Election season always seems to be right around the corner. Even if you have months to prepare, developing a successful communication strategy to garner the support of voters for school bond issues and levies should be a year-round activity.

Topics: Strategic Planning, Marketing, School Districts, Political, Education, Levy, Bond Issue, Government

Goal setting drives success, but it is commonly the most overlooked step of creating a solid marketing plan. Even if you do have a list of goals, chances are your goals may not be helping you. Let's take a look at why goal setting is such an important part of the marketing process and how you can create goals that will help your marketing plan succeed.

Topics: Content Marketing, Content Marketing Plan, Business Development, Marketing, Digital Marketing

Whether you're creating a content strategy from scratch or re-evaluating your existing one, performing a content audit can be a daunting task. You may even be asking, "What is a content audit?" and "Why do I need one?"

Topics: Online Content, Marketing Best Practices, Content, Content Marketing, Content Marketing Plan

Storytelling can be a powerful tool. In our personal and both professional lives, we can use storytelling to create and maintain connections. Storytelling can also be a powerful tool when creating marketing content for your business.

Topics: Insider, Online Content, Marketing Best Practices, Buyer Personas, Content, Engagement, Content Marketing, Content Marketing Plan

Finding the right keywords for your business helps improve the search engine optimization of your website, which in turn will attract visitors from outside search engines. In many cases, this is the very first touch point between a potential customer and your brand. It is important to ensure the keywords that lead visitors to your site reflect the nature of your business or services offer, but also mimic the language of your target audience. Here are some helpful practices to use when determining the right keywords for your website. 

Topics: Website Best Practices, SEO, Keywords, Lead Generation

Snapchat isn't just for fun puppy dog filters that give you that oh-so-perfect selfie. Snapchat filters provide a fun, engaging and affordable way to promote your company, organization or school district. With over 158 million users, Snapchat is quickly growing. It's reported that every second, 8,796 photos are shared on Snapchat (CEWE Photoworld, 2016). That's a lot of snaps.

Topics: Marketing Best Practices, Social Media, Content, Snapchat, Engagement

My personal email inbox is currently sitting at 301 unread email messages...EEK! Who else is guilty of ignoring the many marketing emails that you receive each day? But here we are as marketers, still using email marketing. Why? Because it is EFFECTIVE! 

Topics: Marketing Best Practices, Finding Audiences, Content, Lead Generation, Email, Email Marketing

In Blair's previous blog you learned how to find the right audience for your content. Once you've determined your audience, it's time to develop the content. Content can sometimes be tricky. What you think may be important and what your audience wants to hear may be completely different.

Topics: Online Content, Marketing Best Practices, Keywords, Content

Great social media content is only as good as the plan that you create to support it. But where do you begin and what should you consider when creating the perfect social media plan? 

Topics: Online Content, Marketing Best Practices, Optimization, Social Media

You've created terrific content for your webpage and you're ready to share it with the world. This is great, but how do you get your content found by your target audience? The key to having your content found is through optimization. Optimizing your page allows for search engine users to find the content that is most relevant to them and gets your content seen. Here are four helpful steps to optimizing your webpage.

Topics: Online Content, Website Best Practices, Optimization, SEO, Keywords