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Tingalls Blog - Marketing Tips & Tricks

Quick Tips for Maximizing Facebook Reach

Guest Blog from Wells Print & Digital Services For many businesses and organizations, Facebook can be an incredibly valuable tool for brand development and connecting with their fans for a relatively low expense. Whether you’re an international brand or a family-run small business, the ability to convey a personal side to your business is a necessary step in this growing age of digital marketing. Knowing how to effectively use Facebook, however, is a skill that requires a creative mind, in-depth analysis, and no shortage of patience. To determine your reach (how many people see your posts) Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank. EdgeRank is used to determine what content appears […]

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Posted in Social Media Marketing, Tips

10 Tips to a Better Website

Too many people create a website and then just let it sit and expect it to do all the work without any attention. In today’s competitive web environment and with the search engines placing a large degree of importance on recent web information this just isn’t a viable option. If you want to have the best website possible, you need to add updates on a fairly frequent basis. We’ve come up with 10 small tips that will boost the appeal of your website and make it more effective. 1. Call to Action. Don’t be afraid to ask for the sale. If your website is designed to have people do something, […]

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Posted in Branding, Tips, Website Design

Are You Making it Easy for New Customers to Find You Online?

If you’ve ever hired someone to work on Internet marketing or a search engine optimization campaign, you probably already understand how important keywords are to the visibility of your business website. But, do you know how to find the best ones… the terms and phrases that make it easy for new customers to find you online? Although a lot of business owners and executives don’t spend much time thinking about keywords, they can literally make or break your campaigns. When people search for information for companies on the Internet using sites like Google and Bing (or even social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn), the results are compiled and arranged […]

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Tips, Website Design

Can You Picture Using Pinterest to Get More Customers?

Although it doesn’t get the attention that social media giants Facebook and Twitter do, Pinterest has quickly gathered more than 10 million users, and is one of the fastest-growing sites around. With image-based topics and posts, it isn’t just a different spin on social networking, but also a unique marketing forum for businesses of all sizes. In fact, some companies (and especially retailers) consider Pinterest to be the best social site for attracting new customers. Could you take advantage and use it to get people to think about your company and products? Here are Tingalls top seven tips for Pinterest marketing: 1. Spend some time with the site. As with […]

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Posted in Social Media Marketing, Tips

What is Social Media Costing You?

If there’s one thing a lot of small business owners absolutely love about social media marketing, it’s that it usually carries a pretty low upfront cost to get into. You have to set up profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and the other major social networking sites, of course, and add content, but it isn’t like pay per click advertising, which can mean big expenses to get your campaign moving. Make no mistake, though… social media marketing is going to cost you something. We’re not talking about a hidden expense, although there are more ways to advertise on sites like Facebook than there were in the past. No, what we’re […]

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Posted in Branding, Social Media Marketing, Tips

Make Your Marketing Emails Count

Did you know that email marketing can be as much as 20 times more cost effective than other marketing methods when you’re trying to reach your customers?  But how do you create emails that get opened, engage the reader, and build value for your company? Tingalls Graphic Design has gathered a few tips to help you draft better emails and reach your customers with cost effective marketing. Be Trustworthy. People don’t want to open spam and they’re afraid of opening anything that might look suspicious. This means you have to identify yourself with a recognizable name. Make sure the from line in any email you send clearly identifies your company […]

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Posted in Advertising, Branding, Email Marketing, Marketing, Tips

12 Quick Twitter Marketing Tips to Help Your Business Grow

Contrary to what some business owners and executives think, Twitter can be a great tool for attracting new customers and developing relationships with them – provided that you use it in the right way. That means it’s important to keep a few ground rules in mind, and then to keep at it until you start to see the right results (success on Twitter is rarely ever instant). In fact, there is an art and science to building your Internet marketing profile 140 characters at a time, and it amounts to more than just getting lots of followers. To help you out, here are a dozen of our top Twitter marketing […]

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Posted in Social Media Marketing, Tips

5 Signs You've Gotten Bad Search Engine Optimization Advice

Search engine optimization and Internet marketing have gotten to be big enough, and complex enough, that most businesses wouldn’t even dream of trying to manage things on their own. There are just too many concepts to take in, and details to stay on top of, for the average owner or executive to handle in-house. In most cases, they turn to businesses like ours who can help them increase their rankings on Google and turn search engine traffic into a stream of new customers. But what if the advice or service they are getting isn’t accurate, or up to date? Unfortunately, that situation is more common than you might think – […]

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Tips, Website Design

3 SEO Trends, What’s In and What’s Out

Ranking at the top of the search engines is the goal of many websites but not all of them know how to get to the top. There are a variety of different approaches you can take to improve your search engine optimization, some legitimate, others not so much. Tingalls Graphic Design stays on top of SEO trends and always recommends using best practices. To that end, we’ve come up with the latest SEO trends, what’s in and what’s out. IN – Good Content Content is king, especially in the world of websites. Targeting one or two keywords/keyphrases for each page and then using those keywords in content that is informative […]

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Posted in About Tingalls, Copywriting & Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Tips, Website Design

What’s in a Color? The Impact of Color in Branding

Like it or not, people form opinions about your brand every day based of one simple thing: color. In fact, color can increase logo and brand recognition by up to 80 percent! Here are some reasons not to overlook the role of color in your branding efforts. Colors are seen by different age groups, genders and nationalities in many different ways. For instance, orange is highly accepted by young people, while people tend to dislike orange and green the older they get. Even men and women react differently to color. Females generally respond to red better than blue, while men prefer blue over red. Yellow has a higher effective value […]

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Posted in Branding, Color, Logo Design, Tips

PR Is Not Dead … Just like Everything Else, It’s Evolving

Did your first mobile phone come in a briefcase-sized carrying case that you kept under the seat of your car “in case of emergency?” If so, you – like me – are old enough to call yourself a witness to the communications revolution of the last couple decades. As a public relations and communications professional winding my way through this revolution, I attend my fair share of seminars, educational events and networking groups. The content of these meetings and events has obviously changed over the years to address the domination of all things electronic, social, and mobile. And, as such, I’ve been hearing a frequent refrain: PR is dead. Of […]

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Tips

The Sure-Fire Approach to Social Media Marketing

I really recommend using digital marketing and social media for your local business to help promote and amplify your brand online, to help drive online engagement with your website and, as a bonus, bring some more sales to you. Where small businesses often get digital marketing wrong is:  digital marketing is not a silver bullet for your company’s marketing.  It’s definitely not the only thing to do, and if you think it’s your sure-fire, quick-fix way to market yourself to a booming business then you’re going to be very disappointed. In my opinion, the biggest benefit of digital marketing is the ability to initiate and foster online relationships by directing […]

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Posted in Advertising, Branding, Networking, Social Media Marketing, Tips

Creating an Effective Landing Page That Leads to More Conversions

A landing page is a web page that targets a particular audience and captures their information, typically through a lead form. A good landing page will be easy and comfortable to navigate and will quickly give visitors what they want. And, in theory, this will increase the number of conversions you have because the process is easier for them. Tingalls Graphic Design has come up with some suggestions to help you make a more effective landing page so you encourage more conversions. 1)      Be clear and concise both visually and with your content 2)      Make sure there is a value to them and that it’s clearly stated 3)      Keep your […]

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Posted in Marketing, Tips, Website Design

The Right Words Win

Words are so important in everything we do — they’re a vehicle for communication to drive shared understanding with someone else to build a platform to grow a relationship (learn more about this in GrowLoop’s free ebook). I recently read Rework (Amazon affiliate) by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of 37signals.  I really enjoyed this book because of the authors’ philosophies and approach to business, but also because of its straightforward concise communication  — no extraneous words, everything in there is purposefully written. One idea that stood out was that companies should hire great writers vs. those overly talented in their specific area of skill — unless […]

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Posted in Advertising, Copywriting & Blogging, Tips

Convenience Does Not Need to be Expensive

Eight dollars a gallon seems like a lot to pay for anything.  It seems like a crazy amount for something as simple as sugar water, or more specifically a cold soda.  But on a hot day when you’ve been sweating hard and you just finished filling up with gas, that big number seems reasonable.  At least when they put it into nice, cold and refreshing liter size bottles.  If you were not at a place that relied on your convenience to mark up prices you may think twice about paying eight dollars for multiple gallons of soda. This paying extra for convenience is completely understandable, but what if you didn’t […]

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Posted in Print & Package Design, Tips

Mac Security Alert

Many Macs are vulnerable due to publicized but unpatched security issues with Safari. Square Circle Consulting, LLC recommends the following for users running versions of OS X prior to Lion: Switch to a browser that’s being kept up-to-date, such as Firefox, and stop using Safari. Select Apple menu->Software Update… and install all security-related updates such as Security Update 2012-004 and Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 10. Run up-to-date commercial anti-virus software. Prepare to upgrade to OS X 10.7 Lion or 10.8 Mountain Lion. Background Historically, Apple has only released comprehensive security updates for the current and previous versions of Mac OS X. The day after the release of […]

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Posted in Tips