JUMP START Blog and Online Community

Think of the last time you created or attempted to create a marketing strategy.

Chances are, you spent a lot of time thinking about what your boss wanted, talking to other stakeholders within your organization and perhaps even looking at your competitors' online marketing tactics to see how you could compete. But the key to creating a really solid strategy is simple and is frequently overlooked by the majority of online marketers: understand your users and deliver what they need!

Find out what you've missed in the world of content marketing for the week ending September 4th. These are a few of this week's top stories, hand-picked by the team at Flair Interactive Services.

Find out what you've missed in the world of content marketing for the week ending August 21st. These are a few of this week's top stories, hand-picked by the team at Flair Interactive Services.

I always encourage my clients to make analytics a priority in their weekly (or daily) workload. I'll often help clients set up Google Analytics, Hubspot or other analytics tools to ensure that they have access to important data about how their site, content and campaigns are performing.

The problem is, most marketers don't commit to learning analytics basics or making analytics a regular priority in their busy workdays. I've heard over and over again, "I don't understand analytics!" or "Who has time to look at reports all day long?". And here's where it gets interesting...if you're just looking at reports or if you don't understand what you're looking at, then I can guarantee that you won't get ANYTHING out of analytics!

I talk to a lot of marketers each week, and most of them have at least one thing in common: they're frustrated because they have to use a TON of tools to complete their day-to-day marketing responsibilities.

There are a zillion third-party tools on the market for email marketing, social media, landing pages, forms, analytics, reporting, customer relationship management, ecommerce and many others. And if you're like most other modern marketers, you have a hard time keeping up with the updates, user interfaces, training and login information for all of those disparate tools.

Often, smaller businesses try to save money by cobbling together low-cost tools and painfully trying hit-or-miss ways to integrate them together, even if they're not designed to work with one another. Sometimes it works and sometimes results are less than desirable.

In my "Choosing a Web Content Management System" ebook, which is available on Amazon, I talk about common mistakes that people make when choosing and implementing a new content management system such as Sharepoint, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal or Hubspot.

By popular demand, I'm including the first five items in my Top 10 CMS Mistakes list below. Are you doing any of these?

Wishing you a happy Valentine's Day filled with love and chocolate (lots of chocolate!).

Want to attract high-quality traffic that converts? Follow these five steps and you'll be seeing more traffic and higher conversions in no time. Remember that consistency and frequency are KEY!

Our biweekly "Ask Flair!" Q&A sessions allow you to ask members of the Flair team questions about online marketing in a no-pressure, live group environment. Lisa Kirschner, Flair's founder and managing director, was the moderator for today's session.