Tim Priebe's Blog, page 21

Your church should be on Facebook

Facebook is a valuable way to connect people to each other. Used well, it can help a church connect members with each other and with the leadership. Churches are sometimes wary of using Facebook and promoting it among their members, though.

Tips for businesses on LinkedIn

For organizations in the B2B world, as well as some in other areas, LinkedIn can be hugely beneficial. While it doesn't make sense for every business or nonprofits to invest resources in it, for many it does.

Here are some tips for organizations to utilize the platform.

Improve Your Team's Profiles

Just as your staff represent your organization in person, they're also representing it online. You want to make sure that they look their best, so your company or nonprofit looks its best!

Set asid...

Business blogging: pros and cons

Maybe you've considered creating a blog for your organization, but aren't sure if it's right for you or not. Sure, it can be helpful, but it's not a great fit for every business or nonprofit. It's not all rainbows and unicorns. Let's take a look at the pros and cons to having a blog.

First, here are three reasons it could be a good idea.

Pro 1: Website Visitors

Whether you've invested money, time, or both in setting up a website, it does you no good unless people actually visit it. Whether th...

Hide-and-seek email marketing

In a time where it’s a struggle to get people to read even the first few lines of an email, you’ve got to get creative if your emails are especially long.

Kathy Harms, Executive Director at Teen emPower!, has successfully implemented a sort of hide-and-seek to get her supporters to read through emails to get important information.

Teen emPower! is a non-profit founded by Kathy that’s dedicated to educating teens on their bodies, relationships and sexuality. In a state that has the second-high...

Three guiding principles for email marketing

Social media, search engine optimization, and other online marketing tools are good. But none of them match the effectiveness of email marketing. An email reaches your customer where he or she is always at – their inbox. And when you send information out to your customers, you’re sending it to people who are already interested in you.

Building your email newsletter is the second thing that you should do after building a website. And here are three guiding principles for email marketing you sh...

Sales vs. marketing

While I’m a little biased, I think online marketing is great. But too often, people get confused on the difference between sales and marketing. And you can lose sales if you don’t understand the difference.

The goal of marketing

Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time speaking and writing for nonprofits and companies that provide professional services. Often, I share the right order for your online marketing.

Spoiler alert: The last step is engagement. Which means it’s the whole goa...

Test driving new online marketing platforms

The world of social media platforms is constantly evolving. Platforms seem to go from obscurity to being used by major corporations in a matter of weeks, if not days.

The catch? Not all of those platforms are good for every organization. Sure, you don’t want to be left behind when one takes off. But you also don’t want to waste time and money on a platform that isn’t going to help.

To help you figure that out, here’s a guide for test-driving these online marketing platforms to see if they’re...

Top email clients in 2015

If you weren't aware, we here at T&S use MailChimp for our email newsletter, and the email newsletters of our clients. Typically, we recommend that people focus on two email statistics: Opens and Clicks for individual campaigns.

However, you can draw some interesting conclusions if you look at the email clients your subscribers are using. Fortunately, MailChimp makes that data super easy to access!

Let's take a look at some data for the email newsletters T&S runs, some conclusions we've drawn...

How to pick your blog topic

If you need help coming up with blogging topics, there are plenty of options. You can use Google Analytics, free blogging topic ebooks, or many other resources. But once you finish a brainstorming session and have a list of blog topics, how do you narrow that list down? How do you decide what’s worth blogging about, and what’s not?

We’ve developed a system here at T&S that helps us make that decision. Our blog scoring system takes into account three factors.

1. Benefit

How beneficial will thi...

Case Study: Sandler Training of Oklahoma

In many ways, the story is familiar. Mike Crandall, the owner of Sandler Training of Oklahoma, was trying to be a one man army when it came to his company’s digital presence. He struggled to manage all of the company’s social media accounts, newsletter and blog. Things weren’t going well.

Sound familiar? Let’s look at the issues that caused, and how we helped (and still help) Mike’s organization.

Problems

Simply put, Sandler wasn’t getting the type of online reach that the organization could....