While many of us may be more than familiar with the long-established social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, there's a social media platform out there that seems to demand our attention in the business world – LinkedIn!

As often as technology evolves to improve our day-to-day experiences online, hackers and scammers evolve just as fast to find new ways to manipulate software and its users to become victims of their malicious schemes.

In email marketing, the subject line is your first and often only chance to make a lasting impression. A subject line can differ between your email being opened, read, acted upon, or lost in their overcrowded inbox. Let's talk about the art of writing the best email subject lines that drive engagement. 

In this digital age, where much of our communication is through our phone screens and other devices, the way we express ourselves has evolved significantly. One addition to our digital conversations have been the emoji.

WOODSTOCK, GEORGIA, August 15, 2023 – Technical Resource Solutions is proud to recognize its 20th anniversary this year. Established on August 14, 2003, Technical Resource Solutions (TRS) has specialized in business IT, website development and design, and digital marketing for two decades.

Did you know that there are over 8 billion Google searches made every single day? Recent data even shows that Google receives and processes nearly 100,000 search queries every second. With that many people searching for answers to their questions, how many times and in what ways does your business show up?

More than 75% of the world's population over the age of 13 is now engaged one some form of social media or another, as of 2022. More than 93% of internet users are also social media users, and these numbers are only showing signs of increasing further as time goes on. 

If you're a business owner, you're likely acutely aware that trends change seemingly constantly in the world of marketing. As technology improves and professionals find new and better ways to use that technology, the landscape for marketing strategies makes massive shifts in a very tight timeframe. While there are always tried-and-true methods for increasing your business's digital reach, keeping abreast of changing times can keep your business ahead of the curve. 

If you've been following tech news, you know that one of the hottest topics of 2023 is the democratization of artificial intelligence, or AI. In just the past few months, AI has hit major strides in the consumer market: we've seen artificial intelligence paint pictures, chat with users, and even fully replace the voice of recorded actors with different actors' voices. Truly, the possibilities for creating with AI are limitless, but has the technology progressed to a point where we can rely on it for everything? 

According to recent statistics, nearly 80% of the United States purchased something online in the past year. That's nearly 263 million people regularly making purchases using eCommerce solutions instead of brick-and-mortar shops to purchase products, and that number is expected to continue to climb throughout the 2020s. In addition to single purchases, though, a 2022 study has identified that the percentage of Americans who prefer online shopping over an in-person alternative is now 56.6%, about a 10% increase over 2020's numbers. 

One of the tenets of a strong website marketing strategy includes a fair amount of work in Search Engine Optimization: the process of making your website more attractive to search engines and the people using them. SEO is still the end all, be all of search engine ranking, however some seemingly recent changes have made even more apparent the need to augment strong SEO with other methods of search ranking. Some of us have noticed around the office that Search ads on specific queries are displaying in larger quantities, sometimes going as far as pushing all organic results "below the fold."

Running a successful business takes a lot of work, and a great deal of the early work in bringing customers in the door lies in the visual realm. As a business, your visual identity can do a lot of the talking for you, and if done improperly can push traffic away. While some of the top companies are always changing their logo to chase yearly trends, keeping a consistent visual tone can be one of the key factors in creating lasting relationships with your clients and customers. 

In our previous blog we described the different types of ads and some of the ways they can be sent out to your audience. When coming up with a plan for sending out blogs, a few things are important to keep in mind: targeting, reach, and budget. Balancing the first two against the third can be troublesome, but you're not alone. The Technical Resource Solutions team is here to work with you to plan out and set up your ad campaigns to ensure that your budget is being spent as efficiently as it can be.

Advertisements on the internet have been around almost as long as the World Wide Web itself. Whether you're looking for information on your favorite search engine, pulling up a favorite music video, or corresponding with old friends on social media, it's likely the first thing you see when attempting to do any of those things is an advertisement. While your first reaction might be one of annoyance, nearly everyone has a memory of a particular ad that caught their eye, or even that led to a purchase.

Digital advertisements are one of the best ways of interacting with an audience that you may not have ever interacted with otherwise, but the road map for accessing those audiences, thanks to the ubiquity of the internet, is becoming progressively less clear. To help with that, Technical Resource Solutions has put together a short primer on digital ads, their utility, and some frequently asked questions!

Any business owner knows that data can be a powerful thing. Tracking sales can help you optimize inventory, find upselling opportunities, and companion items to increase your average order value. Research data following customers' eyes as they peruse store aisles informs on what shelf real estate is more valuable for brands. Tracking customer movement in and out of the store can help you determine what hours are best to stay open, and what hours are best to schedule additional staff.

The same can be said of your digital marketing presence. If all you do is post occasionally on a Facebook page or sending out emails to your list of clients without checking the data first, you might be leaving a huge source of potential revenue untapped. 

Video is a powerful tool that can be utilized in any industry for marketing purposes. Need to put together an explainer video? Advertise your services? Interview an employee on the subject they specialize in? Record an event? Release a how-to video? The possibilities of video marketing are endless, and those that we listed are just a few of the directions you can go in. Our society continues to gravitate towards video content now more than ever. IGTV, reels, Facebook Watch – almost every social media platform has promoted video, and consumers are liking it… 

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a gray area is defined as "an area or situation in which it is difficult to judge what is right and what is wrong." This definition proves to be accurate in the case of graymail as it's a problem in the marketing industry that even the best marketers struggle with. Though it's a widespread problem, it's not often talked about so we will dive into what graymail is, why you want to avoid it, and steps you can take to try to remedy its effects. 

My typical day looks like meandering around the office greeting my TRS family and eavesdropping on their conversations. They're always busy at work providing marketing plans and solutions for clients, a major part of that being email marketing. As I make my rounds, I've more than once overheard them explaining to clients why they shouldn't send bulk mail through their personal or business email accounts. Because I think this topic is a real tail wagger, I thought I would do them a favor and write a blog about all the reasons you just can't send bulk mail through your email account. 

Now is the time to prepare your business for the #NewNormal and implement proactive marketing and technology strategies so you're ahead of the curve, no matter what comes next. Take the first step and learn some practical steps you can implement right now to offer your services on Facebook.