing’s list of achievements and knowledge … we know what it takes to be certified in many areas of Information Technology (IT).  What kind of backing would be behind those companies’ certifications?  Are they accredited?  Does it come from a Search Engine company itself?  (ie: Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc).  We went as far as to research this concept with several accredited colleges here in the United States.  The answer was always the same: “Now, why would a search engine company, who spends endless hours and funding to coming up with specialized search algorithms would possibly want to go and give away all of that scientific data and research to the public to exploit their search results?”  Thank-you!  That’s what we thought all along, too!  But the internet is flooded with these shady "black hat" SEO certification companies.  Not only that, but consider how many of those companies that claim to “give certification” and every company duped by their claims in becoming “SEO certified” with those mail-in pieces of parchment… Wow, that certainly is a lot. 

Take-away:  If you see a company claiming to be “SEO certified” you might consider packing up your bags and walking away.  There honestly is no such thing.  Even if that company honestly believes they have some sort of certification, they apparently are able to be deceived by one of the latest scams in the internet marketing book.

Now that all that is cleared up, let’s dig into the nuts and bolts of SEO.  The who, what, where, when, why and how. 

Who Needs SEO?

Those seeking SEO services are typically business owners or web developers who have sought specialized knowledge for their company's search engine placement.  At Targeting Pro Marketing, we take our consulting very seriously and in doing so have gained life-long clients through honest assessment and feedback of client needs.  SEO services are for those looking to take their website to the next level.  This is usually for new websites, revamped websites (keeping similar content and structure, but getting a bit of a facelift), or established websites looking to gain more traffic for a larger slice of the market share. 

What is SEO?

SEO is much more than invisible text on your website.  It is a series of logical and categorized information that tell the search engine crawlers what your website is trying to convey to the world.  SEO feeds information back to search engines like your company description, title pages, page descriptions, region (including coverage areas for regions such as countries, states, provinces, areas, cities and zip codes), and keywords associated with all of that aforementioned data.  It also includes links on the website that are placed intelligently with coherent corresponding information paired with alt tags (link information text) to further strengthen the informational bond search engine crawlers will use to associate the data you provide to the link you provide.

Where is SEO?

SEO should be on every page of your website … and beyond.  We know some of you may be scratching your heads at this time.  But SEO can reach much further than just your website -- think of the huge outside the box idea of social media.  BOOM.  You have grown your potential Search Engine Optimization reach on the World Wide Web exponentially when coupling it with social media marketing.  SEO can often be tucked away in areas of the website you cannot always see without going into the source code of your website.  You can see snippets of it when your website is built and you see those descriptions and page titles popping up all over the web!  You can also catch glimpses of alt tags if you hover over links in certain web browsers - you will notice when you hover over a link (don’t click on it), a little box with text will appear -- this is the alt text associated with your web link. Building up these different associations is how to build your SEO prescence on the web.

When do SEO results occur?

This is probably the hardest part of Search Engine Optimization to convey to eager customers who would love to instant results on their investment and efforts.  The hard truth about SEO is that you will not typically start seeing results until two to three months minimum.  If a company claims to give you results in days or weeks, prepare to be leery.  The results of SEO are both an art and a science.  There is logic and structure behind it, but how you decided to tie it all together and execute it can be as individual as the company who takes on the job.  You can map SEO results many different ways and depending on how you want to tie in all of that information can be a formula that is very unique and individual to that particular website.  Did a light bulb go off?  Viola!  That is exactly what search engines want!  Beautiful unique content that is tied to other beautifully unique content with information their search engine bots can understand and interpret.  BOOM. 

Why do you need SEO?

Having a good-looking website is great.  But what if we told you that ugly websites with great SEO probably get way more traffic than your $4,000 gorgeously custom-designed site?  Having an attractive website is great for a positive user experience, there is no doubt in that.  If you want people who do find your website to enjoy their interaction with it while they are there (whether it is for education, product showcasing, service offers, sales and specials, etc.)…  but don’t you want people to get there to begin with? 

How does SEO work?

We are sure many people aware of the sales funnel.  More potential in, the more conversions, the more clients, the more sales, and the more money your company makes.  Want to increase revenue?  Get a bigger funnel.  How do you do that?  Get more visitors to your website to start that conversion.  How do you get more visitors to your website?  Make the search engines happy.  How do you make the search engines happy?  GET GREAT SEO!  The sooner… the better.  Remember that turn-around time for results?  That clock starts ticking after you say go and your SEO Company adds the valuable information to your website.

Excited yet?  We sure are!  Targeting Pro Marketing has an absolute obsession with Search Engine Optimization … many dedicated hours to analyzing and understanding how it works plus the ability to map that information in a comprehensive way that applies to the subject website is what is key to success!  Targeting Pro Marketing takes great pride in helping people -- and taking your business to the next level with SEO is what we do best!

Search Engine Optimization Specialist

Contact us for a custom website analysis: 352-553-8739 of Contact Targeting Pro Online.

Mark & Christine Barber
Targeting Pro Marketing - Web, Graphic, SEO and Social Media Expert
Targeting Pro Marketing Professional Website
Targeting Pro Marketing on Facebook  
Targeting Pro Marketing Blog
Targeting Pro Marketing on Twitter
Targeting Pro Marketing on LinkedIn 

Success! - New Degree In The Arsenal!

Hello Friends and Fans!

I know that you have been waiting patiently for an update.  We must apologize in advance (without really feeling sorry, and I'll tell you why) - in my absence I am very proud to announce that I am now the proud beholder of a Bachelor's of Science Degree in Information Technology with an emphasis on Multimedia Communications from University of Phoenix.  (See, I told you I wasn't really that sorry!)  And not to toot my own horn or anything, but finished with a 3.82 GPA as a strive for excellence - and I am completely happy with that number.  With only holding 3 B-Level grades for my final grades, I have to say I was happy to work hard through grueling courses, working full time (+ overtime) and launching my career in IT forward, I am happy to say I am back here at Targeting Pro Marketing and Consulting and of course, at your marketing and consulting service!

I have had a set of IT skills carried over from experience, and have the opportunity to refine them.  I have also had the opportunity to enter new skill sets, technical knowledge, business process and fundamentals in successful implementation of new IT projects - specifically from a consulting basis. 

Some of the classes I have taken, and internet marketing and business skills I have acquired are:
Skills For Professional Development
Management Information Systems
Fundamentals of Programming with Algorithms and Logic
Web Design
Technical Writing Fundamentals
Business Systems
Fundamentals of Business Development
Project Planning and Implementation
Database Concepts
SQL For Business
Network and Telecommunications Concepts
Java Programming
Image Editing and Implementation
Electronic Publishing
Instructional Design
Multimedia Development
XML
Applications Implementation
Advanced Mathematics
Advanced Creative Writing
Critical Thinking
Human Motivation
Success Strategies

The purpose of this list is not to pat myself on the back, but to show my customers and potential customers of Targeting Pro Marketing the professional knowledge they have in their arena when they select us for their digital marketing consultant.

I am indeed proud of my degree for personal reasons, but they are far overshadowed by my professional reasons - to help others.  As a small business owner, I am passionate about the success of small business and is my (successful) niche market.

As an FYI I am currently employed full time as a Business Development and Marketing Manager for an incredible local software and retail company in the DeLand area.  With just six total employees I have not forgotten my roots in small business - and am happy to share that knowledge with YOU!

For a FREE website analysis, or a FREE one-hour consultation, please feel free to contact me!

Contact Targeting Pro Marketing for your next marketing project.
Christine Barber
Targeting Pro Marketing - Web, Graphic, SEO & Social Media Expert
Targeting Pro Marketing Professional Website
Targeting Pro Marketing on Facebook  
Targeting Pro Marketing Blog
Targeting Pro Marketing on Twitter
Targeting Pro Marketing on LinkedIn