While previous generations certainly matter when it comes to marketing, these young people, mostly teenagers at this point, will come to define consumer spending in the coming years. Any marketing strategies which have a shred of hope for success need to take this group of people into consideration.

We are not just talking about a new age of consumer, we are addressing an altogether new consumer. In considering marketing techniques for the coming year, businesses will first need to find strategies to target the emerging Generation Z.

Breaking Down Gen Z By The Numbers

Those from Generation Z were born in the mid-1990’s through the early 2010s, and will comprise about 40% of the consumer market in the years ahead. Though mostly still in their teens, this emerging Generation Z wield as much as $44 billion in discretionary spending. That’s a lot of money they’re spending on products and services.

This is a market that simply can’t be overlooked, and finding the right marketing strategies will be essential for any kind of meaningful success in the coming year. Marketing goals and strategies will be in large part all about figuring out this demographic—how to reach them and what, exactly, they are looking for.

Marketing To Generation Z

Considering the makeup and preferences of Generation Z, the challenges for direct mail can seem daunting. However, many of these same market forces could actually be very positive for direct marketing.

Generation Z consumers have grown up with the internet. From their youth, they understand screens and apps and mobile phones. They think in terms of digital information. Targeting starts with this basic fact.

On the surface, it can seem like the only way to reach Generation Z is through digital marketing. That seems to be the approach many businesses are taking. But direct mail marketing has some distinct advantages over digital marketing.

Actually, the “Four Ps” of marketing communications strategy: price, place, promotion, and product are best managed via direct mail marketing. Rather than relying on digital marketing formats (online ads, emails, etc.) which can get lost in the sea of other information, direct mail marketing lands in the hands of customers and communicates directly the information marketers are trying to convey about a brand.

On top of this, digital marketing has actually hit something of a snag in recent times. Consumers are constantly bombarded with digital advertising to the point that they have built up a mental filter for the ads they see on a constant basis. It’s just too much. With ads appearing on every website, social media platform and app, it’s information overload.

It’s estimated that consumers only see about 9% of the advertising they are exposed to, and even that is only for a matter of seconds. Only 9%!

This means that a massive amount of digital marketing flies right past the intended audience and is wasted. The millions of dollars spent on digital marketing disappear into the internet.

At least partially in response to this phenomenon, businesses have returned to direct mail marketing. And yes, direct mail marketing can be successful to Generation Z.

What Is Direct Mail Marketing And Why Is It Successful?

Direct mail marketing is exactly what it sounds like: mailing a printed marketing document directly to potential consumers. Direct mail marketing involves brochures, catalogs, postcards, newsletters, etc. It involves actual paper marketing materials which end up in people’s mailboxes.

There are distinct advantages to direct mail marketing. Businesses can purchase mailing lists from reputable sources who have already demonstrated an interest in their type of business or product. Rather than the seemingly random messages which are in circulation in the digital format, direct mail pinpoints a specific demographic and targets marketing materials for this demographic.

Rather than gambling on hitting the mark with digital marketing, direct mail narrows the focus and often produces better results in terms of return on investment into marketing strategies.

Consider how direct mail marketing would grab the attention of a young adult. Instead of finding themselves facing dozens of notifications from dozens of apps, they have a single piece of mail in their hands. All their attention is focused on that one piece of mail. There will be no dings, buzzes, or pop-ups when they’re looking at the mail. It is, perhaps, the most effective way to get a person’s attention.

Direct Mail Marketing For Small Businesses

Direct mail marketing is particularly useful for small business. Small businesses often lack the capital for large digital marketing strategies. Even if they build a website to receive and direct internet traffic, there’s little to guarantee that they will pull in the kind of digital traffic required to sustain a successful marketing strategy.

This type of indirect marketing is certainly powerful, but it involves a tremendous amount of data and analytics which may not be available to small businesses.

The simple, straightforward process of direct marketing is ideal for small businesses with small budgets. It’s a simple process for a small business to generate a mailing list from their current customer base and use this for a direct mail marketing strategy.

It’s also relatively simple to combine direct mail marketing with email marketing. By providing the same message in two different formats, the odds of getting the attention of the consumer are much higher.

Will marketing in 2018 involve large digital campaigns? Of course. But given the glut of information on the internet, businesses will need to get creative with their marketing campaigns.

Understanding and Marketing To Generation Z

Generation Z places an incredibly high value on the ability to define their choices for themselves. They want to be individuals. They don’t want to be defined by social constructs, they want to create their own identities.

In order to market to a new generation, businesses will need to pay attention to the types of marketing channels they use and whether those channels connect with the values of Generation Z. Remember, marketing channels are only the medium by which the marketing message is conveyed. A digital marketing campaign may completely miss the mark when it comes to understanding their audience while a direct mail campaign may nail it on the head.

Because the current generation is so inundated with advertising, they’ve become extremely good at filtering out most things and only paying attention to what matters to them. For any marketing campaign to succeed in the coming years, it will need to speak directly to the things that matter to young people.

Marketing campaigns need to be thought of as working with the consumer rather than to the consumer. In other words, because Generation Z highly values individuality and the ability to choose, marketing campaigns need to communicate that they are helping the consumer rather than telling them what to do.

Le Tote and Direct Mail Marketing

Direct mail marketing is a long way from the old ideas of junk mail. There are numerous examples of direct mail marketing that meet the challenges of the new consumers and new consumer practices.

Le Tote, a women’s clothing and accessory company, uses direct mail marketing to reach customers and to succinctly explain the fantastic benefits of their company. Le Tote directly allows customers to purchase clothes in a new and unique way. The fun for their customers is that each gets a box of mix and match items which they can choose to keep or trade for other items. The customers get products and participate in trading and exchanging those products.

This company uses a direct mail integrative strategy (regular mail, email and other direct mail channels) to reach their customer base. This has been extremely effective and successful because the direct mail marketing strategy allows customers to see exactly what they can get and what they can do with the items in the box. Again, appealing to Gen-Zers and others who want some type of personal identification with their consumer choices.

Conclusion

Is direct mail marketing a thing of the past? Hardly. In fact, as digital advertising continues to crowd the online world, direct mail marketing may actually be the ideal marketing strategy of the future. With its unique ability to grab and hold the attention of customers, it offers significant advantages over digital marketing.

What is clear is that smart marketers will take an integrated approach to marketing in 2018, using every possible marketing channel at their disposal. Direct mail marketing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Source

The Pros of DIY Marketing

A small business can gain success through DIY digital marketing. DIY marketing for small business can be beneficial if the owner or an employee has the time, resources and skill to perform these tasks themselves. However, understanding the intricacies of digital marketing and all the available tools they can use at their disposal is essential – before they can reap all the benefits as shown below:

• Save Money. The primary reason business owners go the DIY route with digital marketing programs is the money they can save by doing the task themselves, instead of paying a marketing firm or agency monthly – plus additional expenses incurred. You can gain more potential revenue by using the money saved toward the actual marketing expenses. Doing this can result in more targeted traffic and higher lever keywords, getting you closer to your marketing goals.
• Control. Performing your digital marketing strategy DIY style allows you to completely control your digital marketing efforts. You will learn more about the details of digital marketing, search engines, your website and your overall marketing strategy by rolling up your sleeves and doing the work yourself. If there are changes to be made, no need to wait for an agency or firm to take actions as you or your team can make the changes as needed.
• Brand Expert. No one knows your business or niche industry as well as you do. Your intimate knowledge of your brand will facilitate the faster formulation of digital marketing strategies streamlined for your brand, product or services. The process will be a lot faster than having to educate a third-party provider about the ins and outs of your operation, making sure they understand, then formulating a strategy that works for your business.

The Cons of DIY Digital Marketing

After getting a clear understanding of the most important pros and advantages of DIY digital marketing, please note that there are also disadvantages – cons to DIY digital marketing. The possibility of experiencing these cons can grow if you decided to take short cuts and resort to a black hat or deceptive practices that will not prove to be beneficial to your business. Before you proceed and make a final decision to DIY your digital marketing strategy, it will be to your immediate benefit to learn more about the cons. Considering both the advantages and disadvantages will equip you with the wisdom to decide if taking the DIY approach to digital marketing is the best decision for you.

• Learning Curve. Consider a steep learning curve and longer ramp up time if you decide to form a new in-house digital marketing team from employees who may not have the skills, experience, nor time to perform the work well.
• Investment. If your company has already invested heavily in your marketing program, forming a new DIY digital marketing team will incur additional expenses for your business and may prove too costly in the long run. Experienced digital marketers spent years fine tuning their skills in internet marketing before they achieved profitable results. If you have no digital marketing experts on your DIY team, it could take you considerable time and resources before you can get any favorable results from your campaign.
• Inexperience. In the digital marketing, game inexperience can prove harmful to your business. If you or your team lack the experience that is required for an effective digital marketing program, your efforts may result in actions that may prove harmful to your online reputation and internet presence.

In conclusion DIY digital marketing is loaded with potential if you have the talent, time, resources and knowledge needed to pull it off successfully. However, if you do not have the talent, time, resources and knowledge to DIY successfully, outsourcing your digital marketing could be the road that will lead you to much success. After carefully pondering both the pros and cons of DIY marketing your small business, the decision is yours to make. For more tips on marketing your small business please subscribe to our blog.

In 2016, we no longer considered social media a fad. Instead, we embraced it as the preferred communicative method in younger generations. Snapchat gave us spectacles, Facebook started live streaming, and Instagram managed a sneaky, replicative live video stream called Stories. Consumers and brands took to all these developments without hesitation.

There is more enthusiasm than ever behind social media. Assuming you’re on all the right platforms- don’t forget Twitter and Pinterest along with the aforementioned- 2017 is the year stay on top of newly surfacing social features and integrate them into your marketing strategies.

A nimbleness amongst your marketing will be key, and you’ll want to be able to react and implement creative ideas as quickly as the trends emerge. For practice, we’re cluing you in on trends that we’ll see take the stage throughout the upcoming year.

Top 2017 Social Media Trends:

• Filters

The puppy dog filter might be out in the upcoming year, but the proliferation of the Snapchat facial filters has sparked an interactive trend that competitors are quickly racing to reproduce.

Brands like High Castle started testing customized lenses this year, and the similar activity will continue.

• Customer service chatbots

Social media has opened itself up as a medium for customer service. Sprout Social reported that in the first quarter of 2016, the number of social messages requesting response was growing at over 18 percent a year.  

Sprout Social showed 34.5% of survey respondents prefer to receive customer service via social media, followed by website live chat. Chatbots combine the two to respond to customer queries about products and services.

• Paid content

Social media ad spend is projected at over $41 billion in 2017, according to Adobe. While we’ve to watch paid content become more prevalent in social feeds, it is clear that the trend has only been at its beginning.

• Business features and analytics

Google has long had its analytical tools, but now social media platforms like Instagram are launching a similar set of tools. Alongside Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics, Instagram’s move into the toolbox space indicates how useful social media is becoming to businesses. Using social media analytics helps brands make better decisions about their posting habits- from times of day to featured content.

• No more automatic posts

In the last few years, we’ve grown accustomed to automated social posts- posts that are pre-scheduled, pre-written and delivered without any human interaction. Although that was effective, the days of automatic generation are over.

Humans want to hear from humans, and 2017 will emphasize the importance of the human quality in posts. Promotions should be replaced by listening to customers; social campaigns should be interactive with consumer interests; followers should be reciprocal relationships; messages should be personal.

• Social shopping

Another trend we’ve watched slowly evolve over the years, social shopping is coming in at full force in 2017. Brands are working through social e-commerce options to making shopping easier than ever for the consumer. If you don’t already have an e-commerce layer in your social media, we suggest hopping on it!

That’s a wrap on social media trends 2017 for now, but no doubt we’ll see dozens more blossom in the coming months. Stay on top of the latest trends by following EM360’s blog, and be sure to reach out to us if you’d like a professional team of experts helping you craft and execute your social media marketing strategy.

As high as the pressure is for applicants, it’s intense for companies, too. HR not only needs to find a way to attract the best of available prospective hires, but they need to outshine competitors seeking these same candidates.

What can your company do to stand out and integrate remarkable potential into your stellar team? Employment agencies marketing strategies range across the board, but one of the smartest ways to get the young, tech-savvy, influential hires you want is through social media recruitment.

Social media for hiring? You might ask yourself. It seems too… untraditional for such a serious aspect of company development. But nearly 90 percent of hiring managers are using the mediums to the staff they want. Here are tips (and stats!) they’re using to harness the power of social recruiting:

Here are tips (and stats!) they’re using to harness the power of social recruiting:

• Get creative. Use as much humor and wit in your hiring posts as you use in your marketing campaigns! Everybody wants to be won over, even jobless millennials!
• Host a weekly Q & A session to better engage passive candidates. This weeds out who in the passive group has potential to be a strong, committed hire.
• Keep the beginning (200 words, maybe) of your LinkedIn profile updated with hiring information.
• Make hiring interactive. Nothing gets motivation stirring and competition thriving like a little competition. Ask applicants for social presentations of their creative work in the application process. This raises the stakes, ensures only serious applicants are remaining contenders, and spreads the word about your brand.
• Make the job requirements that you list relevant to the social media site you’re using as your outreach platform. This should be easy since you’re using social media. On Snapchat, highlight your need for hilarious snappers and excellent selfie takers. On Instagram, you might report a need for a meme-goddess. Depending on when you host your hiring efforts, survey the social media landscape to make sure your needed skills are timely.
• Seventy-five percent of potential hires aren’t actively searching for a new job. Social media creates a direct link from your company to these passive candidates. Scope out skillsets on LinkedIn, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you find.
• Use Instagram to show off your work culture. Most candidates want to achieve a work-life balance, and preferably, they’ll take an exciting ride on the work side. Post photos of employees at social gatherings, on work trips or having fun getting in the grind.
• Use social network analytics and audience insights to best direct your hiring efforts. Make sure that your posts are reaching the right age and experience level of candidates. This might mean shifting your target audience in posts or adding an additional audience who specifically sees job-related messaging.
• Weave hashtags into your posts about job openings, and make posts relevant to more than that position’s availability. If you can hook a potential hire on an interesting piece of information in the task at hand, you’re more likely to peak their interest with the bait of a job opening.

Try your hand at actively recruiting passive candidates. Social media consistently proves to be a sharp, useful tool, and it’s no stranger to landing awesome employees. To learn more about advertising employment agencies best strategies and implement them into your current HR, get in touch with EM360.

Today we want to focus on marketing for an industry who is also experiencing an all-time high: the allergy clinic.

Now, we know that business is booming this time of year, but who’s to guarantee that the allergy-ridden are coming into your clinic and not your competitor’s? Why are they coming in for preventative care during the off-seasons?

Grow your company and keep business consistent throughout the year by stepping up your private practice marketing strategy.

Here are EM360’s top Marketing Tips 2017 for Allergists:

• Patients with allergies are your top priority. Not only are you here to help ease the pain and inconvenience of allergy season on their senses, but you rely on their business. Make your clinic a safe haven for clients and make sure they know they’re part of your private practice family.
• Educate your clients whenever possible. Allergies are a struggle in their lives, so any tips or information about the cause of allergies directly benefits their understanding of their health and consequently, their lives.
• Reward patients when they prove to take an active approach to their health through the year; not just during allergy season.
• Sell well-being. Easing allergy effects is just one part your patients’ health throughout the year. Offering healing and treatments for general well-being, too.
• Aim to make campaigns more informative than sales-focused. If you have a new nasal decongestant available at the practice, don’t make the produce the focus of the market. Instead, focus on the elements in the environment that are making patients congested. People with allergies like to understand why they are unlucky enough to suffer every year.
• Become a voice of authority in the community by hosting web or podcasts on health and well-being (are you seeing a pattern?) Provide insightful, well-produced dialogue on your website and partner with local establishments to host your content on their sites, too. Working as a team will generate a wide audience for all parties involved and provide some marketing budget relief.
• Pulse your marketing efforts. Although you want to keep brand awareness going throughout the year, you don’t want consumers to become numb to your messaging. Try running a campaign for two weeks, and then taking a week off. This allows prospective patients a break from the advertising campaign and a chance to be reintroduced to reinvigorated by what you have to offer.
• Focus on local search engine optimization. Local SEO is especially important for allergists because it provides a golden opportunity to win new clients based on geographic location-based searches. Work with your digital marketing team to ensure you rank favorably and accurately in Google and other search engines.

• Ask for reviews. When you pull up toward the top of a Google search, potential clients are quick to explore your favorability- have other clients rated you well? Provided examples of a good experience? If not, you want to make reviews a focus of your current strategy. Most clients will be happy to write you a review upon request, but you can also incentivize reviews.

Marketing aggressively and consistently is integral to the success of your company, and EM360 is here to help you employ new strategies as effectively as possible. Give our team a shout when you’re ready to hire a professional team of small business marketing experts.

In the jewelry business, photography is especially important. Accessories are sold for how they look. Without being physically present to try on the parcel, admiring the jewelry’s beauty and imagining how a piece will look are the best ways a consumer can decide whether or not they wants to make a purchase.

Imagery in social media jewelry can create the scene around which your jewelry should be worn. Light and bright photos will convey everyday use, isolated images can spark the note of luxury and specialty occasion.

Beautiful, cohesive photography reflects on your brand. The more unified your aesthetic remains, the more consumers want to come to your page for an escape. There, they can browse and make purchases.

Photos are integral to your marketing for a jewelry store, branding, and sales.

Here are tips to boost photography in your social media marketing strategy:

• Background

When in doubt, stick with a white background. White provides a beautiful, bright canvas for any piece of jewelry you want to display. The color always looks clean, fresh and forbids any distraction from the focal accessory.

An easy way to create the background is to use a white poster board beneath your shots- try the table or the floor.

• Lighting

The sun’s natural light is your best friend! If it’s a gorgeous day and sunlight is pouring in through the office or your home windows, take advantage of it. It’ll be worth the time spent to have perfectly, naturally bright photographs to share with your consumers.

Avoid shooting directly beneath the sun- you don’t want to produce a glare.

• Angle and Camera

With the right lighting, a camera phone can shoot incredible photos. Of course, if you can swing a more technical camera in your budget, the investment will pay off.

Whichever camera you use, experiment with angles. Try capturing from several vantage points- maybe from atop a ladder- to get the best shot.

• Styling

Stay on theme in your photos. What story does the piece of jewelry you’re shooting tell? Style shoots with props that are thematically relevant and always keep the accessory as the star of the show.  

Try flowers, magazines, window frames, and sunglasses.

• Editing

Photographers often joke that the real work happens in editing. Before you start making changes, go through your reel and select the photos worthy of editing- ones you might use in a campaign. This will lessen the workload. While editing on apps like AfterLight or Lightroom, focus on saturation, contrast, and brightness.

Keep editing consistent amongst photos and be careful to not over edit.

• Selfies

It’s too soon to say whether the selfie will fade in 2017, but for now, it’s an excellent way to relate to consumers and show how the jewelry falls and looks in person.

Small business marketing is a craft, and it’s one we love at EM360. When you are ready to get started on your company’s brand and strategy, reach out to our team of experts for the best insight and long-term guidance.

Catering to the thin attention span is only half the battle; millennials don’t to tell you what they’re looking for in goods, services, or in life, for that matter. Millennials generations Y and Z expect you to know the ins and outs of their lives, and to cater your business to these needs. If you don’t, somebody else will.

Athletic apparel retailers are no stranger to winning this generation’s demands. Luckily, a consistent, continually increasing passions of this generation are health and fitness. Millennials have developed an acute awareness for their nutrition intake, daily physical activity and the balance between their work and home lives.

Sporting goods marketing strategies are set up for success with the built-in interests of millennials in health and wellness. But how can your retail sports marketing effectively prompt this group into a purchase? Let’s take a look.

How

Millennials are active and tech-savvy, so make your messaging interactive. Can you reach your audience while they’re working out? Support their activity monitoring by hosting an app that does all the work for them? By being there in those moments that they take so seriously as part of each day, you’ll win brand recognition amongst the group, along with their trust and loyalty.

What

Millennials are pushed so much content throughout the day, they don’t need extra, useless information to feast their eyes upon. Pinpoint exactly how you can be helpful. How can you help them grow? How can you help them achieve your goals? How can you legitimately make their lives better? If a millennial understands that your product has a genuine use, they’ll listen to you! But you’ve got to bring you’re A-game to your value-add proposition.

When

Millennials are on the go. They are active, 18-29 year olds who tend to live in urban areas or with their families. They work all day, but they’re also always dialed into their smart devices. This means they’re scoping out your brand while commuting to work or getting to the gym after hours. They are busy, and their attention spans are quick, but they can also digest a ton of information at once. Since there isn’t just one time to reach a millennial, push messaging often and frequently. Post several times throughout the day so you can reach your audience whenever it is they’re free.

Let’s look at one of the biggest sporting goods brands, Under Armour, and their success in reaching this audience. Under Armour did an exceptional job a few years back by opening up its creative development to suggestions from its consumer. Consumers had the opportunity to submit their most innovative, outlandish ideas and Under Armour agreed to produce one or several if their team found the idea both revolutionary and achievable. They allowed the consumer to be part of making the impossible possible.

As a smaller brand, you can be successful by making every extension of your marketing part of your brand experience. Invite consumers in with your messaging and make them a part of your story while you enhance their lives.

For more information and help setting up your sporting goods local business marketing plans, get in touch with our team at EM360.

If you specialize in media financial services and find yourself wondering how to market your accounting firm, read below for the essential ways to utilize social media in your overall marketing strategy. Below the list of things to do, we’ve also included a list of items to avoid! Pay attention to both, avoiding either can get you into trouble.

Social Media Dos for Accountants:

• Ask questions in your posts that engage readers and keep them interested in the services you provide.
• Be selective with what you share. Whether original or repeated, make sure content is relevant to your brand, services, and clientele.
  
• Don’t just educate your audience, inspire them! How do your services empower their lives?
• Embrace a multi-platform presence and keep posts relevant to each platform’s audience.
• Follow industry leaders and influencers.
• Make social media part of your routine checklist and give your social presence a checklist of its own, too.
• Personalize content. Not all posts need to reach your entire audience; it’s okay to vary!
• Post frequently and consistently.
• Prepare your content in advance. This is a huge time save and a way to ensure that you don’t forget to post special promotions or timely events, like tax return deadlines.
• Set up accounts on relevant, popular networks. Find out where your niche audience spends most of their time and set up profiles there. Amongst others, LinkedIn should be amongst your top selections.
• Sift around social media for popular hashtags, and include them in all of your posts.
• Search your brand name and see what competitors show up. Investigate what social presences they have and what type of content they share through platforms.
• Sync campaigns with the rest of your traditional marketing campaign.
• Vary content to keep consumers engaged.

Social Media Don’ts for Accountants:

• Expect anything to happen without a plan.
• Expect to win over new clients overnight. Clients and followers take time! Stay persistent.
• Assume people are interested in your practice. What you do is interesting, we believe you. But you must convince your consumers of this.
• Settle for what the general media say. What do you say?
• Follow every random person possible. This will give you a false sense of engagement. Focus on followers that are likely to convert into strong, loyal customers.
• Blast too many promotion messages. If you’re running a promotion, publicize it as part of a larger story, and in a fashion that complements the select platforms. Social media use is well-received when it’s used as intended by its users; not when it is used as a free space for ads.
• Assume that social media is an easy, time-friendly task. There’s a lot to it, and it’s going to take time to fulfill goals adequately.
• Confused metrics with what matters. Pay attention to lead conversions. Don’t get caught up in high follower numbers. Remember, at the end of the day, you need sales, not likes.

Navigating social platforms and utilizing SEO strategies aren’t difficult as long as you are committed and know what you’re doing. Contact our EM360 team to get help on SEO for financial advisors. Your most successful year yet is just around the corner!

Below are EM360’s top tips for improving your marketing in 2017:

Email market with auto response

Auto responders include personalized messaging. Depending on what consumers have indicated interest in, email genres can be specified and sent accordingly. Stay consistent with your email promotions and outreach.

Engage the community

Reach out to your local community, host events and offer insight on the car buying and upkeep experience as often as you can. Being an expert locally is monumental to your company’s success.

Generate leads with social media

Social media for car dealerships is a phenomenal way to make a name for your brand. As long as you execute correctly and keep content genuine, standing out amongst fellow car experts is a synch. Target your ideal audience on Facebook, drive sales through Twitter, enthuse millennials on Instagram, and market your brand through video on YouTube. Harness your Pinterest board to encourage re-pins that lead consumers back to your website, host contests that generate buzz and interest and remember, reviews matter! Ask consumers to review your company online and send kind words on your social platforms. Settle on the story that your brand wants to tell and carry it through all of your efforts on social platforms.

Generate trust with website design

Upholding a decent digital footprint lets consumers know that you’re on top of your game. Being a used car dealer does not deem anything else about your brand second-rate. Some of us know that a used car isn’t second rate, but you have to communicate that to potential buyers. Show consumers how impressive a used car is and how enjoyable the respective buying experience can be by offering an up-to-date and compelling website. Sites should be easy to navigate, informative, SEO-equipped and filled with only quality content.

Keep a consistent blog

Blogging is a resource that many find useful for search engine optimization purposes. It’s also a great way to educate consumers. Make sure that blogging content is original, unique to your brand and plenty engaging for your audience!

Mobile compatible websites

Mobile is the ever-increasing favored medium for web browsing and information searching. If your site is not web compatible, you won’t rank well in search engines; consumers will opt for a different search choice for their needs and your audience won’t take you seriously as a leader in the industry. Mobility is essential.

Promotions as central messaging

Car dealership promotions can be used as more than in-store or online elements. Use promotions as your central message to reel in current and prospective consumers. Investing in a car is a huge financial commitment, so you can plan on your consumers being budget-conscious. Offer promotions as part of larger buys and include some as giveaways with no strings attached.

Track leads by customizing offers

Customizing is critical to converting leads into sales, and channel tracking lets you know how effectively your messaging is working.

Use both traditional and digital marketing

Digital marketing is essential, and we are thrilled you’ve hopped on board with the movement. But don’t let go of traditional marketing just yet. Online and tangible presences complement each other sweetly. For example, outdoor ads can be traced quickly online, and online efforts can just as easily be reinforced with tangible signage.

To get the most out of your auto dealer marketing efforts in 2017, reach out to EM360. Our team is your go-to source for local and small business marketing. We look forward to helping you grow past your potential in 2017.

Once you know who you’re after, a good start to converting target audience to consumers is optimizing your website SEO for local searches.

So, what is local SEO?

Local SEO augments your website’s likelihood to rank high in particular geographic settings. When a Detroit user whose location preferences are on initiates an online quest for say, pizza, they’ll get Detroit-based listings. As long as you’re employing local SEO tactics, you should show up in the search.

Local SEO experts consider the localization of search optimization vastly more important than ranking well in national and global searches. What’s the point of ranking high in the Detroit consumer’s search if you are a neighborhood bistro in Brooklyn? Additionally, you are sifting through the competition by localizing SEO. There is a lot of effort put into high national search rankings. If you’re not conducting business nationally, that’s a lot of effort you could be fueling elsewhere in your business.

Making sure your website is local SEO friendly suits the majority of users that qualify their searches locally, e.g. sushi near me; it ensures that search engines recognize your location match you with respective consumers; lastly, users who search locally are generally headed toward a purchase. This is the ideal audience to capitalize on.

So let’s get to it. What steps should you take to make sure your site is primed for local traction?

Local SEO Tips 2017:

• Local Schema. Schema markups are data fields that let a search engine know what needs your business meets.

• Optimize GMB. Google My Business is a powerful tool to have in your box. In order to realize its potential, you must complete your profile. Remember, Google favors those who participate in its SEO tools.

• Customer reviews. Google and other search engines continue to increase the leverage of customer reviews. The more positive reviews you have, the higher you can move up. Customers want to know what they’re getting with your service, and reviews provide them just that. Whether you get a good review or a bad one, make a habit of responding to consumers input.

• Locally optimized content. Every time you push content (and it should be frequently), make sure it is locally optimized.

• Mobile-ready website. Mobile use numbers continue to skyrocket, so it is imperative your website is mobile friendly. You can bank on most of your local searching consumers to be physically nearby. Search engines like Google monitor their geo-location and push searches accordingly. As long as said consumers are on their smartphone, Google is only going to share mobile-ready websites.
  

• Clean up your NAP. NAP is your Name, Address, and Phone. Google determines search rankings by relevance, distance, and prominence. So if you want to rank in their favor, you need to update and complete all of your listed information, verify your location, double check listed hours, manage and respond to related reviews and include high-quality, engaging photos.

Local SEO is not so different from regular SEO except that it is specific, and it allows you to directly compete against similar, proximal businesses. Get in touch with your Detroit local SEO service squad at EM360. We’ve got you and all your SEO needs covered in 2017.