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The content for Reels can vary for each unique company and industry. You can focus on promoting products or services, educating your target audience, sharing relatable behind-the-scenes footage, sharing reviews from satisfied customers, or repurposing your company videos into clips. Any content that is engaging and relevant to your business can be used in Reels to attract a broader audience base. 

What are Reels?:

Reels are vertical videos that can be up to 90 seconds long and can easily be customized to add audio, text, stickers, and other video effects. You can share Reels to your profile for your current followers and on public pages dedicated to finding new content. Reels allow companies to tap into the vast market of video content consumers and engage with them directly. In addition to the increase in organic reach, Instagram and Facebook updated their algorithms to favor Reels over standard, written posts. Both platforms are more likely to recommend or promote Reels to potential viewers. In other words, you are granted higher visibility for using Reels and its features.

Changes in Social Media:

Since the 2020 pandemic, users have increased their demand for video content. One example of this is the mainstream success of TikTok, which gained a significant user base in 2020 and now maintains around 1 billion monthly users worldwide. TikTok is a social media app dedicated to short-form videos and includes various editing tools. As other social media companies observed the rising popularity of this app, the plans to roll out new video content strategies began. In 2020, Instagram announced its launch of Reels. Soon after, Facebook also included Reels as a feature. This addition is how Instagram and Facebook compete with other video marketing platforms, such as TikTok or YouTube. 

Results of Video Marketing:

There are several reasons to take on this new form of marketing. For example, organizations that market with video receive 66% more qualified leads each year. Video marketing is the most engaging way for your business to communicate to your desired audience. As long as it is not too long, people are much more likely to give their full attention to a video than any written content. An estimated 54% of consumers say they wish they saw more video content from the brands they support. Ultimately, users want to see entertaining content that communicates an idea quickly. So what does this mean for your marketing strategy?

User Experience:

Most business owners know they should promote their company on social media but still struggle to reach a large audience. What many do not realize, however, is what kind of content they should be sharing. If you want to improve the reach of your business on social media, it is helpful to consider the experience of the potential clients you want to reach. The average user spends most of their time on social media consuming content as quickly as possible. Some content may come from friends and family, and some from various business profiles and advertisements. While a targeting plan is still necessary for your social media content, every individual on Facebook and Instagram is significantly more likely to notice your business if you incorporate Reels into your strategy.

Reels can be a simple way to boost your content and reach more of the right people. However, it can take significant time and effort to produce and manage video content for your company. No matter your marketing goals, the TOTAL Advertising team can help you tackle them head-on. Contact us today to start achieving superior results. 

Let’s be honest, Facebook has changed A LOT over the years. There seems to be a new feature, update, or change every other week. At the end of 2021, Facebook dropped the news that they were rebranding to Meta and shortly thereafter released Meta Business Suite, a totally new way to interact with and create content for Facebook Pages. Most recently, Facebook has started rolling out yet another new Pages experience.

It might feel impossible to keep up with the changes, but for businesses with active Facebook Pages, it’s important to try! Read on to learn what’s new with Facebook.

No More “Likes”

“Liking” a Page on Facebook has been a function of the site since 2009. Clicking a Page’s “Like” button enabled the user to see the Page’s status updates, photos, videos, and more in their newsfeed and easily interact with what was shared. It’s no secret that social media algorithms have changed dramatically over the years, and Liking a Page no longer means that you’ll see most, if any, of that Page’s posts, but now Liking a Facebook Page will fully become a feature of the past.

Instead of Liking a Page, users will be prompted to “Follow” a Page. Following a famous person or company on social media is certainly not a new concept, as most social media platforms only give you a “Follow” option, and soon it will be no different on Facebook. In fact, for a stretch of time you had the option to Like or Follow a page on Facebook (and if you were interacting with Facebook as a Page, you could only Follow other Pages). This is why most Facebook Pages had a different number of Likes and Followers.

With the update, those who had previously both Liked and Followed your business’s Page still count as a Follower. Those who only Liked your Page will not transition into a Follower. Luckily, most who previously Liked a Page were also automatically counted as a Follower. Users had to manually Unfollow a Page if they didn’t want to see that Page’s posts in their newsfeed, so any who only Liked your Page weren’t seeing your posts, anyways!

Shorter Page Bios

The age of unlimited character usage in your Page’s biography has passed. Once your Page is updated to the new Page experience, your bio can only be 101 characters. That’s right, characters, meaning you’re allowed 2.7 times fewer characters than a Tweet.

Once your Page transitions to the new experience, it will cut whatever existing bio your Page had off at 101 characters precisely, so you’ll need to compress your company’s history, mission, and services down to about one sentence.

Page “Profiles”

One of the biggest changes with the new Pages experience is Pages getting their own “Profile.” Previously, any and all Pages your personal account was an admin of were directly accessible through your own profile. If you managed multiple Pages, you could easily cycle from one Page to another. With the new Pages experience, each Page is given its own “Profile.”

You can still view the Pages you run on your own Facebook profile, and Facebook acknowledges that you are indeed an admin of the Page. But if you actually want to manage any part of the Page (post, view statistics, etc.), Facebook prompts you to “switch into” the Page’s profile.

Page-Specific Newsfeeds and Interactions

Now that Pages have their own Facebook profiles, they also have their own specific newsfeeds. Pages did have their own easily accessible newsfeeds before, but shortly before this new Pages experience was rolled out, they were more difficult to access.

Now, if you’re interacting as your Page’s profile, the Page’s newsfeed displays just like your own personal newsfeed does. The Pages that your Page follows populates this newsfeed, and it makes it much easier for you to like, comment, and share posts as your Page.

It also lets you more easily Follow public figures and brands that are relevant to your own Page’s industry and posts, as well as Pages run by local businesses and loved ones that you’d like your own business’s Page to publicly support.

Abolishing Page Roles

With the new Page experience, Page admin roles as they’ve existed before are going away. Instead of different people having different admin roles, you must now assign people to different Page tasks.

People with task access to your Page can manage the following things, if given the proper access:

• Content: Users with Content Access to your Page can create, manage, or delete posts, Stories, and more. They can also respond to comments and update Page information. Basically, granting someone Content Access allows for them to have much of (if not precisely) the same power as someone who previously held the role of Page Admin.
• Messages: Those with Messages Access to your Page can send and respond direct messages as the Page as well as manage and use other Page Inbox functions.
• Community Activity: Users with Community Activity Access can review and respond to comments, remove unwanted content, report activity on the Page, and engage in other similar activities.
• Ads: People with Ads Access to your page can create, manage, and delete ads as well as handle other ads-related tasks.
• Insights: Insights Access grants users with the ability to see how the Page, content, ads, and other metrics are performing. Insight Access is granted to all users who have task access to your Page.

You can grant people with Full or Partial Access to your Facebook Page, and toggle what someone can and cannot access at any time. Additionally, any action someone takes as the Page may be visible to everyone who helps manage it. These actions can be seen in the new Page Management History menu, accessible through your settings when you are in your Page’s special profile.

New Look for Page Insights

Once your Page experience changes to the new version, it initially seems like Facebook Insights has changed. You can view Insights on the new “Professional Dashboard,” but the Insights shared here are just a list of numbers. Unfortunately, this new way of presenting your Page’s Insights doesn’t even specify the dates from which they’re pulling these analytics from, which may be frustrating if you like to compare your Page’s analytics from month to month.

On this Professional Dashboard you can also see some minimal statistics about each individual post on your Page. It’ll show you the Post Reach and Engagement numbers for your posts from the last 7 days, 28 days, or 90 days. You can also see basic Audience analytics through this dashboard, namely the percentages of men and women in each age demographic who follow your Page and where these followers are from geographically.

While these changes may feel like you’re getting even less insight on your Page’s analytics than you previously were, all hope is not lost! The Insights available on the Professional Dashboard are basic snapshots of your Page’s analytics, but you can (thankfully) still see the more detailed analytics you may be accustomed to on your Page’s Meta Business Suite dashboard.

On the Meta Business Suite dashboard, you can see the graphs and numbers Facebook has been providing as analytics for the last few months, as well as more detailed analytics about all your Page’s posts (number of likes and reactions, replies, link clicks, etc.). On the Business Suite dashboard, you can also continue to adjust the date range that the analytics are being pulled from and compare them to any stretch of time that you desire.

While Facebook tweaks its platform regularly, this new Pages experience is the most dramatic change since the creation of the Meta Business Suite. It also seems to be rolling out across the platform slowly, but once you get a notification that your Page is changing over to the new experience, it will occur with or without your agreement in a matter of days.

With how frequently Facebook tweaks and changes its platform, it’s difficult to stay on top of it all. The digital marketing experts at TOTAL Advertising can help you manage your business’s social media accounts and stay up-to-date on what’s new so you can focus on what’s most important: running a successful business. Contact us today to start planning a successful social media strategy for your business.

If you run a business you are well aware that advertising, in many different forms, plays a crucial role in driving traffic to your website. But just getting eyes on your site isn’t enough—the ultimate goal is to make customers out of your site visitors.

However, not every website user is ready to fill out a contact form or make a purchase when they first find your business online. In fact, a whopping 97% of first-time website visitors will leave without taking action, and nearly 49% of consumers visit a website 2-4 times before actually making a purchase.

So how do you get all these site users to come back and actually turn into customers? By running successful retargeting campaigns!

What Is Retargeting?

Retargeting is a paid advertising strategy that involves putting your ads in front of people who have visited your website after they’ve clicked away and visited other websites to try and remind them of your products and services and get them to return to your site.

Retargeting campaigns can be done with the help of Google Ads, Facebook retargeting, AdRoll, and other retargeting advertising platforms. This type of advertising campaign has rapidly become a vital tool to (re)connect with customers and increase sales and customer loyalty. It’s also a lot more cost-effective than other types of advertising!

How Retargeting Works

From a technical standpoint, a small piece of code called a pixel is added to the HTML of your website. When someone visits your website, this information is stored by the user’s web browser, enabling the browser to remember that the user spent time on your site. Marketing teams can then utilize this data to serve ads for your site and your products to the user again and again on websites, social media platforms, and apps they use.

From a consumer’s perspective, it just may seem like a specific company or product is following them around from site to site or app to app. Say you were looking at a jacket on a clothing store’s website one evening, but you ultimately decide not to purchase it right then. You click out of the site and close your laptop.

A few hours later, you open your laptop back up to read some local news stories and scroll through your Facebook feed. While on the local news site, you happen to notice a banner ad for the clothing store you were browsing earlier, and when you’re checking Facebook, there’s an ad for the specific jacket you were looking at!

Encouragingly, 89% of Internet users have either a positive or neutral reaction to being retargeted, so it could be just the thing to get people returning to your site and becoming a proper customer!

Who Does Retargeting Work For?

Any business and every business can benefit from retargeting campaigns! Successful retargeting campaigns are used by brick-and-mortar stores, residential service providers such as roofing, painting, and gutter companies, real estate agencies, restaurants, universities, medical service providers, and more.

But it doesn’t stop there! Whether your company is B2B or works directly with individual consumers, whether you sell services or physical products, a retargeting campaign can turn site visitors into proper customers.

How Could You Use Retargeting Campaigns?

The best-performing retargeting ads have clear call-to-actions and promote offers that will get people back to your site and taking the plunge with your company. Additionally, retargeting is most effective if you segment your site visitors and tailor your retargeting ads to each group of site users.

First and foremost, a retargeting campaign can be focused on keeping your brand top-of-mind for potential customers who visited your site but weren’t ready to purchase or fill out a contact form. Most people need to feel like they know a brand before they want to purchase your product or service, and seeing ads for your company as they use other websites and apps will help.

Other, more specific ads can be used in retargeting campaigns to try and bring back site visitors who didn’t yet convert to customers. Creating retargeting ads that showcase your bestselling items, for example, can help convert more visitors into customers and increase Return on Investment (ROI) for your ads.

And while retargeting is massively beneficial for turning site visitors into actual customers, campaigns can be used to get current customers to come back to your site, as well! If your company is launching a new product or service, it may be a good idea to launch campaigns that target people who’ve already invested in your brand so they could consider investing again for whatever product or service is brand new.

It could also be helpful to create campaigns around slow-moving inventory or infrequently purchased services. Retargeting ads are low-budget, low-effort ways to showcase surplus products or services that aren’t taking off the way you’d hoped, and the ads can be presented to potential and current customers alike!

And while retargeting is great for businesses that focus on making sales directly to consumers through their websites, it is also just as effective for businesses whose main online goals are to generate new leads via Contact Pages or Free Estimates. Instead of creating ad campaigns around specific products or sales, you simply focus on keeping your brand top-of-mind and getting past website users to come back to fill out your contact or free estimate form.

All that said, retargeting site visitors immediately is not always the best practice, depending on what goods or services your company offers. Different products or services warrant different retargeting time windows. For example, people shopping for clothing items or other reasonably priced goods could be retargeted immediately; people looking into building an in-ground swimming pool or making similarly large purchases should be retargeted later, to keep your company in mind as they think about investing their money.

Why Should You Use Retargeting?

Utilizing multiple marketing strategies is always recommended, as you’re ensuring as many current and potential customers as possible are seeing what your company can offer. According to Google, using retargeting campaigns in combination with your other advertising strategies can help you sell 50% more than you would without them. That’s precisely the success you’d hope for when it comes to using a new marketing strategy!

To create truly effective retargeting campaigns that drive real results for your business, you need a team of marketing professionals behind you. TOTAL Advertising is a proud partner with AdRoll, the leading ad retargeting platform, and together we can produce successful retargeting campaigns for you. The experts at TOTAL Advertising can help you design eye-catching and intriguing ads and tailor retargeting campaigns to precisely the site users you are trying to reach, and AdRoll can help us launch them across the web. Contact us today to learn more about how retargeting campaigns can work for your marketing strategy.

Sales calls are par for the course when you own a business, but lately, many companies are pushing backlink-buying schemes to help bolster your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). “Gaining 1,000 backlinks in one month” might sound intriguing, but it’s crucial to understand more about SEO and the role backlinks play in it before you spend any money on buying backlinks. 

Many factors are at play when it comes to SEO and achieving high ranks on search engines like Google, including backlinks. Simply put, backlinks are links from one website to a page on another website. While it’s true that websites with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings, link building has changed significantly over the last decade. Here are some common myths to take note of when considering a link building strategy for your website:

SEO is All About Backlinks

One of the biggest backlinking myths is that SEO is all about these links. There is so much more to SEO than just creating backlinks; they are simply one component of an effective SEO strategy. In fact, there are more essential things to focus on if you want to create a website that will rank well in Google. These include:

Technical SEO: A process of optimizing the infrastructure of your website for the crawling and indexing of search engines. This deals with your website’s technical components, such as sitemaps, page speed, and site navigation. If done well, search engines will access, crawl, interpret, and index your site without complications.

On-Page SEO: The method of optimizing pages of your website for specific keywords to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic from search engines. On-page SEO relates to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized. 

Off-Page SEO: Related to techniques you can use to improve a website’s position on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). At its core, Off-Page SEO is the method of promoting your website to rank higher on a search results page. 

The More Backlinks You Have, the Higher You Rank

As always, quality over quantity! A single high-quality backlink is worth more than thousands of low-quality backlinks. Spammy websites linking to your pages won’t carry the same weight as a link from a trusted, authoritative website or top industry publication. 

Similarly, having unique backlinks has more bearing on your website’s SEO than having tons of backlinks from the same few sites. 100 links from 100 different websites will rank you higher than a handful of websites linking you 1,000 times. 

Link Context Doesn’t Matter

Not all links are equal. Google rewards and gives the most significant authority to backlinks from a site that’s relevant to your content. Let’s say that you run a site about gardening. Several gardening blogs and home and garden magazines are linking to your site. Search engines will register those highly relevant backlinks and give your site’s search engine rankings a boost. But if, say, a nightclub is linking to your gardening site for some reason, search engines will find the connection irrelevant and the backlink won’t give your site a bump in the search results at all. And while there is no penalty for having too many “good” backlinks, having too many poor quality or irrelevant backlinks will prove detrimental to your SEO efforts.

Additionally, if your site is backlinked in a way that enhances a user’s experience rather than manipulates search engines, you’ll notice your ranks get a boost. “Editorial links” in blog posts and news articles that are intended to help readers find out more information or buy a recommended product are rewarded by search engines. If your website is linked in such a way, you might notice an increase in online traffic and a higher search engine rank.

Buying Backlinks Boosts Your Rankings Fast

Those backlink-buying schemes that promise higher rankings on Google should be completely disregarded. Buying links is a direct violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and getting caught penalizes your website. The penalty? Your search engine rank will plummet, and the money you spent trying to climb those ranks will have been wasted. Even if Google doesn’t catch you in the act, most companies asking for money in exchange for backlinks to your site will most likely link your content to irrelevant or spam pages, which could hurt your rankings more than help, anyways.

You Can’t Ask for Links

You might have heard that you should never ask people directly to link to your site. It might have never even crossed your mind that you could ask for links. But you absolutely can! Asking for links is a great way to get them, but it is crucial to do it the right way. As long as you are genuine in your request and don’t come across as being “spammy,” you’re in the clear. For example, if you notice a broken link in someone’s article or blog post that could be replaced by content that lives on your site, you can send an email to the writer. Politely inform them of the broken link and suggest it be replaced with your relevant content. Situations like this can be a win-win: you get a worthwhile backlink and more eyes on your site, and the journalist or blogger can continue to service their readers!

Guest Posting for Link Building No Longer Helps

Guest posting is a great way to generate backlinks to your site, but it matters where your posts go and what they are about. For years, spammers and those that were trying to build backlinks exclusively to increase their amount would create content irrelevant to the site to which they were backlinking, or they’d share backlinked content to random sites with no real domain authority. However, writing guest articles for quality websites relevant to your site’s content and adding a backlink to your site in your byline is a fantastic way to generate high-quality backlinks for your site. 

Backlinks Are Forever

No, just because a site linked to you once does not mean that that link will exist forever. This is both good and bad news for your site. The bad news? Any backlink from a “good” website with a high domain authority or high relevance to your content could swap out your link for someone else’s at any time. That could lead to your site’s rankings taking a bit of a hit.

But the good news? “Toxic backlinks” can be removed, too! Toxic backlinks are links that are hurting your website’s search engine rankings. They typically come from low-quality or suspicious websites (often the kinds of sites you’ll get linked to if you are buying backlinks). There are backlink audit tools available online that can help you review your backlinks, identify toxic links, and generate and submit a list of the toxic links you’d like to disavow to Google. If you know your site isn’t ranking well, auditing and clearing toxic backlinks from your site may help. 

Fully understanding the use of backlinks in your SEO strategy can be tricky, and numerous other factors can increase your website’s ranking on search engines like Google. Contact the experts at TOTAL Advertising to help you improve your SEO strategy in the right ways.

The marketing industry is constantly changing, which makes it difficult to know the best way to reach your target audience through the digital clutter. As the new year starts, it is the perfect time to evaluate your business’ marketing strategies and figure out how to break through the digital clutter in 2022. Here are the top 5 trends you should consider while creating your digital marketing strategy this year.

Mobile-First Content

To break through the clutter in this digital age, it is important to craft content that fits the platforms your audience is drawn to and adjust the tone to fit the specified platform. As phones become the most used technology to surf the web and make online purchases, it is important to ensure your website automatically adapts to the size of the mobile device. The best way to do this is to design the site around what it would look like on the mobile device to ensure the site’s quality is not surrendered to meet the needs of the consumer.

Bite-Size Content

Content is still king, but there is no need to do a long post every day. With an average attention span of about 8 seconds, consumers are spending less time on individual posts. This means businesses need to create high-quality and unique content that gets to the point fast. Content experiencing the most success on social media are short interactive captions and short-form videos (TikTok and Instagram Reels). Google is also showing a preference in short-form content delivered in real-time.

Own Your Audience On Social Media

Today’s social media audience is highly fragmented across various platforms. Each platform has a specific tone that must be utilized in the content to reach your audience most effectively. Along with tone, each post must be personalized to your audience and their interest as a result of society becoming immune to hard selling tactics. According to a recent study, 72% of respondents viewed personalization as “highly important” for marketing content coming from brands.

Build On Brand Value

The goal for brands has shifted from acquisition to retention. As consumers become more aware of the negative effects that can come from social media, they are looking for brands with values they can trust inorder to form a connection . They want to support a brand that reflects their views on society. They want a brand they can create a personal relationship with. Publishing a message that connects with your consumers will captivate their attention, and bring them back for years to come.

AI marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing how marketers receive data about their consumers’ preferences to optimize their digital marketing plans. Businesses are using the automation process to increase efficiency and profitability. With Google killing the “cookie” in 2022, AI will become a wonderful way to target your customers by their internet usage and preferences.

Do you feel overwhelmed and need help kickstarting your 2022 digital marketing plan? Call the experts at TOTAL Advertising. TOTAL is a full-service advertising and digital marketing agency with a team of marketing specialists ready to help your business reach your audience and achieve success.

The design industry is changing at a rapid pace, which means logos will date fast. If your company has not updated its logo in a few years or since it was established, it is time to consider an update. Check out our last blog for a full guide on how to determine if it is time for a logo redesign.

If you are getting ready to redesign or refresh your logo, you should now the most important rules to follow to ensure your logo appeals to your target audience and doesn’t date fast.

Design Rules To Follow When Updating Your Logo

Here are our top rules to follow as you redesign your logo.

Keep It Simple and Look At Long Term
Your company already has an established look and reputation. You should show confidence in who your company is and what it offers. Do not add too many elements because this can make it difficult to decipher, especially on digital platforms where the majority of your company’s assets will be viewed.

Make An Impact
Your logo should be memorable. Do not settle for something that won’t stand out. Your logo is not worth much if people cannot remember it.

Color Palette
Colors can create psychological connection and provoke emotions in your customers. Look at your company’s current colors. Evaluate whether they project the image you desire. Also consider combinations of two colors that compliment each other. Do competitor research to help evaluate whether they’re working with the brand image your looking to project

Typography
The typefaces in your logo should make it easy for customers to read your company’s message. If the typeface makes text difficult to read, it can deflect possible consumers and contradict the goal for the rebranding.

Pick The Right Format
There are four primary formats utilized by designers when creating a logo.

Wordmark/wordform logos are a specific design utilized with the written name of a brand or product. Examples of these type of logos are eBay, Google, and Jeep.

Letterform logos are comprised of a couple of letters. The letters do not form a word, but are representative of the company. Popular logos that utilize this style include ABC, NASA, and IBM.

Pictorial logos are illustrated with symbols that have recognizable items. They are icons that can be recognized as part of a brand on its own. Companies that utilize this type of logo include Apple, Twitter, and Target.

Abstract logos are a form of pictorial logos that tend to not be recognizable. They are designed to provide a symbolic meaning relating to your brand. Examples of this format include BP, Pepsi, and Adidas.

Things To Avoid For Design
While designing your new logo, there are certain things you can do to ensure it doesn’t have to happen for a while.

The top thing to avoid is making your logo too trendy. Logos date fast due to the rapidly changing design world. If you are too trendy, you will most likely have to change it in the next few years.

Do not make it too different from the original logo. Even though you are aiming for a new logo, it should still connect to the past logo in some way. The less drastic of a change the easier it will be to avoid confusion among your existing customers.

Do not try to add an element just for the sake of adding it. The more you add to your logo, the messier it will look. Logos should be simple, don’t make it more complicated.

Once your new logo is done, do not compare it to the old version. The new logo should reflect your company’s current message. If you try to critique and edit the new logo based on the old design, you will most likely revert the efforts you just made.

If you need help starting the redesign process, contact the experts at TOTAL Advertising. Our branding specialists can help you define your company’s personality and promise in a logo. Contact us today to get started on your next logo.

A logo is a simple symbol or design adopted by a company to identify its products and/or services while leaving a lasting impression. As industries evolve, the initial values and mission of your company when choosing the initial logo have changed. To keep everything consistent, it is important to consider either a logo redesign or refresh.

A redesign is a dramatic change in your company’s logo, and rebooting it. If you decide to pursue a logo redesign, your company is looking to portray a new message and change the creative branding assets including colors and font.

A refresh consists of small changes to your company’s logo. The majority of changes are small tweaks that are necessary for a modern look/design or to stay consistent with your evolved message.

Is It Time To Update Your Logo?

A logo redesign can be a big task. It is something your company must be committed to inorder to produce the best results. If you are uncertain if a redesign is the right choice for you, there are a few things to consider.

Has your business expanded/changed?- This includes a new product line, more employees, or purchasing new offices. If your company is considering an expansion, it may be time to consider updating your logo.

Are you speaking to a new audience? – Refreshing your brand is an important aspect to expanding into a new market. When the logo is updated, it will become more modern and allow you to connect with a newer/younger audience while maintaining your established loyal customer-base.

Have your brand’s values/mission changed? – A logo should always reflect the values and mission of your company. Over time, your company’s values and mission are bound to change to reflect the evolution of your company’s personality during its operation. To reflect these changes, your logo should be updated. If it is not changed, audiences will see a discrepancy/mismatch between what your company offers and the image being projected.

Is your logo dated? – Design elements change over time. It is important to ensure your logo reflects these changes to continue to be in the same category/scope as your competition.

Things To Consider When You Start To Rebrand/Redesign

Once you have decided it is time to change your logo, it is important to evaluate what elements of your current one need to be changed. Some elements to consider in this evaluation include colors, style, letter capitalization, and the strength of correlation to your brand. It is also good to compare it to your competition. This will help you see what they are doing and what is needed to make your company stand out from the crowd. Also consider what elements of your current logo and your competitors’ logo are connecting with customers and how it resonates with the audience. What parts best inform them about your company?

This evaluation can be done via various research methods. The best methods to use include surveys and focus groups.

Following your evaluation, you may be more excited to make these logo changes. However, don’t rush into it. You want to make subtle changes while slowly updating it. This allows you to stay up-to-date with design trends.

Remember, your logo’s design for your audience’s eyes. It is important to remain consistent with your company’s values and mission.

After You Update Your Logo

Once you have finalized your company’s new logo it is time to release it. The best way to start is setting an announcement date where you will do a formal announcement highlighting the new design. Upon the formal announcement you should update any areas it currently is. These locations include your company’s website, social media platforms, email signatures, business stationary, and employee materials.

If you need help starting the redesign process, contact the experts at TOTAL Advertising. Our branding specialists can help you define your company’s personality and promise in a logo. Contact us today to get started on your next logo.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website to make it easy to find on search engines like Google. The industry has changed at a rapid rate over the years, making it difficult to know the best strategies to optimize your website, but some strategies that once made a difference no longer help. Learn our list of things that don’t matter when it comes to improving your search rankings.

Age of the Website

The age of your website and the reputation of the site will not affect where it ranks in SEO. The most important thing considered by Google is whether the content exposed meets the user’s hopes for the website when clicking on it. Google will reward any meaningful traffic, sales and signals that may show authority of the site, but it doesn’t affect where it ranks for SEO.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords can help boost traffic to your site, but this does not equal an increased SEO ranking. Good paid keyword campaigns have been shown to boost traffic to a website, however the engagement on the site may be low or have a high bounce rate. This can negatively impact your SEO ranking. The goal with any site visit, when it comes to SEO rankings, is to have users actively clicking on pages throughout the site. If the data shows otherwise, utilizing Google AdWords is counterproductive in your SEO strategy.

Keyword Stuffing Meta Descriptions

Don’t keyword stuff your meta descriptions. Keyword stuffing – an overload of keywords – never benefits a website and its search rankings. Keyword stuffing is when a brand “stuffs” a webpage with the same targeted term with the hope of increasing its ranking on search engines. However, keyword stuffing creates an awful user experience – especially in meta descriptions.

Meta descriptions tell search engines what topics can be found on your website. It is the snippets of text found during search results. Its intent is to offer snippets that educate and engage with visitors. The copy should make the site more compelling with the hopes of the user clicking the link provided. When executed correctly, the copy can be optimized and decrease bounce rate – which will only benefit your site and its SEO rankings.

Image Alt Text Keywords

Keywords in our image’s alt text won’t directly affect rankings. An image’s alt text is copy written within the code of an image on a webpage. In most cases, an image’s alt text is a redundant aspect. The biggest issue with this keyword usage can negatively impact user experience. If the image doesn’t load properly for a user, due to slow internet or browser issues, the alt text will display. Depending on the number of keywords used in the image’s alt text, the user’s experience may be affected and cause them to click off the site sooner due to “glitches”. The best way to optimize your image is by adding the best keywords to the image’s title text. This will also result in better image SEO rankings.

Likes, Shares, and ReTweets

Google does not care where a website is shared or how it is promoted to potential visitors. Google only evaluates the actual website and how it shares information about user experience – either positive or negative. Your post could be shared with 10 people on Twitter or 500 people on Facebook, but it doesn’t matter. It only matters if those individuals visit your websites and are active within it.

There are numerous factors that can increase your website’s SEO ranking on Google. It is best to focus your time utilizing other SEO strategies that will produce results. To get the best results, contact us to help. Let the pros at TOTAL Advertising craft a plan that will have your website heading for the top of any relevant search.