Insights
Inside 5 Horizons: The Transformative Power of Our Unique Strategist Role
Account Managers vs. Strategists—what’s the difference? Hear from our Strategists about their unique role and the importance of strategy for digital marketing.
Read MoreSummer Social Media Ideas for Higher Education Institutions
When the campus starts looking emptier than usual, higher ed marketers can use our six ideas to stay on top of their summer social media strategy.
Read MoreHow Do Podcast Ads Work?
Have you ever considered advertising on podcasts? Learn about the different types of podcast ads and the benefits of adding podcasts to your marketing mix.
Read MoreHow to Establish a Successful SEO Strategy
Read the final blog in our Demystifying SEO series to learn our top three recommendations for establishing an effective SEO strategy.
Read MoreThe Future of SEO: 2024 SEO Trends & Beyond
Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, zero-click searches, and more—read our latest predictions on what might be on the horizon for SEO in 2024 and beyond.
Read MoreHow AI and SEO Interact
How do you use AI for SEO? Is AI going to take over SEO? Get answers to these questions and find out how to use AI in your SEO strategy.
Read MoreGet to Know the Googlebot
Familiarize yourself with Google crawlers, spiders, and fetchers—all of which are interchangeable terms for the same software.
Read MoreBite-Sized SEO for a Limited Budget
Discover some steps you can take to improve your website’s SEO when a more expensive strategy isn’t an option.
Read MoreExploring New Features at Adobe MAX
Discover what our creative team learned at the 2023 Adobe MAX conference.
Read MoreAdvertising on LinkedIn in 2024
LinkedIn offers a variety of advertising formats, each containing unique audience targeting features. Learn how to utilize LinkedIn advertising to boost your business in 2024.
Read MoreUnlocking SEO Potential at MozCon
Explore the top three hottest topics that our technology team learned at MozCon 2023.
Read MoreCelebrating Our 2023 Wins + Planning for Our 2024 Successes
2023 brought 12 months of growth for our team. Here is a look back at our wins as we plan for our 2024 successes.
Read MoreHow to Increase Return Site Visitors
Search engines view repeat site visitors as a sign that your site provides valuable, trustworthy information. How do you increase return visitors to your website? Learn how.
Read MoreWhy SEO Isn’t One-and-Done
SEO is an ongoing process––a strategy that requires continuous attention, tweaking, and improvement. Here’s why SEO isn’t one and done.
Read MoreThe Benefits of Focusing Your Strategy on Local SEO
Local SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps increase search result visibility for local businesses. Here are the benefits of implementing local SEO.
Read MoreDemystifying SEO
Do a deep dive into the complexities of SEO and how you can begin implementing best practices into your own marketing plan.
Read MoreContent Marketing is Modern Marketing Evolved
Content Marketing World (CMW) is a must-attend event for the writers on our creative team. The hottest topics fell into three distinct categories: AI, SEO, and video content.
Read MoreHow to Write Effective Alt Text
How to write it effective alternative text for the people with visual impairments and for the search engines.
Read MoreAlt Text Best Practices
Images and infographics are great at displaying information in eye-catching designs, but they may be isolating a large audience without the proper parameters in place.
Read MoreThreads App: Do You Need to Use It?
If you or your business aren’t on Threads yet, the question remains: should you be? Here are a few things to consider.
Read MoreGoogle’s Changes to FAQ and HowTo Results: What Website Owners Need to Know
As of September 2023, Google reduced the visibility of FAQ and HowTo information in its search results, prioritizing websites primarily in the government and health sectors.
Read MoreWhy We Love Conferences: How Conferences Can Benefit Your Business
Five reasons why we think conferences are a successful investment for business development and employee growth–and the five conferences we love the most.
Read More10 Things We’ve Discovered Running a Digital Marketing Agency in 10 Years of Business
This September, 5 Horizons is excited to celebrate 10 years of business! With a decade of experience, we’ve compiled a list of our top 10 lessons that have kept our company strong.
Read MoreInside 5 Horizons: 3 Tips for Efficient Project Management
Hear from Amelia Morrill, our Director of Project Management & Operations, as she shares her top suggestions for managing, implementing, and completing successful projects. Managing people and workflow involves a balance of skills. Sticking to a schedule, keeping projects under budget, and communicating across teams are just a few of the responsibilities project managers have […]
Read MoreInside 5 Horizons: Internal Linking Best Practices
Our Tech Team’s guide for identifying and implementing effective internal links in your website. A well-built and maintained website makes it easy for users to find what they’re looking for. Internal links are critical for guiding navigation, building authority, and increasing keyword visibility. This guide explores important considerations for identifying and implementing effective internal links. […]
Read MoreUsing HTML5 for Animated Banner Ads
GIF vs HTML5—which one do our web developers use to create banners and why? Animated banner ads can be created in GIF or HTML5 formats. What’s the difference between the two? A GIF file consists of a series of frames that play in a sequence, creating a looping animation. HTML5 banners, on the other hand, […]
Read MoreInstagram Reels: Best Practices Guide
Our Social Team has put together this best practices guide to help our clients create the best Instagram Reels to promote their business and grow their brand.
Read MoreInside 5 Horizons: It’s Organic! Growing Your Social Media Audience
Hear from our Lead Copywriter, Abigail Egan, as she discusses her favorite tips for growing social media audiences organically.
Read MoreArtificial Intelligence in Marketing
Our team predicts marketing to become one of the industries that will see a lot of AI-driven change. Here are three examples of exciting possibilities for incorporating AI into marketing.
Read MoreGoogle Slides Presentation Tips
Giving a Google Slides Presentation in a Google Meet, while still seeing your speaker notes and your audience, can be tricky.
Read MoreWhat is A/B Testing and How to Use It?
A beginner guide to understanding A/B testing (also known as “split testing”) and how to use it to achieve results for your marketing campaigns.
Read MoreInside 5 Horizons: A/B Testing on LinkedIn
A/B testing is an essential experiment for determining which form of content performs better on a platform and drives higher engagement and results. Here is what our Director of Performance and Analytics has discovered through experimenting with LinkedIn A/B testing.
Read MoreBest Practices for Creating Effective Content Posts
Optimizing your web pages for specific keywords can increase page ranking and boost traffic, but it may not be enough to achieve your goals. Strategically written content pieces can help improve keyword visibility through internal links to the page.
Read MoreLaugh at Work Week
At 5 Horizons, we embrace humor and fun every day to keep stress low and morale high. Read our top three tips for cultivating a workspace full of laughter.
Read MoreWhat Does it Mean to be a Google Premier Partner for 2023?
5 Horizons has been named a Google Premier Partner for 2023. Many of our clients come to us for Google Ads assistance. Becoming a Google Premier Partner takes a lot of time and hard work.
Read MoreHow to Make Google Calendar Meeting Guests Optional
In a company as busy as ours, Google Calendars can fill up fast. To lighten someone’s meeting schedule, you can mark a guest as “optional.” Learn how in our tech tip.
Read MoreInside 5 Horizons: 2023 Design Tips
Nostalgia, dark mode, and loud color palettes. This months Inside 5 Horizons post includes stories and perspectives from our design team.
Read More7 LinkedIn Updates Coming in 2023
LinkedIn recently announced seven new features coming in 2023, most of them focusing on improving the platform’s accessibility and optimizing content creation.
Read MoreMake Your Google Slides Presentation Pop
Make your visual presentation stand out to retain your audience’s attention and share your information in a digestible and easy-to-follow manner with six easy steps.
Read MoreInside 5 Horizons: First In-Person Company Outing as a Remote Employee
The Inside 5 Horizons series includes stories and perspectives from our amazing team. Get a glimpse into our company culture each month by hearing from the unique voices of our copywriters, strategists, project managers, and more.
Read MoreFostering a Fun Work Environment
There are a number of things any employee or employer can do to make the work experience—remote or in-person—more fun and enjoyable. Learn how!
Read MoreNew Year, New Look
2022 was a year of growth and learning at 5 Horizons. Hear from the owners Pat & Ben as they reflect on the last 12 months of growth and look toward the year ahead.
Read MoreHow to Build a Direct Response Enrollment Marketing Strategy
This October our team traveled to New York for the NCMPR D1 Conference and shared our insights on building a direct response enrollment marketing strategy at community colleges.
Read MoreSEO Strategies That Make a Big Impact
Download our free reference guide for higher page ranking and better user experience.
Read MoreHow to Use QR Codes to Enhance Your Marketing Strategy
With the rebirth of QR codes, your business can (and should) leverage the QR tool to enhance your marketing and advertising. Diversify your marketing strategy by using QR codes with our 3 tips.
Read MoreUnderstanding How QR Codes Have Evolved Over Time
Quick Response codes, known simply as “QR codes,” were first invented in 1994 by an automotive company. Today the use of QR codes is to merge the physical and digital worlds together.
Read MoreClock’s Ticking
Though you may be late to the TikTok game, here are four ways your educational institution can leverage the TikTok platform’s success to achieve your marketing goals.
Read MoreWhen Third-Party Cookies Become Obsolete
The world of digital advertising as we know it is about to change. McKinsey & Company reports that starting in mid-2023, Google’s Chrome browser is expected to block third-party cookies, which are already blocked in Safari and Firefox.
Read MoreFacebook Text Overlay: Is the 20% Rule Still Relevant in 2022?
At 5 Horizons we value curiosity and expand our industry knowledge by keeping up with the latest marketing trends and testing the relevance of the old ones.
Read MoreHow to Strengthen Higher Education Marketing: Part 2
While virtual events and digital marketing continue to be popular strategies for capturing student leads, striking a balance between traditional marketing and fresher trends is still highly important.
Read MoreHow to Strengthen Higher Education Marketing: Part 1
As experts in higher ed marketing, we compiled a rundown of the marketing trends and recommendations on how you can enhance your strategy in the upcoming calendar year.
Read MoreSmall Steps to Grow Social
Growing your audience organically takes time, but here are five small steps you can take along the way to boost consistent growth and engagement.
Read MoreHow Rewards and Loyalty Programs Affect Marketing
Businesses that prioritize rewards and loyalty programs in their marketing efforts are more likely to not only find but also retain customers in the current abundant online retail market.
Read MoreSay Hello to 5 Horizons
We’ve refreshed our look and we’re incredibly excited to share it with you.
Read More7 Things You Must Do to Update Your Facebook Ad Campaigns for Apple iOS 14
Here are seven steps advertisers should take to update their Facebook Ad campaigns for the iOS 14 update.
Read MoreVerifying Your Facebook Domain
This post walks-through the steps to verifying a website domain on Facebook.
Read MoreApple’s iOS 14 Operating System’s Effects on User Data
In June of 2020, Apple made announcements at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) about product and policy changes coming in early 2021 that would affect the user data shared with advertisers.
Read MoreKeeping Your Team Together in a Time of COVID
We Were Lucky Friday, March 13th was supposed to be a normal work-from-Starbucks day for me. As an agency principal and father of three, every once in a while it’s nice to have a…
Read MoreCOVID Changed Higher Education Overnight
How 5HD Helped a Titan of Graduate Education Adapt to the New Normal COVID-19 brought monumental challenges to the higher education sector. As campuses and universities shut their doors and sent their communities home, a fervent need for exclusively digital communication quickly arose. Our client, the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), faced an uphill […]
Read MoreBlack Lives Matter — Let’s Educate Ourselves
As a part of our effort to support #BlackLivesMatter by listening, learning, and acting, our team at 5HD has gathered the following list of resources. We have found these books, blogs, stories, and websites useful. We hope you do too, and ask you to actively participate in the cause of justice.
Read MoreBeyond the Rainbow: How Our Social Strategy is Impacting Our Corporate Culture
At the beginning of Pride Month, rainbows 🌈 started showing up all over social media. And we’ll be honest, we asked ourselves whether we should be doing that too. LBGTQ rights are very close to home for us. Regardless of whether any of the initials apply to us personally or to our friends or loved […]
Read MoreMaster the Marketing Funnel: How Scheduling Appointments Can Improve Conversion
Excited by the opportunities to fill the marketing funnel with new leads, marketing teams in considered purchase industries have spent the past decade exponentially enhancing their lead generation techniques. For many, this has meant significant lead growth, better looking KPIs, and lots of high fives in marketing meetings. But if that avalanche of new leads […]
Read More5 Ways to Leverage Matched Audiences
The power of digital marketing is its ability to maximize the efficiency of marketing spend with highly-sophisticated targeting. Yet not enough marketers or agencies are taking advantage of the most efficient target, their own database.
Read MoreFacebook Ad Specs Cheat Sheet
Every social media channel has its limits, character limits that is, not to mention image sizes, resolution, and other requirements. Keep your Facebook ads compliant with our interactive Facebook Ad Specs Cheat Sheet or download our infographic to keep everything you need to know at your fingertips.
Read MoreHow To Measure Marketing ROI
One of the longtime benefits of digital marketing is you can measure ROI from almost every angle. Are you sure your budget is being spent to its fullest? See our checklist to learn how you can make sure your campaigns are measuring up.
Read MoreTime for Marketers to Ramp Up Their Use of Programmatic Advertising
Six years after issuing our first programmatic insertion order and five years after investing in our own in-house platform, we’re still amazed by the number of marketers who either don’t utilize or don’t fully understand programmatic advertising.
Read MoreDon’t Get Stuck in Groundhog Day – Online Advertising Needs Fresh Creative
Groundhog Day isn’t just the day Punxsutawney Phil tells us when Spring is coming. It’s also a great (in our opinion) 1993 comedy featuring Bill Murray as a weather reporter keeps reliving the same day over and over and over again until he gets things right. When it comes to online advertising, sometimes brands can […]
Read MoreClicks Don’t Matter….Post-View Conversions Do
At a recent marketing conference we gave a presentation about the emergence of Programmatic Advertising. During our introduction, we asked the group by a show of hands, how many people had clicked on a banner ad in the last 30 days. No one raised their hand, and that is exactly what we expected.
Read More4 Reasons Online Video is a Must for Your Media Mix
1. What’s More Effective than a :30 second Video Ad? An Online Video Ad! With online video you can target who sees your message. Traditional TV is great for reaching a wide audience efficiently, but wouldn’t it be better to show your commercial only to your target audience, limiting wasted impressions. Plus 1 in 4 […]
Read More6 Strategies to Lower Cost Per Click
Overall Graduate and Continuing Education keyword costs are going up, but there are strategies you or your search management partner can use to lower your Cost Per Click.
Read MoreDigital Marketing Glossary
Online Display Advertisements shown on a web page or mobile app. Ad formats include text, static, animated, video and social. Programmatic Advertising Advertising campaigns that are automatically deployed according to a set of rules applied by software and algorithms. RTB (Real Time Bidding) The practice of bidding on ad impressions the moment users arrive at […]
Read More5 Must Haves for a Successful Online Campaign Launch
1. Have a Privacy Policy If you are going to ask for information from a prospect, make sure you have a proper Privacy Policy in place. This will tell the prospect what you intend to do with their information, what tracking you have in place on your website, and how to opt-out of being a […]
Read MoreFocus On Digital Yields 200% Inquiry Boost
When Wentworth’s College of Professional and Continuing Education (CPCE) decided to expand its student base by growing its degree programs, they asked us to evaluate their existing marketing plan and develop efficient, effective strategies to grow enrollment. Primary goals included increasing the number of leads within the existing budget and effectively target the appropriate candidates.
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