The emfluence Blog

If you’re using email strategy as part of your marketing efforts, then this blog post is for you. That’s because reporting on what you’re sending…

Customers are constantly being barraged with marketing messages, often multiple marketing messages from the same company. So, as a marketer, how do you know which…

Regularly publishing quality content can be difficult for any business, even those with a wealth of marketing resources. It’s so easy to put content creation…

You’ve perfected the spacing, the images are just the right size, and now you’re ready to test and run pre-flight (which we always suggest before…

So, You Decided to Run Terrestrial Radio Ads… Why: You wanted to achieve mass reach, with a low CPM, to reach a captive audience. You…

We’ve all stumbled across content that is a little too transparent with its goal. We’ve read a blog post that feels like an exhausting sales…

As emfluence continues to grow and forge new partnerships with more great clients, we realized we were getting stretched a little thin when marketingourselves and our business. Enter: Natalie Jackson, emfluence’s new Marketing Director. I took some time to chat with Natalie shortly after joining the emfluence team about her background, interests and goals in her new job.

Content marketing is a vast and ever-changing industry, so I thought I’d take some time to look into my crystal ball and see what the next year might bring. Naturally, I can’t actually see the future, but I like to stay as up to the minute as possible. Here are the content trends I think will dominate content marketing 2017.

A couple weeks ago I received a call from a new client who was moving from another M.A.P. to our Platform. They had hundreds of…

It is all too common that digital marketing agencies narrow their focus on only the trendiest marketing tactics. Everyone is buzzing about the latest feature of SnapChat or the newest PPC ad style on Google. You see countless blog posts, social media posts and think-pieces hailing the next great thing in marketing. What’s worse is that so many of these digital marketing agencies then push their clients toward executing these “Tactics of the week” without a full understanding of what they can actually do for the client and the results they can deliver. It’s the marketing equivalent of throwing stuff up against a wall and seeing what sticks.

It’s easy to think that your favorite search engine knows everything. It’s our go-to source for new information, after all. You “Google” everything you don’t know, and Google always has an answer.

But there is one critical thing that search engines don’t know, and it can completely change the way content marketers think about content creation.

Search engines still don’t know what you are going to search for.

It’s never too early to start forecasting what’s going to be ‘the next big thing’ in the digital marketing and tech landscape in 2017. emfluence has compiled trends and expectations from across our agency team members to bring you an array of predictions for what to look for, and more importantly plan for in 2017. The boldest prediction of all? 60% of the time our predictions are right, every time.

There are many moving parts to an SEO campaign and having a roadmap that lists the items to accomplish and the actions we will take to fix & optimize your site, can be the best tool. A solid roadmap can consist of:

Let’s talk about social media marketing for a bit. I know, there are plenty of articles about the use of social media for businesses, so…

This will not be the greatest blog post you have ever read. But it will give insight on how to navigate setting expectations with clients.

Is it obvious that Instagram Stories is a Snapchat rip off? Absolutely. Does it matter? Not in the least. If you already have Instagram, you now have the feature power of Snapchat behind it. Without the trouble of building and managing a completely separate channel and audience.

We sought to improve our digital agency’s proposals through testing various tools outside of the traditional Word, PowerPoint, and InDesign documents. I average seven proposals per month and with my growing team, I assist in more than I can keep up with. I needed a way to create documents for sales templates that were easy for my team to access, with easy design capabilities to save time and a way for us to track the results more effectively. One of the tools I came across in an article was Qwilr. We decided to give it a test run.

Certainly, you or a loved one has contracted the Pokémon Go fever currently sweeping the country. It’s everywhere. It has even infected a good portion…

These days, content is everywhere. The internet is practically overflowing with content. There are think pieces and think pieces analyzing think pieces. There are recap and prediction videos for your favorite TV shows (Who hasn’t seen the latest Game of Thrones fan theory?) There’s even content discussing the value of content itself, the category under which this blog post would fall.

If you are a digital marketer, then odds are that you touch content production in one way or another. That also means that you're well…

You can blog and publish content regularly. However, if your site content isn’t converting your website/blog readers into actual contacts – then what’s the point or value behind it? Every marketer inevitably hits a content wall and bandwidth restrictions to keep churning out blog posts, social posts, infographics, videos, podcasts…you name it. The key is to keep the content and conversion wheels in motion, even while you’re not at the actual wheel creating it.

Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que, a long time fixture in National Barbeque Capital Kansas City, has come a long way from it’s humble roots in a neighborhood corner gas station. Joe’s has turned into a famous spot for BBQ aficionados, celebrities and fans alike. With their growth, Joe’s Kansas City recognized that their brand was underserving one large area of their growing fandom: the internet. In early 2016, Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que tapped Kansas City-based digital agency, emfluence, to bring Send Joes KC BBQ to life online.

It’s that special time of year when email and digital marketing enthusiasts gather in Kansas City for smart strategy and new features in the emfluence…

We’re currently in the midst of a social arms race around live video streaming integrations and roll-outs across Facebook, Twitter, and other major social players. Live video streaming, amongst other next-generation Web innovations like virtual reality headsets, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other wearable technology, all make up what many digital experts and Web data scientists like John Markoff and Tim O’Reilly experts have already dubbed “Web 3.0.” Web 3.0 can be summarized as the “connective intelligence and learning of all Web users and devices – or all of your things talking to the other things about all of the things.”

The 2016 KCDMA AMBIT's Award show was a great night for the emfluence team and our wonderful clients! This year, the gala was held at…

Today Instagram announced that it will be lifting its previous 15-second cap on video capabilities in favor of the new 60-second format. For a long time brands have been confined into figuring out ways to share their message on the creative social media giant in a 15-second format. With 4x that amount now available, brands have more time to get inventive but why the big change all of a sudden?

Boaty McBoatface sounds like something a kindergartner would say, or it may remind us of Theodore Tugboat, but it probably shouldn’t be the name of the $300 million dollar research vessel. As the latest instance of the internet getting the best of an advertising campaign, Boaty McBoatface takes the stage as one of many well-planned engagement campaigns that had an unplanned outcome.