Online reviews are super important for local businesses, but which sites should you focus your efforts on? Source: Which Sites Should You Focus on for Reviews? – Whitespark Weekly – Whitespark

Content marketing has taken on a life of its own as a buzzword in our industry. With reduced organic reach over both search and many social channels, it’s never been more important to focus on promotion strategies that cut through the noise and get content discovered. Source: https://searchengineland.com/7-marketing-and-promotion-tactics-to-get-your-content-discovered-293734

Loyal customers are both your cheerleaders and bodyguards. Contributor Wesley Young shares six ways to boost local search results using customer loyalty. Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

via Customer loyalty: A key ingredient for successful local search results — blogsieve

Website usage in the US has stalled. And with at least 90% of the US adult population already using the internet, growth in website usage is unlikely to come from new users. New data from Adobe – showing a 2% drop in website visits between January 2015 and December 2017 – has the analysts arguing… Read More: The Battle for Website Visits is Increasingly Being Fought on Smartphones – Marketing Charts

“According to Brandmuscles’s 2018 State of Local Marketing Report which surveyed over 2,700 “dealers, agents, franchisees and distributors of national and global brands,” 64% said that the actual SMB owner executes all marketing efforts. Another 26% said marketing is a team effort but not anyone’s full-time job and 7% have a dedicated marketing professional on staff. Only 3% said they outsource marketing to an agency or vendor.

Based on this study, roughly 97% of SMBs execute some form of DIY marketing. Two years ago we discussed a survey of 1,000 SMBs that put this DIY figure around 71%. This suggests a significant increase, and the Brandmuscle study went on to say that the percentage of owners that execute all marketing efforts themselves went from 51% in 2017 to 64% this year.

While the data show an increase in DIY marketing in the SMB space, other data points indicate serious flaws with this approach. For example, Brandmuscle shared a stat from another study (not clear which study) that said 60% of SMBs do not know who owns their Google My Business listing. Additionally, the survey found 36% of SMBs aren’t sure if their website is mobile responsive.”

Source: Study: 97% of SMBs DIY Marketing, Most Don’t Get It