Online Marketing Blog

In one month my new book Optimize will be available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com and many other booksellers on and offline. It’s been one heck of a journey so far and I’m really looking forward to sharing the key concepts and insights from the book with Search Marketing, Public Relations and Content Marketing professionals all over the world in the coming months.

So many people have reached out to me, unsolicited to offer help promoting the book, to review it and to have me speak at their event and I am truly amazed at what a super community we have with TopRank and our blog. The next few months will be an Optimize speaking extravaganza of sorts and I’m looking forward to meeting readers of our blog, fans, friends and followers on the social web and other likeminded “optimize and socialize” advocates for content marketing.

When you ask an online marketer what frustrates them the most about reaching customers and prospects online you’re likely to hear the following:

• Finding a way to connect with their audience
• Moving prospects through the buying cycle
• Growing their network and lists

Marketers often talk about their prospects being overloaded with too much information which can lead to an indecisive audience, causing marketers to miss projections and sales goals.  Lets face the facts, consumers are engaging online.  Recent studies show that over 53% of active social networkers follow a brand.  If there are that many people actively interacting and engaging with brands online what changes can be made to reach and engage target audiences?

Sign #1 – The Sounds of Silence – No One is Commenting On Our Blog

Google+ For Business

This infographic was recently shared by Chris Brogan on his website and provides some valuable insight into using Google+ for business.  Highlights include:

• Why Google+ is the place to be
• Sharing is the key
• Taking your business page to the next level

“Introducing Google Play:  All your entertainment, anywhere you go”  Google is looking to eliminate the hassle of syncing across multiple devices and computers.  Google Play is a digital entertainment destination where users can find everything from music, to books and movies.  The best part about Google Play?  It’s entirely cloud based so everything will always be available.  Via Google Blog.

One of the key objectives and performance metrics for business blogging is to grow the network of people that find, interact with and share blog content.  An optimized approach to growing a blog community relies on an understanding of who the audience is and what their information goals are, not just what the brand wants to achieve. Many companies start out blogging about their own products and services, company news and essentially the kinds of things that belong in a corporate newsroom.

An ego-centric approach to business blogging misses the opportunity to create meaningful connections with people empowered to publish, share, refer and buy. Blogging is a publishing platform that allows both one to one and one to many communications so content should take advantage of those engagement opportunities by thinking about content that’s interesting from the reader’s perspective.

Working in the marketing department for any sized organization takes organization, dedication, innovation, and standardization.  BIA/Kelsey estimates that digital marketing spending among small and midsize companies will reach $16.6 billion annually by 2015. As online marketing budgets grow there is more room for testing and implementing search and social media tools that will help streamline processes and monitor results.

With all the moving pieces involved in creating a successful online marketing program, it is easy to get caught up in the thrill of testing and purchasing new products and software tools meant to make your life easier. Believe me, I know about this first hand.

Over the past few years I’ve experienced selecting tools the right way, and the wrong way.  I hope that my experience will help you better select your own approach to finding new processes and tools that will make your own social media and content marketing efforts more successful.

Sometimes it feels like I spend more time on the road than in Minnesota, but the Twin Cities has a fine digital marketing community that includes advertising, direct marketing, interactive, B2B, search, PR and communications groups that serve the needs of marketing and communications professionals in the region.

Networking locally can be incredibly important if you’re new to the area, want to connect with other professionals in your field or are in search of professional development and job opportunities. Below are a list of Minnesota (primarily Minneapolis & St. Paul) marketing and communications organizations that offer a range of opportunities for networking, education and industry involvement.

What does it take to go viral?

This recent video from Salesforce.com covers what it takes for your content to spread as well as the formula for success.  The video also includes a checklist marketers can use to increase their likelihood of going viral.

This Week in Online Marketing News

“Getting Socially Optimized with Mobile Marketing” As mobile marketing continues to expand marketers are still searching for the best way to reach their audience through the development of applications for smart phones, ads, and mobile optimized websites.  This article provides some insight into the benefits and challenges of a mobile marketing strategy. Via BtoB Magazine.

View from our "boat" in Barcelona during Search Congress

I’m about to go on stage at the Search Congress conference in Barcelona and I thought I’d share the presentation that I’ll be giving. Don’t worry, only the title page is in Spanish but all the photos are from my last trip to Barcelona.

As a complement to the growing amount of Content and Social Media focused advice being given by traditional SEOs, this presentation is in line with our approach at TopRank to customer-centric content optimization.

Instead of focusing solely on keywords as inspiration for optimization, this presentation provides a framework and example of how a customer centric approach would segment customer data into personas and then map keywords, topics and content types according to each persona’s journey through the buying cycle.

Optimize For Customer Experience

When people learn I’ve recently written a book called Optimize they usually ask what it’s about. I say it’s about optimizing customer discovery and engagement with content. The response I usually get is something like, “Oh, cool. I thought it was about SEO.”

Well, in a way optimizing content and customer experiences is SEO. That’s because what most of the better SEOs practice today is really more about the promise of marketing: attracting, engaging and inspiring customers to buy.

Whether it’s Google, Social Networks, Online News Media, Digital Assets or any other channel/format for content – best practices optimization is in effect for smart companies that want an advantage.

At TopRank Online Marketing, we work with clients in many different industries each facing a unique set of problems.  One of the industries we provide online consulting for regularly is software.  Be it network monitoring, healthcare system and hospital software, email marketing, project management, or B2C software, promoting technology solutions has been a part of our expertise since TopRank was founded over 10 years ago.

Software development continues to become even more valuable in today’s social, mobile and overall digital world as companies begin to migrate what were once offline industries into SaaS and cloud based services.  It wasn’t too long ago that recruiting, sales, and marketing relied heavily on meeting in person or over the phone. With advancements in software and devices, organizations are now able to accomplish the same if not better results at a drastically reduced cost.

How do you measure your online marketing performance? What are your goals, your KPIs and how do you measure ROI? These are pretty common questions in the world of social media marketing.

As companies evolve their people, process and technology to attract, engage and inspire customers through content, I think attention on a broader view of the value that is created warrants consideration.

Many companies that approach my agency ask about the ROI of specific tactics as if they are gambling money with a direct rate of return. If there are agencies contributing to that perspective amongst clients side marketers, I wish they would stop. It’s not helping anyone. Here’s why:

The History of Content Marketing

From the dawn of time people with things to sell have been using stories to attract, engage, and retain customers ala #optimize. The infographic above from the Content Marketing Institute takes us all the way through the evolution of content marketing and provides some meaningful insight into what companies have done in the past to generate results. You might learn a thing a two, plus it’s a great read.

 ”6 Start-up Tips From the World’s Biggest Tech Companies”  Every company has to start somewhere.  Famous companies such as Google, HP, and Microsoft were built on a set of core principals including creating long term customer relationships and listening to feedback.  This post provides tips from some of the largest companies in world on how to get through the start up phase of your business. Via Inc.