If you think seasonal advertising is all about the holiday shopper, think again. The summer season can actually help you promote your business, especially if you're in a field related to the changing temperatures, like a garden center or an HVAC company. No matter what your business, if you experience seasonal highs and lows, here are some tips to help you capitalize on the season's trends.

Sponsor the Weather

Whether you're advertising on TV or online, running an ad around a forecast means you've got the attention of an audience interested in what's happening outside. As the temperatures rise, so will interest in products like frozen yogurt shops, tanning beds and air conditioners. A recent article in Marketing Land shows that some 50 percent of consumers research purchases on computers, while a majority (67 percent), still buy in-store. In other words, the path to purchase is complex. Linking your brand with a consumer who is already interested in a core aspect of your business gets you over the hurdle of distraction.

More than ever, customers are calling local businesses directly from searches, without ever visiting a company's website. For SMBs, it's easier than ever to use call tracking not only to monitor this surge, but also to connect online and offline worlds and get a better return from investments.

But before answering the questions "How does call tracking work?" and "What can it do for my business?" it's important to understand what it is.

What Is Call Tracking?

Call tracking simply means monitoring your business's incoming phone calls. With call-to-action buttons easily incorporated into digital marketing campaigns, particularly SEM, it's simple to collect a great deal of information. Without this technology, however, it wouldn't illuminate your offline campaigns — or help you monitor customers who dial rather than click to call. Thus, you might assume a particular campaign isn't working, and you could be making a costly mistake.

With so many digital marketing channels at your disposal — paid ads, organic search, email, blogs and social media, just to name a few — it's easy to lose track of what's working and where there's room for improvement. That's where a careful media audit can be of service. You can do an audit of your digital marketing to gather up and analyze all of your data coming from different sources, and then use that information to guide strategy and decision making.

Here's a quick guide to help you start your media audit off on the right foot.

You have to consider many variables when planning even a single digital ad: type of ad, visual elements, accompanying text, audience targeting, landing page composition, marketing channel and so on. When you're busy plotting the perfect combination of these factors, it's easy to forget another crucial aspect of advertising campaign planning: ad frequency.

Frequency is simply the number of times a customer will see your digital advertisement. While it might seem like an afterthought or something to figure out after you launch the campaign, frequency has huge implications on not only the success of an ad, but also on the audience's perception of your brand. If improperly managed, frequency can be the reason that ads don't deliver optimal returns or backfire altogether and estrange consumers who might otherwise be interested in your brand.

We're back with our second episode of "Ask the Experts," our new video blog series where we sit down with CMG Local Solutions' digital marketing experts to ask them some of the questions we hear from advertisers around the country every day.  

In this episode, we talk about setting and measuring objectives for digital marketing campaigns. It's short, but packs a big punch (of information, of course). Take a look. 

Though the text of your call-to-action phrase is very important, getting the design just right is also crucial for marketers looking to increase conversions. It might not seem like details such as color, page placement and font could directly influence consumer behavior, but marketers who take a little bit of time to do some design testing and research can enhance the effectiveness of their call-to-action and actually boost conversions.

1. Inspire Action With Color

Research reported on by the Better Business Bureau found that color can have a huge effect on conversions, with one study finding that bold colors like orange and red can actually increase conversion rates by over 32 and 20 percent, respectively. Of course, practicality is important here, and obviously, you shouldn't go crazy turning your entire website red and orange in an effort to boost consumer action. Something you might want to do, however, is look for ways to add orange or red accents to your design, and use complementary colors to make sure calls-to-action stand out.

Converting competitors' customers into your own is an art form. Beyond being the best at what you do, you need to beat the competition at their own game. If you want your business to grow, you must constantly be seeking new opportunities. It's only logical that the most effective place to seek out those opportunities is among users who are already inclined to purchase your products and services. As the information economy evolves, there are several highly effective strategies for nabbing the competition's audiences.

Bidding on Competitors' Brand Keywords

One strategy involves going right to the source — include your competition's brand name in your pay-per-click ad campaign. You may have seen this plan in action when you're searching for a particular store or item and another brand name pops up. The challenge, however, is to keep your quality score high. Consumers looking for Best Buy may not be happy to see Bob's Computer Services pop up, and search engines will rank your ads and site lower for that. But for new businesses, or in markets where there is brand confusion, this can be a highly effective technique.

Earlier this year, Ad Age proclaimed, "ROI Is Dead." It's certainly true that the digital age has given rise to many more tools measuring ad engagement and tracking consumer behavior, so it makes sense to create new metrics. But where to start? The sheer number of variables — Are your customers using mobile or desktop? Are they on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook? — makes for a daunting list of factors to consider. It's tough to know what really constitutes ad engagement in this complex new marketing world.

The call-to-action is a huge component of many different digital marketing strategies. Considering the long, winding path consumers can take to an online conversion, CTAs have tremendous utility: They can make tangible progress on the consumer path to purchase, sending traffic further down the funnel.

But effective CTAs aren't just growing on trees. Too often, marketers write them as an afterthought. But calls-to-action are a very specific piece of content targeting a very specific goal. As such, they need to be carefully developed and placed in a position where they can thrive. Here are some simple mistakes that undercut calls-to-action, as well as some basic solutions.

Small businesses often lament the fact that they're at a disadvantage against bigger brands, which not only have larger marketing budgets, but can afford to offer much lower prices. But local businesses still have their own attractions, including a focus on quality and a commitment to their communities.

Small Business Saturday has emerged as a smart means of raising awareness about the value of shopping local, as noted by Marketing Land. The event, which comes on the heels of Black Friday, encourages consumers to spend their money wisely with businesses that reinvest that money in their local communities. This national retail day depends on the entire small business industry to promote it for their mutual benefit. Local businesses need the support of their communities, and an annual day dedicated to this relationship can give businesses a big boost. Here are some effective digital strategies for raising awareness of the event and driving traffic to your stores on Small Business Saturday.