For two days, our team networked and attended amazing sessions at the Digital Summit to learn digital marketing best practices, latest trends, and strategies. Here, the SpotOn Agency Council explains the future landscape of the digital economy.

Here’s everything you need to know about Google’s newest core update and what it means for how relevant Google views your site.

Marketing agencies are rather fragmented right now making it hard to know who to choose and what type of agency will align with your business strategy, culture and current growth stage. Here are tips to help you vet your options and choose the best partner.

Email marketing works. In fact, it’s still one of the most effective digital tools for customer and prospect connection. Those rolling their eyes may be of the mindset that email marketing is dead. People are quick to dub email marketing as passé but hear us out on why it’s still winning.

Digital marketing, traditional marketing, content marketing, social media, advertising, organic growth, branding, email - the list of marketing terms, techniques and strategies grow each year thanks to both evolving technologies and evolving audiences. Within that list of opportunities though, content marketing is woven into each (if not it should be!) as it plays an essential role in successfully connecting with your customers and prospects.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), are options you might hear thrown around often in the marketing world as viable tools to garner attention and conversions from your audience, but many aren’t totally sure what they even mean much less which one or if the combination of the two makes sense for their company. Let’s clear up what SEO and SEM are and how they’re used to help your company grow.

Defining your brand isn’t a new concept, but now more than ever, many companies understand the importance of using their brand to connect with potential buyers on an emotional level. Therefore, it’s paramount to not only define your brand but to live it out. And branding isn’t just for larger companies with a jumbo marketing budget - it’s a crucial component to small businesses and startups. In fact, these companies should rely on leveraging their branding even more than larger more-established companies in order to stand out from the noise.

Social media is changing for businesses, and if you don’t know how to navigate those changes, it could be frustrating and costly. The larger social media platforms (like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram) are constantly updating their algorithms to allow users to see more friends and family content and less business content. Twitter is on its own journey to clean up its feed and remove bots and fake accounts, which sounds nice and is for many, but a significant drop in followers overnight can hurt your Twitter business profile.

We frequently stress the importance of alignment between the sales and marketing departments within an organization. Their synergy is a critical component to the success of a company. Unfortunately, though, Hubspot says a mere 22% of companies feel like their sales and marketing departments are jiving. This isn’t good for the company, and it isn’t good for the customer.

Knowing the struggle many have, we felt we could all benefit from diving in a bit deeper to the subject. There are many ways marketing techniques benefit the sales process, but let’s look at the benefits of marketing automation.

The marketing industry is ever-changing and our team is constantly learning and educating ourselves on how to stay ahead of the curve. We enjoy having this little “spot” on the internet to share with you the latest findings and helpful takeaways you can apply to your business. As we close the books on 2018, we thought it would be helpful to take a look at which blog posts from the past year you read and engaged with the most. So dig in to the recap and see what you may have missed…