I ask every service business owner I work with the same question: “What’s working in your marketing right now?” Most of them pause. Then they say something like, “Instagram is pretty good, I think.” Or “We get most of our clients from referrals.” When I follow up with “How do Read more…
Every service-based business owner I’ve met in the last 20 years has the same story. They started with their network. That worked for a while. When the network dried up, someone told them to get on social media. They posted for a few weeks, maybe a few months. Nothing happened. Read more…
This blog has been home to marketing education for years. If you have been reading since the early days of The Digital Engine, you already know the methodology. You know the framework. You have seen the case studies, the walkthroughs, and the practitioner-first philosophy that underpins everything we publish here. Read more…
You recorded a property walkthrough last Tuesday. You posted it on Instagram. It got 60 views. Then it disappeared into the archive. That video was worth a lot more than one Instagram post. The problem is not the content — the problem is the pipeline. Most real estate agents capture Read more…
I’m going to give you my honest take on this. The conventional answers are wrong. You’ll hear people say small businesses fail at marketing because they don’t have a budget. Or they don’t post consistently. Or they don’t understand their target audience. These are symptoms. They’re not the disease. The Read more…
If you’re a real estate agent, you already know the marketing problem. You need to post consistently on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. You need to write blog posts that show up in Google. You need to send emails to your list. You need to do all of this while actually Read more…
Thinking about a digital marketing certificate? Here’s an honest analysis of costs, ROI, and what employers really value, from free Google certs to $4,000 bootcamps.
AI website builders promise instant sites, but should you learn WordPress instead? Here’s the honest comparison nobody’s writing, with real data on what each can (and can’t) do.
This week students complete their 8-week live practicum using the Digital Engine curriculum. Over the past 13 weeks, students have created their own inbound digital marketing campaign, complete with a newly built website with blogs, social media posts, emails, search engine optimization with keyword analysis, multiple analytic platform audits, and Read more…
The last two weeks students have audited their campaigns and made strategic decisions to improve performance in any of the four categorical areas where they may be weak. Students examine 16 different variables through their InGen Analytics report to determine where they may need to spend extra time to improve Read more…
Over the last two weeks, students have learned how to audit their content, social media, and email campaigns for strengths and weakness. Auditing this information will help them to better understand whether their strategic initiatives are working as they intended. To begin their content analysis, students use CoSchedule to examine Read more…
This week we are all about MailChimp. The past two weeks have been focused on digital communication effectiveness around website and social media content. This week we continue that discussion with email. As we say here at the Digital Engine, email is the “heartbeat” of your inbound marketing campaign. Staying Read more…
Last week our students focused on the “how” of good digital strategy, learning how to create and curate interesting content. This week, we turn our focus to the “where” of digital communication effectiveness by teaching social media strategy. Even though in the planning stage students selected their primary digital communication Read more…
This week celebrated our inbound marketing campaign kickoff. The students have been working very hard over the last three weeks to prepare for this week. They have completed their setup instructions for both their mechanical and aesthetic builds. Likewise, they have all of their goal funnels setup, tested them to Read more…
Last week, students were instructed to set up as much of the aesthetics of their website as possible. Using our step-by-step instructions, students typically take twice as long in setting up the look and feel of their website verses the website mechanics. Students find this creative process fun and tantalizing Read more…
Last week, students were instructed to set up the mechanics of their website to make it operate as the hub of their inbound marketing campaign. With our step-by-step instructions, this process can take about 5-6 hours to complete. And while our aesthetic instructions are half as long, constructing the look Read more…
After purchasing their web assets and getting their WordPress website installed, this week students begin two parallel paths of getting ready for their campaign kickoff. One of these paths includes three weeks of website setup to be completed outside of class. The second path is three weeks of content planning Read more…
After deciding on a topic last week and developing a brand positioning statement and tagline, this week students purchased their digital assets. This includes students leasing their website URL from ICANN for one year and purchasing monthly web hosting and branded email plans. Using these three assets, students will build Read more…
When it comes time for students to pick their practicum topic for the semester, I have found it is important to help them consider a few different ideas before selecting. First, this project is so much better for students if they complete it on their own, rather than in groups. Read more…
This week my students were introduced to the principles of inbound marketing, and in this domain, CONTENT IS KING! Therefore, this first week is spent teaching them about inbound marketing and their project. Through this process, I help them conceptualize the need for inbound marketing, since most business aren’t currently Read more…
This fall 2023 semester, we are going to show you behind the curtain of our Higher Education course here at the Digital Engine. Our courseware is designed to teach students how to manage an inbound marketing campaign from conceptualization to actual lead generation. This is so important in the real Read more…
When it comes to creating and managing websites, WordPress has emerged as the leading choice for individuals and businesses alike. In fact, HubSpot reports that WordPress is used by 43.2% of all websites on the Internet, up from 39.5% in 2021, and is used by 65.2% of all websites that Read more…
We have an exciting announcement to make! As requested by our students, more instruction on the aesthetic design of your site has been added to our courseware and curriculum. If you have a current membership at the Digital Engine, then you can access our new instruction set here. Included in Read more…
In today’s highly competitive digital landscape, companies strive to gain a competitive edge and establish a strong online presence. Inbound organic digital marketing, as highlighted by the Digital Marketing Institute, has emerged as a crucial tool to reach and engage with target audiences effectively. While paid digital marketing offers immediate Read more…
Is there a better example of using the creativity of Generative AI in the classroom than this video? Instead of providing a review of the AI created debate between Bill Gates and Socrates, we wanted to demonstrate how both ChatGPT and Midjourney can be used to create unique and innovative Read more…
DALL-E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs. OpenAI, DALL-E’s developer, has found that it has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, Read more…
In the ever-evolving digital landscape, data has become the lifeblood of businesses. It provides invaluable insights into customer behavior, website performance, and marketing strategies. As businesses strive to stay competitive, they must harness the power of data analytics to make informed decisions. Google Analytics has long been a go-to platform Read more…
A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about artificial intelligence and what marketing education could possibly look like in a decade of exponential growth of technology. If you missed the debate on promise vs peril, click here. Nevertheless, it’s common knowledge that the exponential growth of technology is being powered Read more…
In the popular press book, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media, author José Van Dijck makes a compelling argument about the dialectical nature and co-evolution of social media. That is, social media capitalizes on the inter-connectedness between humans and machines. She contends that connectedness is human Read more…
In our instruction on content design, The Digital Engine teaches course participants how to create a content matrix. This matrix is critically important as it becomes the building blocks for your rolling editorial calendar, which is the life blood of your inbound marketing campaign. Unlike paid digital, inbound marketing is Read more…
Coleman Alford worked efficiently and effectively to build creative content to earn his DE Certification this semester. For as long as Coleman can remember, he has loved film, especially in the theater. To him, there is no better feeling than the excitement and emotional response he feels when watching a Read more…
When course participants complete the 15-week higher education course or the continuing ed “go-at-your-own-pace” course, then he or she will be awarded a blockchain-secure Certificate of Achievement. Here at the Digital Engine, we have teamed up with Accredible at credential.net to provide a block-chain secure digital certification and badge that Read more…
Inbound marketing is the process of establishing a website “hub” that attracts visitors naturally to a company’s content through search engines, blogging, and social media. This approach attracts an audience of content consumers to the service through functional content on a blog or social media channel that is relevant to Read more…
A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one marketer’s product as distinct from that of other marketers[i]. For example, let’s consider your options when you go to a convenience store to purchase a bottle of water. When you view the options above as Read more…
Digital Marketing and Social Media has changed the marketing environment in ways that traditional marketers could have never imagined just a short time ago. It has rapidly provided a mechanism to communicate on a one-to-one level, allowing marketers to tailor specific messages and content towards a fine-tuned segment of customers, Read more…