A new year means a new opportunity to make 2018 the best year yet. For many businesses, that also means a website makeover may be on the horizon. While not every business needs (or has the budget) to completely redo their website, there are things that you can do to give your website a digital face lift in the new year. Here are six of our favorite website additions and changes that you can make right away to improve your online presence.

We've all got plenty of competition, both direct and indirect. In order to get a leg up on our competition, it's important to understand where the 'low hanging fruit' is within the market. As the digital landscape has grown, it has actually gotten easier to skip through some of the growing pains behind new campaigns and marketing in general.

Marketing has changed. The sales process has changed. Consumers have changed. In order to reach your potential customers and really get them into your funnel so that you can nurture them into customers, intrusive outbound marketing just doesn't work anymore.

The best marketing campaigns of the past year all have one thing in common - they all did much more than just promote their brand.

Did you know that when you generate a lead online they are already over half way to their purchasing decision? According to research, 57% of their decision is already made. 

UPDATED September 22nd, 2017.

Creating great content is what separates businesses on social media. Do you like seeing sales pitches with every single post? HECK NO. We want to see interesting, engaging, and fun content that relates to us. The companies that figure that out and deliver on that are the businesses that see the value and benefit of a great social media content creation strategy. Like we talked about in Social Media Content Creation: The 80/20 Rule, we recommend focusing 80% of your efforts on creating engaging content and only 20% on sales material.

Finding great content is the hardest part. Let's take a look at eleven resources that will help you create, develop, and share great content on all of your social media pages.

Want to know why people say "content is king" when they talk about marketing? It's estimated that 95% of consumers look for a business online before making a purchasing decision. Your online content is the first thing they'll see, well, hopefully it's your content and not a competitor's.

If you've read much of our content, you know that we're big believers in high value content and some of the most powerful pieces of high value content are white papers. White papers are great tools to generate new leads and educate your prospects, but they have to be valuable and well written. So today we're going to teach you how to write a white paper.

If you're anything like me, you LOVE your phone and you're always on the lookout for the next best app whether it's in productivity, business, learning, gaming, finance, or anything else. I download far too many apps (wait...is that a thing?) and I've created my list of the 7 best apps that you need to download right now. Of course, I left off the obvious ones like Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Spotify, Credit Karma, and Uber because if you don't have these apps, you probably still have a flip phone. It's cool...no judgment here.

One of our favorite quotes (which happens to also be on our website homepage) is from HubSpot Co-Founder Brian Halligan (@bhalligan), "You can't out-spend the giants. But you can out-think, out-teach, and out-help them."