Online Marketing Blog

If you’re old enough to remember the classic movie, Cool Hand Luke, there’s a moment when a rebellious prisoner played by a young Paul Newman refuses to “go along” with prison rules despite some grueling punishment. The warden, played by Strother Martin, made the famous observation about a lack of communication.

The failure to communicate is probably the most important cause of failure with client and internet marketing consultant relationships. Everything from managing expectations to performance reporting are affected. One of the most common outcomes from a lack of communication in a consulting engagement is the failure to implement.

Photo Credit: Geoff Livingston - Flickr

[Note from Lee: The growing trend towards integration of marketing and communications disciplines has brought a tremendous demand for guidance and insight. I'm happy to say that my friends Geoff Livingston and Gini Dietrich have published a new book about just that. We rarely publish guest posts but the message of integration and optimization in this book blend perfectly with our core messages here.]

One of our favorite books to come out in a long while is Lee’s Optimize. We love the three discipline approach — content, search and social — to online marketing. Without integration across all marketing disciplines we fail to understand the customer experience.

We just published Marketing in the Round on a overarching integrated communications, traditional and new, and see online as the backbone for all marketing today, on or offline.

Are you optimizing your conference experience?

TopRank receives a lot of value from having me speak at conferences but you don’t have to be a speaker to realize a positive return from events. Small, large online or offline, there are numerous ways to optimize and maximize your return on conference involvment both in the short and long term.

If your company is considering whether to send you to events because of uncertain return or benefits, show them the following list.

In fact, if I were running a conference, I’d make sure these tips are shared with attendees, sponsors and speakers alike.

When you have a business that relies on attracting new business online the sheer volume of options can be confusing. Should offline advertising efforts transfer to online? Maybe email marketing? What about SEO or the hot topic, social media? So much focus is placed on tactics and channels, that a lot of misplaced digital marketing budget gets wasted or spent inefficiently.

To bring some clarity to the myriad online marketing options available, I think it’s worth marketers taking a holistic approach that starts with an essential understanding of goals and customers. Who are your best customers? Who are your worst? What do your best customers care about? What are their pain points and goals? While you’re answering those key questions, think about how your solutions meet the needs of your target audience and what stories you can tell to bring align those interests to a common goal.

If you’ve been involved with marketing on the web for 10 years or more, could you have imagined what the web looks like today back in 2002? Considering the changes over the past year between Google, Facebook, Pinterest and Mobile, looking ahead just 12 months can be a challenge.  The state of constant change requires an adaptable approach. One that involves a cyclical process of planning, implementation, scale and refinement.

During that process of continuous optimization, it’s important to take the temperature of trends for your specific target market as well as at a broad level. I’d like to use this post to take your general social media temperature when it comes to the most important social networks for business. This is a gut feeling check for how you perceive the list below of social media/network properties that companies are currently using for business purposes.

While I’ve been to Belgium the past week for the fine Fusion Marketing Experience, I decided to take a day trip to Paris yesterday since it was only 2 hours away by train. As you may know, I do a bit of traveling.

The quality of the experience, memories and the stories you get to tell after visiting other countries are usually the most meaningful. Sure “stuff” is fun to get, but how often do you think “I met too many cool people” vs. “I bought too many souvenirs”?

As I talk to other people about traveling (and online marketing), the spectrum of perspectives is pretty amazing. It’s just like the wide variety of perceptions towards optimization and social networking. For some people, both are simplified as checklists. Keyword list? Check. Take a picture of the Eiffel Tower? Check. But what did it mean?

The new book on internet marketing we’ve recently published, “Optimize“, has been very well received and I’ve been doing a number of interviews and speaking engagements (as you do) around it. One of the most common questions I hear concerns the challenges of implementing an integrated “optimized and socialized content marketing” approach within an organization.

This is a reasonable question, because while it makes sense that content, SEO and social media (as well as email, online PR and advertising) should work together, the challenge for many corporate marketers and communications professionals is how. That’s where a good approach and plan come in to play and Optimize is a blueprint for such a plan – in particular, when it comes to optimizing and socializing content. Here are a few key considerations for integrating these high impact online marketing tactics:

Link Building for Business Blogs Doesn't Need to Be Risky

As a key component of a hub and spoke online marketing strategy, blogs can be very effective for social media network engagement, online PR, customer service, and as search engine optimization assets. While there are numerous cases studies of business blogs (I like to think Online Marketing Blog is one) providing tremendous value, blogs are simply software tools and what you get out of them is in proportion to how well you know how to use them.  One of the common areas of lost opportunity with business blogs is link building.

In the search engine marketing world, effective online marketing comes down to surfacing keyword opportunities that reflect a demand for solutions (products/services). Content about those products is created and optimized to attract search traffic for popular and relevant keywords.

Niche products often suffer from a universe of keywords that have low popularity counts and that creates a challenge. Because in the world of SEO, accountability starts with driving more organic, non-branded search traffic to a company website. If there’s very little demand for the keyword phrases identified, it can be frustrating for all.

A common reaction to that frustration is to accuse the products, company or industry as being “boring”.  But here’s the thing:

How important is influence with online marketing? Most professionals would say influence is pretty important, especially when it comes to social media. The notion is that a few key people can spread an idea to their audiences and networks, causing a brand’s content to “go viral” or at least gain more substantial distribution than if the content were promoted to the every day social media Joe and Jane.

Pursuing the “big influencers” alone, is probably one of the biggest fallacies on the web.

Put aside the challenges how to find influencers and consider what “influencer” means. To me, it’s someone that has earned ongoing attention of an audience or community and the ability to motivate others to action. There’s often a disconnect between the appearance of influence and those in a position to act on it.

By now you may have heard that I’ve written a book called “Optimize“.  After months of writing and editing, it’s now the real deal and online orders just started shipping a few days ago.   I haven’t done a formal post talking about the book and so here are a few highlights.

Essentially, Optimize it’s a more holistic view of content and social media optimization than what you’ll often hear at events, read in other books and online.  So many optimization efforts are focused on chasing exploits and loopholes only to be shut down by search engine quality efforts. Why not focus on quality in the first place?

Last year we ran a poll to identify the top Internet Marketing blogs in the UK which ended up getting a little spicy.  There were over 3,000 votes cast (both human and bot) plus a ton of lively discussion (60+ comments). Many long time online marketing folks know of our famous BIGLIST of SEO blogs and so there was a lot of awareness and interest in getting on the UK list.

A lot has changed in the past year so I think it’s worth revisiting that list.

Blogs continue to represent highly effective content hubs for integrated SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing programs for all kinds of companies and industries, not just internet marketing. I’ve traveled to the UK many times and between my discussions with practitioners at conferences and the clients TopRank has in London, it’s clear that while there are many amazingly talented internet marketers in the UK, many companies are not as progressive in their approach.