Marketing is a very important and specialized element to growing a business and differentiating yourself from the competition.  I didn’t used to think so.  My background is originally in finance.  I used to think marketing was just some common sense piece of the puzzle that any intern could handle.  Boy was I wrong.  Much of the “wisdom” I now have comes from making mistakes and following the wrong instincts. 

Being in the Internet Marketing business, I have also spent time analyzing other companies and reviewing their internal strategies from the outside looking in.  This exercise has lead me to gain a more keen understanding of how some of the seemingly “best” mid to large size companies out there completely miss the mark when it comes to marketing.  Here are some basic things that business owners should avoid:

The Good Old Marketing Fallback:  Maybe you used a specific marketing strategy 5 to 10 years ago and it worked very well to drive leads and sales.  Maybe you haven’t even really used “marketing” in years because times have been great and all your business comes to you.  But now times are tough and you realize you need to reach out to your customers more.  Their behavior seems different.  They are price comparing and actually seeking opportunties outside of your brand.  Looks like its time to turn on the marketing again, right? 

In this situation, business owners often revert back to the same strategy they used years ago.  Just because direct mail and billboards did wonders 10 years ago does not mean that you should use the same marketing plan.  Design a plan that will define and address immediate business goals.  If you do not have the in-house expertise to put this together, seek advice from colleagues that have a more current marketing plan to see whats working.  Doing a competitive analysis will also give you great insight into what others are doing to drive new business.  Don’t however make the mistake of assuming your competition is getting it right either.

Branding and Creating “Awareness”:  I have seen some business owners who seem satisfied with their marketing plan because THEY see their ads and assume everyone else is seeing them too.  Not only do they assume that others take notice but they assume that others are responsive to the message.  This can be referred to as “ego” driven marketing.  A business owner should never assume their big billboard ads and fancy print ads are channeling new business.  This was easier to get away with in a good economy.  Owners did not scrutinize marketing dollars as much and therefore assumed their expensive print ads had something to do with their sales.  Maybe they did, but maybe not…how would they know.  How can you truly measure an ad campaign like that? 

As business owners wise up and move away from startegies that are not measurable, they seek more cost effective methods that can be supported by true analytics.  Enter Internet marketing and online media.  Marketing is much more that creative brand awareness.  Your loyal customers are most likely aware of your competition, but something called them to choose you and something is keeping them loyal to your brand.  Do you know what that is?  You are doing something right, just make sure you know what it is and how to translate that into a marketing plan.

Push Advertising:  Push advertising and messaging is alright as long as it is combined with true inbound marketing.  Inbound marketing, or better yet, inbound Internet marketing, is about getting your prospective customers to come to you.  Consumers are constantly expsoed to media of all kinds and therefore we must stay on top of the methods that are curently working to engage people and build trust. 

Consumer behavior has changed in large part to the economic conditions.  People want to trust the brands they surround themsleves with.  They want transparency and honesty.  They don’t want to just hear your pitch anymore.  They will seek out the truth by asking their peers, going to their online social networks, or looking at rating and review sites.  Great online inbound marketing starts with SEO, blogging and social media.  These elements build online visibility and better yet trust among your audience.

Hiring a Consultant too Soon:  It is common for large brands to have a full inhouce marketing team.  But is the team really on the same page and using the same strategy?  Big companies will sometimes have an Internet marketing team, a PR team, and content team, and a general marketing team.  It is quite common for the PR team to have no idea what the Internet marketing team is doing.  When things are disjointed like this, it is best to put an internal communication plan together before bringing in an outside consultant.  This will ensure that there is a team working towards the same goal when new marketing plans are put in place. 

Planning without Analyzing:  There is no point in putting a plan together that will most likely cost you a lot of money if you haven’t really analyzed the problems.  Business owners need to define the true goals behind what they are trying to accomplish because it will affect how a great Internet marketing strategy is built.  For example, search engine optimization isn’t just about going after keywords you think are relevant to your industry or terms you see your competition showing up for.  It takes many factors into account that include basic marketing, customer behavior, competition, business goals, financial goals, conversions, etc.  Spend the appropriate time analyzing the situation before design the marketing plan.  It will save you money in the long run.

Internet Marketing Inc. is gearing up for the Search Marketing Expo in New York next week!  Our very own SEO Director Michael Martin will be speaking on the panel covering “Mobile Search Apps and Opportunities”.  Michael will be on a panel with Scott Dunlap, Rachel Pasqua, and Matt Siltala.  This session will look at popular search apps and different devices, how they gather data, and the Internet marketing opportunities they offer. 

The team from the New York office will also be in attendance all week.  We are looking forward to learning new things and meeting new people.

Blogging is not social media in itself, but it is a perfect avenue for providing great value to your audience and social media strategy. When I speak about Internet marketing and social media to CEO’s and business owners, one of the biggest hurdles is blogging. Why? Because it takes time, understanding, and a general committment to provide a consistent knowledge transfer to for your readers.

Business owners simply need to embrace the importance of blogging as a tool for communicating your knowledge and experiences in your particular field. To do so, they must understand what its all about, why it is indeed important, and in what capacity. Once they have a clear vision, it is easier to make the committment.

HERE ARE SOME TIPS FOR GETTING STARTED:

Be An Expert in Your Field >>We can use the term “expert” losely but it does help if you know what you are talking about.  If you are a business owner, chances are you have a lot of knowledge and experience you can share with your readers. 

Start Be Reading Other Blogs >> Blogging is different than traditional writing and usually takes on a more casual tone.  The best way to gain a clear understanding of how bloggers in your industry do it is of course to read their blogs.  Simply run some Google searches or use Technorati (great tool for searching the blogoshpere) to find top blogs related to your business industry.

Messaging >>  After reading other top blogs you should have a good understanding of how people write.  You may also notice that good blogs are vary rarely self serving.  As a businss owner, the most value you will bring to the table (and therefore gain positive feedback) is through thoughtful educational topics such “How to..” guides or “10 Great Ways to…”.  Blog readers want it simple, well written, casual, and valuable.  They want to be able to lear something quickly and easily.

Be Consistent >>  The worst thing we can do as business owners is to start something and then not follow through.  That is why you must make the time committment.  Will you always be able to stick to your “blogging schedule”?  Of course not.  But that is why you have to make other sacrifices.  Why do you think I am multitasking on a Sunday (watching football while blogging)??  Contributing to your blog three to five times each week is good enough.  Don’t stress out about it.  Once you get into the groove it can be an enjoyable activity.

UNDERSTANDING THE MARKETING VALUE:

We already touched on the fact that good blogging allows you to show what you know.  The more free knowledge you provide your audience, the greater value it will bring your business.  Blogging also brings a certain amount of trust to a company.  That is why I always recommend that companies (large and small) have a corporate blog.  It is also great if the owners and/or top executives are the key contributors.  This goes back to the “transparency” part of social media.  Consumers want to see the CEO’s and owners out in front leading by example and taking responsibility for their brand.  But there is a more technical marketing value behind blogging and that is search engine optimization. 

Blogging is one of the best ways to add great content to your site as often as you like.  Great content of course leads to more pages for your website that can potentially get indexed and ranked by the search engines. 

Here are some tips:

1. The best way to accomplish this is to use a SEO friendly blog platform such as Wordpress (this blog is a Wordpress platform) and integrate it with your website (i.e. www.yourdomainname.com/blog). 
2. Have your keyword strategy in mind when writing.  Use blog titles and phrases relevant to your topic and industry.  For example, if you run a financial consulting firm you might write a blog about “How to Maintain Financial Liquidity”.  In that blog you would want to include keywords related to your topic as it relates to your keyword strategy.  I don’t want to get too far into SEO because that is a whole other topic.  As long as you write well and at least keep these tips in mind, it will add value to your website.
3. Promote your blog on your website in the header or footer so people know you have one.  I also recommend having a link to your blog in your email signature.  If you are engaged in social media, provide links to your blog through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  After each blog you write, post it on Facebook with a note about the topic.  The more you write and promote the blog, the more successful you will be in increasing links and website traffic.

All the studies out there point to the fact that an integrated online marketing strategy is more powerful than just using one Internet marketing channel alone.  Most strategies compliment one another very well.  Today, I want to talk a bit about the use of search engine optimization and pay per click advertising together as a combined strategy. 

About SEO:  Organic search engine optimization is the process performed on (and off) a website to improve the quality and volumes of traffic from the natural search results.  A good SEO campaign starts with a targeted keyword strategy.  Then best practices must be applied to site architecture, content, and link building.  SEO is one of the most important investments in the long term online visibility for any brand.  However, unless you already have good momentum with natural placements, it can take time to see results.

About PPC:  Pay Per Click advertising is a strategy that involves buying keywords through programs like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, etc.  Again, it starts with defining the keyword strategy and setting budgets.  You can of course dig deeper by geo-targeting terms as well as using daily and hourly targeting so that over time you can maxmize your budget and have your ads showing only during times where you are experiencing the best conversions.  Google now uses a Quality Score index to rank campaigns.  This is important because your budget matters less and the quality of your campaign and landing pages matters more. 

Here are some interesting stats on spending:

• PPC search advertising continues to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013. (Source: C|Net News, June 30, 2008)
• Companies in the US spent $10 billion last year on paid search ads, and even more this year. How about SEO?
• SEO: $1.3 billion (11%) (Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008)
• According to SEMPO’s data, it’s 11% for SEO and 87% for PPC (with another 1.4% for SEM technologies and 1% for paid Inclusion).

It seems that people still do not quite grasp the power of natural search rankings.  Let’s take a look at this heat map study to show where most users look when doing searches online.

Companies that use only paid search marketing do so usually because they either do not have good orgainc rankings or are deploying a very targeting ad campaign.  Companies that use only SEO usually do so because they have great natural traffic and don’t have much need for more targeted advertising (or think they don’t). 

As we all know, starting from scrath, SEO takes months to generate good lasting results.  The time it takes to show results is largely based on a few factors:  the competitiveness of the industry online, the age and history of the domain, the number of inbound links the site may already have, content, and the overall quality of the SEO campaign.  In the meantime, many companies use PPC to drive traffic and generate revenue.  PPC advertising managed correctly can show some big wins.  But you don’t want to have to rely on PPC alone forever.  This is not a scalable strategy nor will it always yield the best conversions as compared to great natural traffic. 

When using PPC as a means to drive traffic while working on building natural rankings, the keyword movements and traffic volumes coming through the SEO efforts should be monitored closely.  As specific keywords start to drive more traffic (most likely from moving to the first page results), you can gradually start to decrease the PPC budgets.  You don’t want to be too quick to turn certains terms off though and you will want to montior both efforts closely.

Many case studies are now showing that conversions rates increase when companies deploy BOTH methods, even for overlapping keyword strategies.  Companies using both methods, are seeing the conversions coming through SEO, but at a much higher rate than using either PPC or SEO alone.  So as keywords start generating more natural traffic, you may want to consider decreasing some budgets while still maintaining keyword visibility in both natural and paid results. 

A deeper analysis will come when you start really looking at your CPA (cost per acquisiton) and conversion goals through your paid search efforts.  Since PPC is advertising, you can lose money if it is not managed well.  SEO is really more of a true business development investment.  Once you start SEO you really can’t stop – and when you start showing higher traffic volumes coming through natural search, you won’t want to!  The visitors coming through natural search results usually stay on the site longer, view more pages, and convert better. 

The conclusion:  Every brand will need a different strategy but if you have the means, deploying both SEO and paid search can generate great results.  If you decide to manage both efforts in-house be sure to seek professional advice on how each work separately and as a combined strategy.

Recent times have made things tough on everyone.  The economy has forced many companies to downsize or even close their doors creating a flood of talent in the job market.  For companies that are growing and hiring, this has created great opportunities.  Some recently “unemployed” professionals however have taken this opportunity to go out on their own and start their new businesses.  The recession has actually created a massive influx of new start-ups in all kinds of industries!

Even when times are good and funding is readily available, it is wise to tighten your belt and stay as lean and mean as possible.  Here are some tips to ensure that you don’t burn through your available capital and achieve profitability sooner.

1. Business Plan:  Have one.  Even if you are not striking out on the fundraising path, this is a good excercise for understanding your goals, defining budgets, creating cash flow projects, and know what it will take to get to an eventual exit strategy.  This process will also force you to know your competition and the costs that will be involved in gaining market share.  Set goals and milestones.  I do not recommend spending months on this however.  There will be a time when more planning won’t get you to the next level, execution will. 
2. Your website:  Naturally, the kind of website you need depends of your business.  However, the availability of open source technology and advanced templates have made website development more cost effective.  You still must make the investment and be willing to spend at least a few thousand dollars.  You will be judged by the appearance of your website, that is certain.  So take ownership of the process and find a firm willing to understand your business goals.  Make sure you communicate the exact functionalities you require upfront to avoid additional costs down the road.  Also, make sure the firm knows SEO and will build a website that is search engine friendly and adheres to basic SEO site architecture guidelines.  Otherwise, you may incur more costs later when investing in SEO. 
3. Resources:  If you are used to working for a large corporation where you did not have to worry about expenses, then you need to put your start-up cap on.  Try to avoid too much credit card spending for unnecessary start-up expences.  You probably don’t need office space right out of the gate.  Keep overhead as low as possible – it may be uncomfortable for a while but that’s what it takes to earn your stripes in the start-up world.
4. Hiring:  Don’t over hire.  Only hire the people you really need and be willing to wear most of the hats at the beginning.  Most business owners start out as the CEO, accountant, marketing director, receptionist, and sales director!  You will be working long hours so don’t think you need to outsource everything right away.  This is also the time where you learn all of these functions which will make you a better leader later on.  If you land a big account early on, be careful about hiring people just to service one client.  This is tough because you must have the ability to provide a great service or product, but can’t over hire just to support them.  Consider hiring additonal help on an hourly or part time basis.  Freelance workers can be a good resource too.  Also, consider hiring free of hourly rate interns from local colleges.  Interns can be an amazing resource if you hire the right ones.  These people can become great potential hires after they graduate!
5. Marketing:  Internet marketing is probably the most realistc and cost effective way to go other than guerilla marketing and basic grass routes marketing.  You may not be able to afford search engine optimization right away, so consider social media marketing to drive traffic and awareness to your site.  This is also a great way to start building your brand and communicating with potential customers.  Set up Facebook, Twitter, and possibly You Tube accounts and get after it!

If you are in fact heading out on the fundraising path, be ready to meet with at least 30 VC’s or angels.  As we all know, funding is tough to come by and even angel investors are trying to stay more liquid.  Don’t just go for the investment partner willing to get involved.  You will need a partner with experience in your field and one that shares similar passions.  You will be spending a lot of time with them so make sure you actually like them!  The interview should go both ways.

According to AddToAny over a third of content on the web is shared by using Facebook or Twitter.

Email surprisingly fell to third behind both the social networks individually as a means to share content.

Silicon Alley Insider provided a great pie chart below showing the share of sharing on the web.

We have said it before but its worth discussing again. Online consumer behavior has dramtically changed over the past 12 months. Advancements in technology and various economic shifts have fosted change in behavior and a shift in the demographics. From a marketing perspective, this is important to note because the old view that the Baby Boomer generation isn’t online reading blogs and involved in social media is simply not true any more.

The Baby Boomer generation is the fastest growing demographic on social networks and reading blogs. They are dramatically outpacing Generation Y’s interest in these areas. This is good news for companies seeking new Internet marketing strategies. Companies that target this demographic did not used to have as much opportunity with online marketing, but now the opportunity is there.

Below, we have included a graph from a report by Accenture that shows year over year growth comparing Generation Y and Baby Boomers. The areas include blog reading, social networks, and watching or posting videos online. This opens up a whole new option for brands to engage in social media and online marketing.

I do not understand why old school CEO’s are still wasting thousands of dollars on print advertising. Did you know some businesses spend between $30,000 and $100,000 just for one print ad page in the Wall Street Journal to run one week? This is insane. You can’t even track the success results or conversion factors from print advertising. CEO’s still do this because they like to see their company name in big papers and they think their target demographic actually reads newspapers. When was the last time you saw someone aged 21-35 actually reading a newspaper? I think it has been months. Everyone I know gets their information, advertising, and news online and in real time. If you want to grow your business, you need to advertise where your clients live online.

To start an internet marketing campaign, every business that is business to consumer based should start with organic search engine optimization. This is the core of any internet marketing campaign. CEO’s and marketing professionals then need to research where their target demographic lives online. What sites do they go to? What times of the day and week are they online? Where do they live? All this stuff is crucial for deciding which sites to advertise on and how to market your company.

There are also some great tools you can use to see if your site is properly optimized for SEO and follows all the search engine guidelines.  The SEO Ranker Tool by IMI is a great one http://internetmarketinginc.com/seo-report or companies like Hubspot have some great software as well.

I encourage all CEO’s to try to run an ROI report on their current print spend.  Take half your print budget and use it online and run the same ROI report.  I am convinced you will never run print again when you complete this task.

-Brandon