Five Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

Effective marketing requires a consistent awareness of upcoming trends and emerging channels. Even if you feel confident in your business's current techniques and strategies, you should keep an eye on what’s coming next so you can stay competitive and ahead of the rest. To keep your small business successful, here are five marketing tips to help you.

1. Blog With Expertise

If you’ve been in the marketing industry the past few years, you know that blogging is a trend that virtually every business has adopted. Blogging is a great way to utilize search engine optimization practices and get your small business noticed. Unfortunately, many businesses focus on frequency and forget the importance of quality.

By optimizing your website for search engines with quality blog posts, your business will appear at the top of search results for topics related to the product(s) and/or service(s) you offer. This will lead to more visitors to your website, increase your leads, and help your organization grow.

You can post a blog with keywords every week, but unless the content is valuable, you will lose the interest of your readers. The effectiveness of your blogging is going to be based on exciting and informative content. Accomplishing this might mean hiring an expert in your industry or scheduling your own time to draft a quality post each month.

2. Mobile Takeover

Everyone has already witnessed the impact of mobile technology on marketing strategies. The last few years have been focused on mobile browsing and utilizing social media platforms that are only available on mobile devices. In 2017, think about marketing options like text message marketing; 95% of Americans now own a mobile device and 98% of text messages are opened.

If you have not yet developed a mobile marketing strategy, you'll want to invest the time to do so in 2017. There are a number of SMS marketing services online that provide software that will allow you to create lists, draft messages and send them to your customers.

3. Personalized Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has become a crucial aspect of marketing effectiveness in the past few years. Small businesses can’t afford to become complacent with their social media. Pay attention to personalized marketing techniques; tracking consumer behaviors and targeting them based on their interests is becoming an essential tool of marketing.

Personalized marketing techniques can be as simple as using your customer's name in the bulk email messages you send out or as complex as targeting individuals that work at a specific company you'd like to sell your services to with Facebook or LinkedIn ads. Social media sites like Facebook have improved their advertising platforms to let you be very specific to the audiences ads are shown to. With this information, you can create specific ads that target groups that can provide a strong ROI for your effort.

4. Visual Strategies

Live-streaming has taken the social media world by storm. Live feeds and videos have become the new normal for communicating your message. Facebook reported last year that 100 million hours per day of video are watched on their site. Engage your audience with live-streaming at events or conferences that highlight you and your product offering. It's a quick and effective way to connect with customers and build your brand.

Visual marketing effectiveness will also rely on engaging graphics. While graphic design has always been important, it will need more attention this year. Viewer engagement durations are shorter and social feeds are getting more crowded. Stand out with powerful graphic content.

5. Email Marketing

Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of email marketing. Too many businesses see it as an irrelevant aspect of marketing as social media has expanded. The truth is, email marketing is still beneficial to the growth of a small business. In fact, 91% of U.S. adults reportedly like to receive promotional emails from companies they've done business with in the past. Your email marketing strategy in 2017 should be focused on helpful content including industry news, guides and links to your expert blog content. Don’t run customers off with an email about sales every few days. Make your email content engaging, informative and interesting by containing insights that you personally would like to know and receive about your product offering. If you wouldn't want to read the email you're sending to your customers, don't send it.

Marketing is constantly evolving. This year we can expect marketing strategies to be detail-oriented and mobile-focused. Consumers are not paying attention to fluffy content or staying engaged through traditional avenues alone.

Sagamore Hotel Presents 'Cuban Artists: The Prodigious Decade'

South Florida’s leading “art hotel”, The Sagamore Hotel Miami Beach, is debuting its latest seasonal curated exhibit entitled, Cuban Artists: The Prodigious Decade on view now through August 31st, 2017. This thoughtfully curated project showcases a significant selection of historic and recent artworks created by Cuban artists from the 80’s generation, some of the most important artists who pioneered Contemporary art on the island.

Glexis Novoa ‘Ongoing Conversation’, 2016.

Among the participating artists are: Gustavo Acosta, Alejandro Aguilera, José Bedia, Consuelo Castañeda, Humberto Castro, Arturo Cuenca, Ana Albertina Delgado, Tomás Esson, José Manuel Fors, Florencio Gelabert, Flavio Garciandía, José Franco, Rogelio “Gory” Lopez Marín, Marta María Pérez-Bravo, Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, José Toirac, Rubén Torres Llorca, Juan Sí-González, Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, Tomás Sánchez, Leandro Soto, Glexis Novoa, Cesar Beltran, Jose Franco, and Tonel. Some works are consigned from Pan American Art Projects, Dorfsman Fine Arts, Durban Segnini Gallery, David Castillo Gallery and The Oscar B. Cintas Foundation.

The exhibit shows this generation of Cuban artists who emerged through a series of ruptures which then led to the emergence of New Cuban Art as Luis Camnitzer referenced in his eponymous book. At the same time, the exhibit will give the audience an idea of how vigorous the work of this key group of Cuban artists was and continues to be, regardless of where they have been working from.

Ruben Torres, ‘Brother will you spare a coin’.

The term “Decada Prodigiosa” named by Cuban art critic Rufo Caballero, describes a turning point in the history of Cuban Art. The curators of the show – Dr. Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos from Aluna Curatorial Collective, and Sebastien Laboureau, Sagamore Hotel’s art advisor – appropriated Caballero’s term because it encapsulates the spirit of a time that was crucial to the art history of the island. It was a time of aesthetic divergence that questioned the relation of the artists with official institutions, undermined the narrative and iconography of political power, as well as interrogated the function and potential of art itself within society. This wayward generation resorted to conceptual strategies, such as the return to forms of expression extracted from popular culture, the appropriation of international movements, and the depiction of local rituality.

Jose Bedia, ‘Ofrecimiento’ 2017.

This exhibit brings together a selection of works by artists who were raised after the ’59 revolution, and who mostly attended the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) school in Havana. These artists pushed the limits of what was permitted and prohibited at that time and thus emerged in tension with what the Revolution’s authorities considered as their fundamental tenets, for the Revolution sought to forbid anything that might stand opposed to its core values.

Artist Arturo Cuenca

Today, these artists continue to create powerful artwork that reaffirm the value of their artistic journey. They work in La Havana, Miami and other cities without considering the hordes of consumers that flood the island in search of Cuban Art, yet unaware of the movement’s genesis and history. This selection of pioneers who lived on and around the island’s shores, allows the viewer to feel and experience the undeniable courage of a generation of innovators who made and continue to make works of art without any rules but their own. The exhibition is on view through August 31, 2017.

PR Tip of the Day: Non-Traditional Content Amplification

#PRtips: When you have great content, you want to share it. Luckily, one of the most recent PR trends will involve some interesting content amplification tactics. Of course, social media will continue to be one of the main ways to share your content. You can combine that with paid promotion, such as Facebook promoted posts, Twitter promoted tweets and LinkedIn sponsored updates. Google AdWords will continue to be another great paid promotion tactic. You can also try asking big influencers in your industry to share and contribute to your content to give it more credibility and publicity.

'10 Steps To Winning Your DUI' if you or someone you know needs DUI legal assistance contact attorney Mark Lefcourt

'10 Steps To Winning Your DUI' 

DUI/CRIMINAL TRAFFIC

• Act quickly – You only have 10 days to address your suspension.

• Get a lawyer with a proven track record.

• Make sure your lawyer wants to win as much as you do.

• Don’t hire a lawyer who treats you “Business as Usual”.

• Find a lawyer who asks questions about YOU, your LIFE, and your FUTURE.

• Question the lawyer about his/her knowledge the “Arresting officers, presiding judges, current prosecutors, administrative procedures”. (weed out the pretenders)

• Get a comprehensive plan of attack.

• Discuss potential pre-trial motions that may win your case without the risks associated with trial.

• Ask the attorney point blank, “What do you do that the other attorneys don’t do?”

• Hire the attorney that you are most convinced will do “ALL OF THE ABOVE”.

If you or someone you know needs DUI legal assistance contact attorney Mark Lefcourt, the owner and operator of The Criminal Defense Center, located in Coconut Grove and Miami, Florida. Build the best criminal defense possible with the help of the lawyers at The Criminal Defense Center - Reopen old cases, DUI, drugs and more.
www.marklefcourtlegaldefense.com