Category Archives: Market

5 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company

I love the world of digital marketing and SEO. Love it. The strategies and tactics involved in this field are fun for me, and one of the best feelings you can experience is when you help a client succeed. It’s definitely something I’m passionate about, which makes what I’m about to write about all the […]

Change Your Narrative to Drive Better Lead Generation

Tl;dr - Get to know your audience / personas, then change your narrative to connect with people, not companies. Most B2B businesses approach marketing from a “we have a service/product to offer you, you should buy into us because of xyz…” perspective. I would go so far as to say that that 90% of the […]

10 Resources All New Digital Marketers Should Read

It’s an exciting time to be a marketer. At the time of the post, it is May, 2016, and digital marketing has never been more exciting. The power of content marketing, the constant growth of social media, big data and insights into SEO are all serving as the catalysts to growth for organizations all over […]

3 Free and Easy Ways to Make a Company Content Calendar

By now, I’d be pretty surprised if you haven’t heard the phrase “Content is King.” These three words are everywhere. While I could write an entire blog series on why the “content is king” phenomenon doesn’t paint the entire picture of SEO (context has never been more important), I thought that one of the most […]

How to Improve SEO for the Long Term

Tl;dr - 1. Forget specific rank positions. 2. Focus on topical optimization. 3. Rinse and Repeat. Search Engine Optimization / SEO is a fickle thing. You’ll find many SEO agencies suggesting different SEO strategies which have different timelines, tactics, costs, etc. attached to them. While using SEO is a good thing to help your business […]

10 Tools to Help You Manage Your Company’s Social Media

Like most marketers, I’m willing to bet that your daily to-do list is pretty full. Managing press releases, working on that new sales collateral, getting that email newsletter out…there’s a lot going on. All of these activities can make important marketing pieces, like social media management, take the backseat - and sometimes, get left on […]

A Quick Reference Guide for Marketing Metrics

One thing I’ve learned during my time in the agency world is that I am downright spoiled when it comes to data and tools. Since my job involves a heavy amount of research and strategy, I spend a lot of my time reviewing charts, graphs, dashboards, and spreadsheets (you can say I’m really starting to […]

7 SharpSpring Features Marketers Love

It seems that a necessary component of every successful marketer today is a love of tools. No, not hammers and hacksaws - I’m talking about software. We’re now at the point that there is a digital solution for nearly every need an in-house marketer may face. Email marketing, social media scheduling, content distribution, search engine […]

Why Your PPC Strategy Needs to Include Content

True story: About a year ago, I attended a digital marketing conference where I ended up sitting at a lunch table with a marketing manager for an outdoor equipment eCommerce company (they sell tents, hiking shoes, backpacks, etc.); We’ll call him Jim. After some small talk about how fantastic our sandwiches were, he started telling […]

Lead Generation Strategy 101: Using Your Website

“We need more leads.” Isn’t it funny how four simple words strung together this way can be the phrase of nightmares for in-house marketers? That’s because it often represents the schism often found between marketing and sales: sales wants more leads, and marketing wants sales to have a better close rate. Sound familiar? This all-too-common […]

Passion is Your Online Marketing Strategy

small businesses are looking for cost effective ways to rank higher on search engines like Google, driving traffic to their Web page without investing tons of money. here’s how. SEO I can’t lie, there’s more to rankings than passion. But you guessed that — there’s always more. Before we get to the way passion can […]

why does my website suck?

we have a website. what else do you want? three things for starters: Good design: mobile friendly, professional and cohesive, not confusing Good content: pointed, researched, persuasive, often blending informative facts and emotional storytelling A search engine optimization (SEO) strategy…done by a professional Investing in a good web developer can get you all of these […]

3 Sites You Need to Read Before Writing Your Own Content

Honing your web copy is a sink or swim proposition. Precision copy is the latest summit our industry has set its sights on. After all, SEO doesn’t convert, content does. It’s not just your static website content but social outlets too, email auto responders… everything. Some people would say copywriters are essentially social scientists. Compile the […]

Regal Wins Small Agency Award

Milwaukee’s Regal Creative Awarded with Silver Award for Website Design from AIVA International Davey Awards Milwaukee, WI (JANUARY 14, 2015) - Third Ward digital agency, Regal Creative, was selected from nearly 4,000 entries for a Silver Award for www.VICICapilli.com. The 2014 Davey Awards judged entries from across the US and around the world, and honored […]

digital strategy + UX: signs of accidental espionage

It is not uncommon for brands to unknowingly create jarring digital user experiences, which inadvertently send their hard won customers to their top competitors. Usually the culprit is a lack of integration (siloing) of sales and various marketing functions, which in the end leads to measuring KPI’s based on tasks instead of results. A study […]

empathy: the new currency converter

As a strategist, one of the most common issues clients request help with is increasing conversion. Essentially, they want to increase revenue. Don’t we all. The most common reason for conversion issues is rooted in a lack of empathy for their target audience. Every company has a wealth of expertise on what they do. They […]

social strategy: tapping unconscious behavior

As humans, we have the most complex social behavior of any living organism on earth. Our unconscious understanding of self preservation extends beyond ourselves, and physical survival requires the interdependence of a variety of groups for mutual aid and support. This includes coupling, friend and family systems, employment networks, neighborhoods, government agencies, and extends into […]

5 Steps to Prepare for the 2015 Mobile Search Shift

I’m about to age myself here, but I think it’s important to frame this up. When I was my daughter’s age, our phone was on the wall in the kitchen and it had a cord. Our phone “upgrade” was replacing the standard Ma-Bell cord with a super-long one, whereby allowing one to stretch around the […]

State of the Web Browser, Q3 2013

Web designers and front-end developers are very interested in the market share of the various web browsers. Not because we’re nerds, but because usage statistics dictate whether or not we need to design, and moreover, code, the web sites we create to support legacy web browsers. Once an old web browser’s usage percentage drops below […]