Many businesses operate on a short-term basis. Everything from their marketing strategy, to their sales tactics, to their general goals revolve around the concept of instant reaction. And while businesses certainly have to survive in the interim before they can plan for the future, it’s unwise to attempt to grow without first forming a long term marketing strategy. Indeed, though it’s more difficult now to create overarching marketing strategies, business owners can –– and should –– look for persistent solutions to iterative issues. Here then are three tips you can use to flesh out a long term strategy for your operation:

No one should ever want to own a business that’s the “best-kept secret” in any field. Though that phrase might have a positive connotation for some, business owners need to recognize that exposure from advertising is a key element to business growth. Indeed, while it’s fantastic to develop leads through organic methods, informational resources, and word-of-mouth reviews, few companies experience a significant breakthrough without making some savvy digital advertising choices. To that end, here are the three best places to advertise online:

Starting a new business from scratch is one of the most rewarding –– and difficult –– projects any entrepreneur could hope to undertake. Even if you have years of experience and plenty of industry contacts, getting a new company off the ground requires a ton of hard work, capital investment, and, yes, some luck. What’s more, new business owners often find themselves handling assignments they would normally outsource or delegate –– like marketing tasks, for instance. While we can’t stress enough how impactful partnering with the right digital marketing agency can be, we also recognize that sometimes professionals are forced by circumstances to market in-house. With that in mind, here are three DIY marketing tips that can help your company hit the ground running:

How hard could it be to spot a marketing failure? After all, some of the most famous and successful companies have been guilty of making major marketing faux pas online. Indeed, nearly every major corporation at this point has committed some sort of regrettable gaff on social media. Yet the truth is, most marketing errors aren’t obvious or cringeworthy. Instead, many companies might not realize they’ve even made a mistake at all. To that end, today we’ll explore three common marketing failures –– and what your business can do to correct them:

Business professionals love to quantify performance. And they should. After all, if you can’t measure, collate, examine, and calculate how effective your business efforts are, then you’ll never know how to improve them in the future. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that there are several ways to judge a website’s ability to rank on search engines. One of the most commonly used metrics is Moz’s domain authority, which takes a number of factors into account to develop a ranking score for websites. By contrast, fewer professionals know and use the lesser-publicized page authority score. What is page authority? In brief, it’s a measurement of an individual page’s capacity to rank on search engines. Here we’ll explain the difference between domain authority and page authority, and explore a few ways you can work to improve both:

Brand loyalty isn’t what it used to be. Indeed, according to Forbes, only seven percent of millennials identify as “brand loyalists.” This shouldn’t surprise many business owners. After all, modern shoppers have more options to satisfy their wants and needs now than ever before. As such, factors like convenience and price have seemingly overtaken brand recognition as a deciding factor in the purchase process. However, many businesses still find ways to cultivate customer loyalty and use it to great effect. To that end, here are several high-profile brand loyalty examples that can provide valuable lessons for small business owners across industries: 

Do you ever feel like you’re creating content that goes straight into the void? For anyone who regularly writes blogs, social-media posts, and email threads, it can be difficult to stay optimistic if you’re not garnering engagement from your marketing efforts. If that scenario sounds familiar, know that a change in approach can lead to an improvement in engagement levels –– particularly in regard to email open rates. Today then, we’ll take a look at a few email subject line tester tools and show how you can work to bolster your email marketing strategy in general:

When business owners think about using social media to promote marketing content and build professional connections, LinkedIn tends to be overlooked. For whatever reason, most pros will first consider Facebook, Twitter, or even Instagram to launch their marketing campaigns and try out new tactics. However, leveraging some of LinkedIn’s unique features can help entrepreneurs grow their business in a significant way. To that end, today we’ll explain how you can use LinkedIn for business development:

Though we’re loath to admit it, agile marketing can’t fix every problem a business may have. Of course agile marketing has its limitations, like anything else. But that doesn’t stop others from promising the sun, the stars, and the moon when pitching a new agile marketing plan. As a result, there are plenty of people out there who don’t know what an agile marketing agency does in the first place. After all, saying your service covers “everything” isn’t helpful in the slightest. Rather, agile marketing agencies focus on implementing strategies based on data collection. We’ll explain further below:

Across the internet, social media campaigns run the gamut from inspiring to downright dreadful. Indeed, no business can afford to ignore their social media efforts or to put them on the backburner. In many instances, how your social media team crafts content and interacts with customers will have a direct influence on your company’s reputation. As such, if you’re currently running bland, boring, cookie-cutter social media campaigns, then –– odds are –– plenty of people are going to think your business is also bland, boring, and cookie-cutter. Fortunately, you can avoid this and instead create social media campaigns that provide massive benefits for your business. Here are five tips you can use to get started: