Scale

1. Use real photos- not just stock images. Put a human face on your company, and sell the skills and realness of the people who create your product. Your people with their talents and innovations are the value you are selling, and avoiding stock photos will help set you apart and add legitimacy.

Lifestyle and sports brands are selling more than a product, they are selling an experience. Whether their products are centered around a specific sport/activity, a vehicle, food, or clothing, these brands have the added challenge of trying to convey the experience of their product on a medium that can only interact with two of the user's senses.

Additionally, products sold by lifestyle and action sports brands are, generally speaking, not necessities. So it is extra important that they make an impact to their site visitors to lead them to a conversion.

Hear ye, hear ye! 

Tragic Media's brand-spankin, responsive, and beautiful new website is here! 

We are so excited to be able to show you the result of taking some time this summer to finally build a stunning website that fully shows off what our team is capable of. 

Despite some product owner driven scope-creep (ahem, Rich) we were just able to hit our summer deadline- not even taking into account the next 3 months of Indian summer that San Diego is famous for. No Rich, that doesn't mean we get to add features for another 2 months.... ;) 

Sales and marketing are brother and sister disciplines, and sometimes they fight like siblings, too. Believe it or not, many companies use different software platforms for their sales and marketing divisions. Sometimes, internal politics can keep marketing from sharing insights with sales, and vice versa.

Your sales and marketing teams are likely losing time and morale dealing with rote tasks that could be run using automation. Management may not have identified these opportunities, or management may not be aware of the marketing platform that can actually take advantage of it. Either way, your company's most valuable resource - creative manpower - is being lost in a sea of necessary evils.

Let's identify some of the most common opportunities for automation that you may be missing.

Converting leads to sales is essential to increase your profitability. However, when you have many leads and limited resources, it can be difficult to determine which leads should receive the most attention. If you focus on the wrong leads, you will be wasting resources on visitors that won't ever convert. One of the best ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your lead nurturing program is to develop a strong lead scoring system that helps you identify the strongest prospects so you can focus your resources on the right leads.

My company did not have the traditional start of most other agencies. I don’t have a background in sales or marketing, and I did not start a company to make the most money possible. I didn’t start Tragic with a big client contract to form the cornerstone of our sales, and I certainly did not start with a giant pile of investor money. Nonetheless, over the past 8 years I have been able to grow my freelance consulting career into a sleek digital technology company capable of delivering high-end, custom digital products built cheaper and to higher standards than businesses twice our size. 

Content marketing is king, and it will be for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, you don't need to be present for every step of your content creation or distribution - choosing the right automation tools is the key to optimizing productivity during the buyers journey.

The most important aspect to remember about modern content marketing is that it is now necessary at every stage of the sales funnel. Obviously this means a jump in production that most small companies would not be able to handle without automation.

Google's search-rank preferences towards pillar-based content, combined with the growing design trend of creating long easy-to-scroll web pages broken up by sections, has led to an increase in the need for highly configurable, yet expertly designed top-level landing pages. A top-level page is any page that is at the top of your website navigation, or is the top-level of a section, and contains child pages underneath it.

Your website is the hub of your business online and it has a threefold purpose: to define your brand, to generate an audience for your content, and to direct your audience to make purchases or become sales leads. Landing pages and gated content are two important and related pieces of a successful digital marketing strategy. These tools can be used to guide your audience through their buyer's journey and ultimately lead them to convert.