From boardrooms to blogs, mainstream marketers are fixated on “Content marketing” and why it’s so important these days. In reality, savvy advertisers, PR pros, brand evangelists, SEOs, in-house and agencies have been leveraging content’s intrinsic power since the dawn of organized marketing activities. Wielded properly in the hands of masters, there are few tactics more […]
When an investment in social media marketing is considered by executives, it’s common to hear objections like “prove to me we can make money” or “where’s the ROI?”, regardless of whether the organization is an extremely large business or a mom and pop shop. Such classic concerns actually make a ton of sense. Social media […]
Marketers have been advising strategy and tactics by “search” keyword research for well over a decade. We pretty much all know by now that keyword “inventory” has various tails including search frequency (number of searches), seasonality (when), cost-per-paid-click, CPM (cost per thousand impressions), SEO attainability, geo-location and user-intent (query objective). All these years later search […]
The old has become new again. Back in the day, when setting budgets for mailing paper things in bulk to prospective customers, marketers asked themselves crucial questions. “Will the ROI of this direct response mail piece justify the investment of paper, printing, postage and fulfillment?” If not, “is the objective a more cosmic value, in […]
Aggressive marketers have been infiltrating competitors’ camps since long before Odysseus sought covert entrance to Troy by way of the fabled Trojan horse. Search and social media marketing tools elevated competitive intelligence to the level of industrial espionage, in the hands of the unscrupulous. That said, somewhere to the left of that ethical line in […]
On Christmas Eve, December 24th, Facebook garnered 7.56% of United States internet traffic market share, whereas Google had 7.54%. Subsequently on Christmas Day, December 25th, Facebook’s piece of pie ballooned to a whopping 7.81% while Google dropped a bit to 7.51%. The day after Christmas, December 26, Google regained its stature as most visited site […]
Sometimes it’s difficult for non-marketers to reasonably gauge the overall success of branding programs, because they have neither dashboard nor perspective to use as benchmarks. This post suggests easy-to-identify measurements to serve as general indications of the marketing department’s success in building a brand (henceforth referred to as [brand]) to top of mind with the […]
These days it’s rare to find a brand, blogger or CEO that does not monitor his or her reputation by Google Alert or other hair trigger mechanism. Training your feed’s content-creation team to exploit this new reality for systematic blogger outreach can yield terrific results over time with very little added cost. Read on to […]
In today’s real-time brand management world, separate teams often control strategy and channel tactics for SEO, PPC, public relations, online reputation management and social media. In many cases, however, out-of-box thinking and creative silo-breaking to cross traditional boundaries can yield sweet marketing fruit.
When naming products, it’s always prudent to investigate potential online marketing challenges and pitfalls before launch. Failure to do so may preemptively damage your marketing team’s ability to cast an appropriate branding net. Traditionally due diligence surrounding the naming process involved trademark search, category and creative considerations. Now that’s no longer enough. Crucial naming decisions […]
Marketers nearly all agree that properly published recurrent content feeds, pumped into social channels and Google’s index, serve SEO, branding and public relations stakeholders alike. Social media channels are huge: 300 million people use Facebook and Twitter alone. Figuring out how to share content and be a good citizen in these networks is easy. Techniques […]
No discussion of social media’s effect on organic search results is complete without considering Facebook’s well-laid play for “search” domination, in a closed-loop-members-only end run around Google’s public algorithmic crawl. With 250 million users, the recent purchase of friendFeed and newly offered ability to search at macro and/or granular users’ network levels, Facebook’s internal community-search […]
On Monday I had the distinct pleasure of speaking to a crowd of about 250 local search marketers at SEMpdx Searchfest in Portland. The audience reaction to my session, entitled “The Dark Side of Reputation Management,” highlighting a stark reality out there in the corporate trenches. While nearly every hand in the room enthusiastically shot […]