Do your landing pages convert visitors at a good rate? Or do visitors back out almost as soon as they arrive? If you’re unsatisfied with the performance of your landing pages, it’s probably because they’re lacking one or more of the following key elements.

Is your brand dead in the water? Are your sales declining? If so, these could be symptoms that it’s time for your brand to get a makeover. Refreshing your brand can help you reach new customers, excite your existing customer base, and gain an edge over the competition.

But how can you be sure it’s time for a brand refresh? Here are 6 signs to look for

Print brochures are still a powerful marketing tool when used properly. A well-designed brochure can educate potential clients on your offerings and encourage them to take action to become a paying customer.

The key phrase? Well designed. If you don’t design your brochure correctly, you risk missing out on all the benefits of brochure design. Here are 7 mistakes you need to avoid when making your brochure.

When visitors come to your website, do they have to wait while it loads? If so, you’re probably losing a lot of visitors. The truth is today’s internet users are more impatient than ever before. Some studies show the average visitor only gives your website about 8 seconds before they decide to back out. If your site is loading the whole time, guess what? They’ll back out before they even see your message.
This means you have to work to make sure your website loads quickly. You need to find ways to speed up load time without sacrificing the look or quality of your site. How can you do it?

Here are 5 tips for speeding up the load time of your website.

What  good is a business website if it doesn’t convert visitors? If visitors  just land on the page and leave without taking any action, a website  hasn’t really done its job. In short, conversion is all that really  matters in the end. It’s the clearest measurement of a site’s worth and  effectiveness.

When  it comes to conversion, much of a website’s success or failure is  reliant upon the designer’s work. If the designer has crafted the site  correctly, it will be much likelier to convert at a successful rate.

Here are 5 simple things designers can do to improve conversion rates.

Whether you’re looking to save a few bucks or you just want to get a website up as quickly as possible, you might be tempted to use a template design for your website. Sure, templates might be cheap or even free, but when you use them, there’s a strong chance you’re killing your web presence right from the beginning. Here are 5 reasons you should avoid template web design.

If visitors leave your website almost as soon as they land on it, it’s a strong indication that you’ve made some web design mistakes that are hampering usability and keeping visitors from moving forward. A high bounce rate spells disaster for any online business, costing them customers and quality leads.

What are some of the biggest web design no-no’s that lead to high bounce rates? Here are some of the most common offenses. Add your own mistakes to this list by leaving a comment.

We like to think that content is king, and to some extent, that’s true. But great content can’t overcome a poor blog design. The design is the thing that sucks visitors in. It creates the first impression. If your design sucks, chances are people will back out of your blog.

Thankfully, you don’t have to be some genius WordPress theme designer to create a good looking blog. You just need to avoid these mistakes, and you should be headed in the right direction.

Is your small business thinking about launching a website? Good idea. Are you thinking about throwing together some template website or having your nephew design it for you? Bad idea.

Just having a website up isn’t enough. Not any old site design will do. Your website is the face of your brand. If it’s average or, worse yet, ugly, you’re making a bad first impression with potential customers. This can cost you business and do serious damage to your brand. That’s why you need to hire a professional Houston web design company to handle your website. Here are just 5 of the benefits you can experience when letting the pros build your website.

While the basic fundamentals of marketing certainly apply to healthcare, there is no doubt this category is its own unique beast. To have a truly successful medical marketing campaign, it's essential to have a compelling message. Your creative needs to be relevant, unique, memorable, and defendable. Just as important is where to place that message. The channels you choose must be efficient and targeted, while also being cost-effective and measurable. This is why we think Internet marketing is going to be the way medical organizations are marketing in the future. It's something we're focusing on more in our web marketing efforts here in Houston.

I received a great direct mail piece from marketing strategist Michele Pariza Wacek, who wrote an interesting article about common flubs business owners make with their marketing campaigns and sent it through the mail. It was essentially a blog post, delivered by post. Not something we've ever thought to do at our Internet marketing office here in Houston. It was actually pretty cool. According to Michele, most unsuccessful campaigns can often be traced back to one of these three missteps. Has your team committed any of these marketing cardinal sins?

1) Your Target Market is Too Broad

Good marketers identify a niche and pursue that one until they've saturated that small market. Then, and only then, do they pursue another one. Even if you sell a product that everyone can use, you'll wear yourself out and waste your money trying to sell to everyone. Pursuing everyone leads to "media waste," reaching people you don't really want or need to reach. Narrow it down however you can — gender, age, ZIP code, household income or people who support nonprofits, buy green products, or enjoy art festivals — to focus your marketing campaign.

They've been the buzzwords for a while now: Social media. Online branding. If you're reading this article, you're aware of these words, and have probably used them yourself. You know that if you have a brand, and you want people to know about it quickly, online branding is the way to go. Interleado's Peter Cullen wrote a great article recently about how the difference between online and offline branding is speed. The amount of time it takes to reach 50 million users/viewers online is a blip compared to gaining the same audience with more traditional methods like TV or radio. However, just because your message is displayed in front of more eyeballs does NOT necessarily mean that you're influencing the person attached to those eyeballs.

The next time someone at your company balks at the effectiveness of social media, throw out this stat: According to a new study by Chadwich Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies, 60% of Facebook fans and 79% percent of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands after becoming a fan or follower. They're also more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.

Imagine you're just arriving at a party. You reach the front door, ring the doorbell and...no one answers. You let yourself in and try to find your friend, the hostess. She is no where to be found. Instead, you find a small group of people huddled around a sad excuse for a party spread. You throw your coat on the pile in the corner. Your hostess has been tied up in conversation with one guest for a while now, and you find it hard to mingle with the other party-goers. You decide showing your face is enough, and awkwardly slip out of the party without saying goodbye.

For many businesses, company blogs are like that proverbial tree in the forest -- if a business writes one, and no one is there to read it, does it really matter? Here are some social media marketing tools that will easily help get more eyeballs on your material!

1) LinkedIn

Providing your blog link to the LinkedIn network is a quick and painless way to drive traffic from your profile to your blog. In addition, you can also join groups related to your industry and promote recent blog entries in their forums. LinkedIn groups are a great way to meet industry peers and potential clients, but remember to use them for conversation as well as promotion to avoid coming off as "spammy." Another approach is to spend some time browsing the "Q&A" area. You might see a question that can be answered with a blog post you've already written. Answer the question fully and provide the link for support.