Integrated Marketing

The Jarboe on YouTube at Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 19th, 2011 by

Greg Jarboe may be my most favorite speaker at Search Engine Strategies and in San Francisco he wow’d us with how to use YouTube as a smart marketing tool in the NextGen YouTube Marketing session.

The Jarboe and Li Evans

After a funny introduction by session moderator, Li Evans, teasing whom we loving refer to as “The Jarboe” about his love for the RedSocks, he stood and told us that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world – but we never think of it that way.

It gets 22 billion searches a month. (And its not a search engine). We spend all the time optimizing for Google and Bing, neglecting the reach of YouTube. It’s also the second most popular site in the world, with the first being Facebook.

YouTube gets 149 million visits per month.

Facebook gets 129 million visits per month.

Greg "The Jarboe" Jarboe of SEO-PR.com

Twitter comes in at 32 million, with Linkedin 21 million and Flickr getting 22 million visits per month.
Where should you be spending your time and money investing in social marketing?

The natural sequence by users in YouTube – people come to discover things. Who seeks what in which channel with what effect? People need to find the video first before they can watch it and then share it with others.

The trick to going viral is to be discovered and be shared.

Make use of the YouTube Keyword tool. It finds relevant keywords for you (but can be quirky sometimes so use your logic.) Use these keywords in your in metadata such as title, description, tags, (Google ignores tags but YouTube loves them).

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Do You Know Which Blended Search Opportunities Exist For Your Business?

Written August 10th, 2011 by

For several years now, Google has been presenting more than the standard 10 blue links in its search results. What does a search results page even look like with only 10 blue links? I had to get creative to find a good example, since they are becoming rare, so I chose three words from standard “lorem ipsum” dummy text as my search query. Here’s what the old 10 blue links search results look like when I searched for the Latin words quo magna etiam.


These days, videos, images, news, and other non-traditional items are likely to show up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for any given search query, and Google continually experiments with these results. This mashup, commonly called “blended search”, combines results from web search and Google’s other properties such as Google News, Youtube, Google Products, and Image Search, as well as results from external sources such as review sites. This gives you the opportunity to work your way into the first page of results through these alternative avenues.

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Audience Research: Don’t Fall for the Counting Trap

Written August 3rd, 2011 by

Traveling and speaking at many conferences, I’m often asked, “How do you come up with a successful strategy for a client? Do you use Twitter, Facebook or YouTube?” I reply that it all depends on my client. Now that may sound like I’m side stepping the answer, but to be perfectly honest, that is exactly the right answer.

There’s No Cookie Cutter Solutions

Photo credit Flickr user coljay72 I know everyone would love to have a “rip open the box and install” solution to creating the perfect online marketing strategy, especially when it comes to social media. However, while a few tactics can be considered to be standard, i.e. securing profiles in social media communities like Facebook & Twitter, how you engage in them can be a totally different story. That’s why research is so vitally important to an integrated marketing strategy in today’s world of marketing to consumers.

There are a variety of different tools you can use to help you with your research. From free to paid, you will get what you pay for. The more expensive the tool, the more information you are going to receive, in both the amount of records and the type of data. From sheer ‘counting’ to actual sentiment analysis, some tools can be very overwhelming in what they bring back – let alone being able to pull actionable insights from that data in order to build a sound strategy for a marketing plan.

Don’t Fall for the Counting Game

When you are beginning to do your research it’s very easy to fall for the counting game. What I mean by the counting game is looking at the sheer number of conversations going on about a particular keyword. Looking at the sheer number, and reporting those numbers as the volume of conversation out there, can be a fatal miss-step if you are planning a strategy around engaging actively interested and motivated audiences.

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Do We Need ANOTHER Social Networking Site, Google+?

Written July 1st, 2011 by

Who better to help test and spread the word about the new Google+ social networking website than the marketing and user experience industries? I’ve lost track of how many social gigs I’ve joined. Do I need another one?

Google Opens the Gates to Google+

Faster than the speed of sound, the moment Google opened the gate to play with their new toy, I received invitations, and sighed. Sure, it’s Google. But do I really need or want to join another social networking site? What does Google+ offer that Facebook, Linkedin, BranchedOut, Quora, and others don’t already do?

Who is their target user?

Firstly, if you receive an invite to test Google+, go ahead and take it for a spin. It’s free and from a usability perspective, easy to jump in and start using right away. So many people accepted and shared invitations that for a time, the gates were closed. While frustrating, I understood this to be part of their beta testing. Performance testing covers server stress, traffic volume and the stresses on an application by a surge of users. Google may have needed to stop and make adjustments. I got in last night.

Google+ has something for everybody and it looks like they took bits and pieces from other social sites and found ways to incorporate those ideas into their own property.

They ramped up Google chat by adding video.

Just as Facebook has categories for topics like Gardening, Books, Science, etc., Google+ does the same thing, but calls it “Sparks”.

Like Twitter, they show a row or two of tiny profile photos of who you have connected with in your circles.

 

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You Can’t Survive on Social Media Alone

Written June 28th, 2011 by

T-Bone Steak on GrillI love steak.  I’m a voracious carnivore with no apologies, with the exception of maybe my two friends, Simon & Alexis, when we go out for dinner.  However, as much as I wish I could survive on steak alone, I can’t. There are certain nutrients and vitamins I need to survive that steak alone cannot provide.  I still need vegetables, starches and even the occasional sugars.  A balanced diet is what helps me continue to be a healthy human being.

Healthy marketing strategies cannot survive on social media alone.  Any marketing strategy needs to be finely balanced based on the “nutritional needs” of its audience.  Therefore, just relying on Social Media can leave your marketing strategy totally unbalanced and weak without other tactics to help support it.

But you hear everywhere that you “NEED” social media.  The mistake some companies make is that they sacrifice other marketing channels to implement social media marketing because they believe it’s going to be the “magic pill” that fixes everything, much like people take diet pills alone in the hopes of losing weight.  Diet pills alone don’t work, just like Social Media alone won’t fix what’s wrong.  There has to be a strong mix of marketing tactics and channels to build a healthy and successful online marketing strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

Meaningful Analytics: Insightful Data Points & Optimizing for Outcomes

Written May 25th, 2011 by

I’m a big proponent of “Measuring Your Outcomes” for any campaign you start, even offline campaigns like in TV, Radio & Print.  Prior to such tools as Ominture, WebTrends, CoreMetrics & Google Analytics (formerly Urchin.. if you remember back that far) it was pretty tough understanding what TRULY worked and what didn’t.  A lot of measurement was guesswork and summation and that was the problem – nothing really concrete.  Now we have a tremendous amount of data on our hands, but again a problem of too much data and not understanding what the valuable insights are can be misleading and even damaging to a marketing campaign.

measuring tapeThere’s a lot more than to understanding if a marketing strategy is working, let alone understanding if you’ve got an “o.k.” strategy or one that’s really hitting the mark, than looking at how many people are visiting your site each day.  The true measure is are you visitors finding value and are you optimizing for all your possible outcomes.

Goals Aren’t Always Monetary in Nature

Goals don’t always have to be monetary at the end of the day.  A goal could be someone as easy as a use clicking on the “Like” button, or adding something to their wishlist that later gets shared with their social network.  They may not necessarily convert in a monetary form today, but in a week or two they very well could.  That’s why looking at just visitors or even click through rates as “lone” metric can be very misleading. Read the rest of this entry »

Promoting Your Blog: Not Too Late to Start Over

Written May 23rd, 2011 by

Over the average course of a person’s life he or she will reinvent themselves a few times; usually in High School, then College and again a few more times in the real world. We’ve all done it as individuals, but what happens when in comes to your company’s marketing strategy?  Are your present strategies working out for you?  Are you feeling stuck in a rut?

For the most part a good promotion strategy or ad campaign could last forever, but as the times change so should your thinking and planning. Granted,  there are those campaigns out there that are timeless gems. Nike’s “Just Do It” is a slogan that has lasted for over 20 years and doesn’t seem to be losing steam anytime soon. In fact, their competitors are finding that they need to keep changing their slogans just to keep up.

This simple slogan. Still going strong.

Currently, the phrase “Just Do It” is so synonymous with Nike that really at the end of the silent, visual ad,  all they say sometimes is “Just Do It” and you find yourself amazed that they did it again. In February we talked about the Super Bowl ads, what worked, what didn’t and why. One of the greatest strengths a company or even a blog should have is to know when it’s material is getting stagnant. For the purpose of this post we are going to focus on blogs.
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Li Evans, Rebecca Ryan Interview – Integrating Your Marketing Cohesively

Written April 21st, 2011 by

We’ve all heard cautionary tales about avoiding the Internet marketer who promises the cure-all of top Search rankings. How can there be solid guarantees, when marketers do not control competitors or search engine algorithms? The real answer is that it depends. Influence must be applied intelligently, strategically and taking into consideration exactly what is going on that effects that particular client.

Then there is the joke that a SEO can always get you to #1 in Google for some ridiculous term like “left-handed green screwdrivers for sale in Pasadena” – no problem there, right? I love that one, because it hits the nail on the head so nicely. Without sensible targeting there may be results, but they probably won’t be useful results.

Da Li SocialIM is very research-based. We don’t just tell clients what we do. We look at what clients need. We look at where their customers are. We look at how and where their customers interact online. We look at usability and engagement. We don’t need to bother with meaningless statistics about left handed green screwdrivers.

Here is a mini case study:

Example: Medical doctor, was told they had to be in Twitter, in Facebook and so on. He was communicating the typical list of “stuff” companies are putting on marketing slicks these days saying they know how to do this and that. The problem is that none of it was working for the client (along with a host of optimization problems). Through our research, we found that the conversations he needed to be a part of weren’t happening on Twitter or Facebook. So the client was wasting valuable time and money. We found certain forums worked for them.

Results: And now, the leads are coming in 5x the rate they were before we took over.

That’s what intelligently applied research can do.

This excerpt is from part one of a two-part interview, published Tuesday on enquirer.com – Integrating your marketing cohesively: an interview with two national experts. Check it out!

SES for Beginners: Things You Should Know Before Attending a Marketing Conference

Written April 5th, 2011 by

At this point I have now been to two  Search Engine Strategies Conferences and though I clearly felt much more comfortable attending the last one in New York, it was only because I had a better idea of what was going on because of attending SES London. I did have a slight advantage in attending SES, in that I was fortunate to attend the marketing conference with people I knew and who had been there themselves many times before. I knew no matter what I could always fall back on their experiences with the conference series for guidance if I had any questions.

Mix & Mingle at the SES Lunches

To be honest,  I am not sure what I would do if I had to attend one of these for the first time by myself. It can be overwhelming and it can swallow you whole.  With that in mind I decided to develop an easy guide for anyone attending an SES conference for the first time.  A beginner’s guide, so to speak.

Lets’ first look at what exactly SES is.  Wikipedia defines SES as:  Search Engine Strategies (SES) is a conference series focused on search engine marketing and search engine optimization.[1] These events teach the ins-and-outs of search engine marketing from top experts in the field, along with information from the search engine companies themselves.

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Search Engine and Social Marketing Strategies Help Tourism Industry

Written March 12th, 2011 by

We all long for vacation. Everybody dreams about it.  They want to have it where they can and when they can. Sadly, we all have jobs that prevent us from being on a permanent vacation. Lately, we are finding ourselves more and more longing for something as close to that idea as possible.   These days travel destinations, no matter their size,  are resorting to hiring tech-savvy “Heads of Tourism” or in the case of a resort, “Head of Special Events”.  They’ve learned the value of expert Search Engine Marketers.  Since word of mouth advertising is limited, online travel search and social media marketing creates new strategies for any travel destination hoping to reach out to those who dream of a chance to relax and escape.

Beach

Travel Search Marketing Pays Off

Let me give you an example. Home for me for many years was the small island of Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles. Ever heard of it? No? But I am sure you’ve heard of our sister island, Aruba. The reason was simple.  While for many years Aruba embraced the American tourist, Curaçao decided to sit back and complain about how Aruba had sold it’s soul. We didn’t even had a legitimate tourism bureau till about 1988. Read the rest of this entry »

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