Online Marketing for Marketers

I had dinner the other night with a buddy of mine who runs a company that produces major corporate events. You know the kind with a stage, lighting, stadium seating and a day or two of PowerPoint presentations designed to pump up the troops.

Interestingly enough he reported their business was off dramatically in that area.

Why? Three letters - AIG … Read more

If you are like most of my clients, you are confused about what your paid search advertising budget should be. I created a simple tool you can use to determine a profitable budget. A link to the free tool is provided at the end of this article. But first, let’s review some basic budget setting concepts.
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In this economy, we marketers know what to expect: the knife. Already, two of my steady clients have laid off good people with whom I had been working. It’s grim out there. With personnel being cut, budgets can’t be far behind.

Yet I think there’s a better way. In fact, one of the most familiar brands in the world took the lead under circumstances similar to our own. And they did it by advancing their presence just when their competitors were retreating. See the whole story here:

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Ok, perhaps the headline is a bit overdramatic, but the point here is that companies tend to focus far too much on staying within a set budget line for their online initiatives to the detriment of driving an acceptable amount of qualified traffic. This common, albeit myopic, tactic will drive marketers right out of a job.

Any promotion campaign – but particularly online ones – must first and foremost deliver returns for a company’s investment. This is where the true value of such initiatives lies; if they bear sizeable fruit, it would stand to reason that an organization should look at putting more resources toward them, and consider going over budget to capitalize on their full potential. That isn’t to say that corporations need to write a blank check to advertising outlets, but it does mean that adherence to an arbitrary dollar figure should not come at the expense of customer growth and market share. Doing so leaves significant money on the table. Read more

There are a couple extremely important components you need to have in place to achieve Web marketing success. Without them, your chance for failure is great. Make the jump over to this post to watch this video to learn what they are.
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When marketing planning gets complicated, I always suspect that, somehow, the essentials have gone wrong. I’ve seen elaborate edifices of media buying, graphic design, brand strategy and more built on the most threadbare understanding of fundamentals: who your customers are and what they want.

But when the fundamentals are solid — you know your customers and what makes them tick —  your actual execution can be quite simple.

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I recently wrote about the necessity of passion in your blog writing, and got some really positive feedback. It’s been great to hear about what you are passionate about.

There are no value judgments when it comes to your passion. A lot of folks consider it strange that I get so excited about online marketing tools and how businesses can act more human. But, that’s what I love! Read more

I was recently asked to give my opinion on common mistakes people make in their web marketing. Here is a major one! Click after the jump to watch my video on what I see people doing, or in this case, not doing.

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Some of us achieve mistakes; others have mistakes thrust upon them. 

In an ideal world, IT, HR, finance and sales would work cooperatively with marketing for the betterment of business.

But we don’t live in that world. Instead, we live in a Stygian darkness where the forces of evil — also known as “group think” — impose themselves on the better angels of reason, insight and creativity (AKA, “good marketing”).

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I’ll be the first to admit that we agency types aren’t always the easiest to manage given our pathological need to push the envelope.  But isn’t that why you hire us?  If you really just want to keep it safe, why not take all your marketing in-house?  So assuming that you really do want to cut through, let’s talk about the things you say that prevent this from happening: Read more