Online Marketing Blog

You’re probably familiar with at least a few social media horror stories; those epic hate-bombing situations, where companies commit social suicide in one way or another and pay for it very publicly. One such company was Boners BBQ, who posted on their Facebook page a picture of a customer who had written an unfavorable Yelp review… and captioned it with a rant which included calling her horrible names and accusing her of not tipping the staff (see the full story by Scott Stratten at Unmarketing).

The fatal attraction I speak of is more insidious, less intentional, yet can chip away at your time and resources, effectively undermining your social efforts and hurting your ROI. Is your social content attracting the wrong type of attention?

For every social media, SEO or content marketing “expert” there are hundreds, if not thousands of smart business people that do not possess advanced knowledge in those areas. That’s not unreasonable, since running a business involves more than keeping up with the latest internet marketing best practices.

On this blog we often include the basics of search, social and content marketing because that’s where a lot of people need confidence and affirmation that they’re on the right track.  To support that approach, here are a series of questions my co-worker Miranda Miller shared with me as prep for an online radio show. Hopefully, if you’re responsible for attracting, engaging and converting new business for your company, you will find them useful.

What is content marketing and what is it not?

Helping beats selling. If you sell someone, you can make a customer today. If you help someone, you can make a customer for life. So says social media speaker, author and coach Jay Baer, in the opening of his “Youtility” presentation at NMX Las Vegas.

What is Youtility and why do marketers need to get on board? Audiences have become fragmented, there is far more competition for their attention, he says. Frame of mind awareness is all about inbound marketing, but this doesn’t create demand; it fulfills it. It’s half the cake – it’s a great thing for consumers for already know what they want. In 2004, 83% of people used search engines to find websites, but in 2012, it fell to 2011. The funnel of knowledge is fragmenting; there are so many more places for people to go to find information. We have Siri, Angie’s List, Cha Cha, etc.

Our CEO at TopRank Online Marketing, Lee Odden (@leeodden), shared his War of Words: Myth-Busting Social, Content Marketing and SEO yesterday at NMX Las Vegas.

The premise of Lee’s presentation was actually crowdsourced; the title War of Words comes from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which was turned into a radio program by Orson Wells and spawned a mass fear that Mars aliens were on their way to take over Earth. There is much misinformation in content marketing, social media and SEO that the hype spreads much like the alien myths of days gone by, says Lee.

Repeat after me: This holiday season, I resolve to take into consideration the increasingly mobile and visual preferences of my customers or readers, and to create and repurpose content to meet their needs, on whichever platform they use to connect with my business.

Recently, TopRank’s Alexis Hall and Lee Odden have each shared with us a few figures that underscore the importance of video in a modern day marketing strategy:

• Sixty percent of executives will watch a video before reading a word of text on their screen.
• Forty-two percent of executives have made a purchasing decision based on an online video.
• 500 years worth of YouTube videos are shared each day on Facebook.
• Over 3 billion hours of video is consumed monthly on YouTube.

The team at TopRank Online Marketing would like to wish our online community a very merry holiday season.  I for one get very nostalgic around the holidays and count down the days (starting in October) until I get to gather with family and friends to share a meal and make new memories.

For many families, part of the holiday tradition includes singing carols and watching Christmas movies from their childhood.  There is one song in particular that gets stuck in my head every holiday season is The Twelve Days of Christmas.  For a fun spin on a classic we bring you some of our favorite tips for the 12 Days of Social Media, Content Marketing & SEO.

On the __ day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

One of the most common issues companies seem to grapple with as they get pulled, kicking and screaming, into a content focused world of digital marketing is content creation.

Of course, anyone with half a brain can create information, but “content” implies usefulness or utility. Content has purpose and content marketing is meaningful information designed to be useful for a certain audience with the intention of inspiring an outcome or action. A lot of companies are creating information, not content, under the label of “content marketing”.

Giselle Abramovich recently posted an interesting article in Digiday, Why Brands Struggle With Content Creation, that really represents some of the most common issues brands like Nestle, AARP, Kellog, Cisco and Capri Sun have with content creation. This post will outline those common challenges and share tips on how to fix.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have your own army of word-of-mouth marketers, standing by for deployment at your beck and call?

A handful of brands have been able to count on their most loyal fans to act as brand advocates for years. Remember the die-hard Coke vs. Pepsi fan wars in the 80s and 90s? There was no convincing a fan of one he should try the other; he would shout his preference from the rooftop to whomever would listen.

Social media has taken these brand advocates of days gone by, given them each a megaphone and shot them full of espresso and steroids. Your most loyal fans are now exponentially louder, more influential, and able to spread the word about your brand just as quickly as they can thumb-type a status update or tweet.

With 9 out of 10 B2B marketers counting on content marketing tactics in their mix, it’s no wonder content marketing is getting so much attention on blogs, in traditional media and on the social web.

Along with the increased popularity of content, opportunists have begun aligning themselves with the topic of “content marketing”, even though their offering is only remotely related. As it was with websites in the 1990′s, SEO in the early 2000′s, social media over the past 5 years, so-called experts have begun pontificating advice based on thin air, obscure experiences and self interest.

To help our readers distill the signal from the noise, here are 3 myths about content marketing and how they are busted to give companies a clearer picture of reality when it comes to effective content marketing.

As a business journalist, I looked forward to information from a handful of specific sources each quarter. In fact, my quarterly e-commerce reports would wait until each of these select few companies, from whom I had come to expect great information, released their data. I relied on these sources for fantastic written and visual content our readers appreciated.

Now, when you have journalists and readers actually waiting on and looking forward to your content, isn’t that a massive win for your brand?

This is the power of sequenced content. Your audience comes to expect a certain type of product from you with each new installment. They subscribe to your RSS feed so they won’t miss it. They follow you in social channels to catch that first tweet once it’s released. They absolutely cannot wait to see what you’re coming up with next!

After an amazing three days at a recent conference, it was time to head back to Minneapolis.

One crucial pre-flight ritual: downloading enough new content to my Kindle Fire to stay entertained during the 3+ hours of flying and airport time.

As I flipped to the Kindle book store, the first place I started was my recommended list. I will say that, overall, I am always pretty impressed by how well Amazon “gets” me.

In less than two minutes I had made my purchase.  Without personalization, faced with the  1 million+ books which are part of the Kindle library, there is a 75% chance I would have never made a purchase at all.

Live from SES Chicago, I had a fantastic opportunity to learn about the ultra-hot online marketing area of remarketing / retargeting from Christopher Hansen and Marty Weintraub.  Remarketing can be extremely powerful, but is easy to get wrong, and the consequences can be costly both in terms of budget and brand image.

Below are 3 tips to make retargeting campaigns work for you, and 3 potential mistakes.

Retargeting Done Right

#1:  Identify Your Best Content

The key to effective retargeting is finding what is already working in your marketing strategy. Retargeting can be very effective at increasing the success of your content, but the content must be effective on its own in order to see a benefit from retargeting.