For many people and businesses, 2017 is a year to start fresh and work on new possibilities and functions designed to help your company grow. At JM2. we're also excited to start 2017 on the right foot as we are always looking at new ways to bring more to our clients and work on new ways to help them and their business grow. For me, 2017 presents an opportunity to engage with our clients even more as we help them achieve their goals for the year. As someone who's job is to speak with clients both old and new, this direction is something that fills me with endless possibilities of what we can do together. Out of all the things we are doing in 2017, here is what I'm most excited about.

What an interesting question our title is for our article today. Our business reputation is on the line and we want, and need, to convey trust to our current and potential customer's. All our businesses try to show trust with our physical locations by showing our customers we care and are concerned for them. Online it is not any different. We show trust in our actions. These actions are not just the words we write to show who we are as a company but in how we act online. In today's world, we need to show trust with "The Green Lock".

In the past year, we focused on growth from purchasing our own building in downtown Valparaiso Indiana, adding to our core team to now have not only graphic designers, content writers, and programmers but to also have an entire department for customer service, sales, social media, photography and videography. Many of these changes happened not because we were looking for them but the culture of our company made it happen.

In November, a long-lost friend (not really lost) started talking over email. We had been emailing back and forth for a week about his frustrations in getting his website to convert from visitors to customers. I will start out this person is not a customer as he is happy with his current provider and is also a close friend of his. He wanted to be heard about his struggles, what he is currently doing, and think of ways to improve his situation in the upcoming months.

As we talk to more people about taking advantage of generating leads from their website into opportunities we move to the talk of branding and marketing. We find that many people believe they are the same thing rather than two distinct items. Branding and marketing are not the same and each has a very important role that is used collaboratively together in your organization. Using marketing and branding together you can achieve a set of goals. In this article, we will define clearly what branding and marketing is and how each one used collaboratively can be used to grow your business.

This week and next week will be two weeks of predictions from industry leaders and those in the digital marketing field. For some these will be guesses while others are more educated guesses with some hard research behind them. For the past three years, we have predicted trends in the digital marketing space. This year is more exciting than the past as we have a large variety of sources we tapped into, cancelled many of our old marketing methods that produced no results, as well as tests we did internally to make this year's set of predictions. We are going to only write about what we see as the top 5 items.

Each year we go through and establish the core fundamentals for the coming year for not only ourselves but each of our social media maintenance plan clients. When a digital marketing campaign is built, you create directions for your business to build your brand and market to your current and future customers. These are plans and not written in stone as the further we look out the more we know things will change over the time. Whether you are a fortune 500 company in the Chicagoland area or are in a growing community like Merrillville Indiana your time spent on your digital marketing campaigns will benefit your business.

Every business has a story and they want to be heard. Whether you are in a small town like Chesterton Indiana, a college town like Valparaiso Indiana, or a big city like Chicago Illinois. You want your story told and to be heard by others. To get your story heard you need to market to those looking around you. In this post, we delve into more on being found locally.

Being found locally for any small business is crucial. As of May 2015, Google acknowledged that search on mobile devices in ten counties, including the United States, surpassed that of desktop searches. With this revelation of how important mobile search is it is more important than ever that your business is truly prepared for local search. Searching on mobile uses geographic (location based) search to determine the most relevant information.

The internet has been insecure for far too long. Google with the largest browser share is doing something about it. The question is how many people will listen. Based on the size of Google I would say that the Google Chrome Security team will achieve this much-needed additional security.