Who knew that looking for, or rather helping people find what they’re looking for, could be so complicated? Starting, building, managing, analyzing and optimizing a paid search marketing campaign can prove to be a daunting task. Read the rest of this entry »

As an agency, we’re responsible for ensuring our employees are well-educated and up-to-date on changes in the digital marketing space.  As a result, we send our staff to a large number of meetings and conferences, ranging from industry-general conferences to smaller, more targeted events.  These events provide our staff with an opportunity to learn new concepts, benchmark against competitors and make new industry contacts.  From a company perspective, finding ways to increase the return on training events, workshops, and meetings is an important consideration.  By making a few small changes, managers can play a major role in maximizing the impact of industry events on the employee, as well as the company as a whole. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you ever ask yourself how the goals of your company and Google align? Let’s make no bones about it. Google’s job is to get your customers to click on your Paid Search ads. That’s it. It is very simple and Google is very good at it. (As of April 22, 2012, Google’s market capitalization is $193 Billion). Over the last year, Google has made several changes to the way it displays and reports on search results. These changes have huge implications towards your Paid and Organic Search strategies and your overall online marketing strategy. It is clear that Google is reinforcing the importance of Paid Search while attempting to reduce Organic Search results for its customers. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, thousands of companies compete with each other to win their share of audience. Millions of dollars are spent on advertising alone. Smart companies choose to invest in multiple channels to optimize their potential returns. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I attended one of the keynote sessions at Forrester’s Marketing Leadership Forum called Branding in the 21^st Century, presented by Chris Stutzman of Forrester. Chris outlined a great framework for building your brand based on 4 key principles: Credibility, Leadership, Brand Relevance and Uniqueness.  One of the major premises was that if you can deliver on these principles, you can demand a higher premium for your product.  He then introduced three actionable concepts to help define your brand along the theme of a brand journey: a Brand North Star, Map and Compass. Read the rest of this entry »

What if you managed your vendor relationships like an employee, what would that look like? What would you expect to change? Would that shape your business strategy?

It seems that as of late I find myself reading Talent Management literature with subject material related to alignment, engagement and performance reviews. While the entirety of my reading has been focused from the traditional employer/employee perspective, I have begun to ask what if the same principles were applied to the client/agency relationship. So much focus and research revolves around the concepts of talent management from the traditional HR perspective, and no one can really deny the effectiveness of a solid talent management approach. In fact, the Gallup Organization, one of the leading employee engagement practitioners, has found that engaged organizations have 3.9 times the earnings per share growth rate compared to organizations with lower engagement in their same industry. But how does this apply to the management of a third party vendor? Read the rest of this entry »

While the digital landscape is littered with vendors and practitioners that offer the promise of reaching local consumers, it’s important to think about where a local strategy fits into your overall marketing plan.  Below, I’ll highlight just a few things you consider before dedicating marketing dollars into local and offer a couple strategies.

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One of the things that I believe is crucial to managing an Internet marketing program is to ensure that every week you are doing something to improve performance.  To do this requires a constant sense of urgency, strong analytical skills and exceptional reporting that provides both high level and granular insights.  None of this matters though if you do not have a solid methodology for both analyzing and implementing changes to your campaign.  Over the past 16 years of managing Internet marketing campaigns, I have realized that there are only 5 questions that you need to be able to answer to ensure that you truly understand your campaign and that you are making constant improvements to increase your ROI.  I believe that these five questions are so important that I make every one of my employees memorize them and ensure that they are able to answer them for every client.  The five questions are: Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook has now been on both sides of the privacy firestorm.  For quite some time, they’ve taken a lot of heat for tracking users’ behavior on and sometimes off the network.  In an interesting twist, Facebook recently spoke out on behalf of user privacy against employers requesting login credentials for potential employees’ Facebook accounts.  As a result, there’s a lot of content going up about which privacy settings to use and how to protect your privacy.  While these are important topics, they ignore the single most important rule: don’t post sensitive information. Read the rest of this entry »

So, what is Google Webmaster Tools? Of approximately 140 million active web domains, how many are registered with Webmaster Tools?  An extremely small percentage.  It’s amazing how many webmasters blindly run their site.  Many of them complain about seeing no improvement in traffic, not moving up in the rankings, and not achieving goals.  Google Webmaster Tools allows webmasters greater insight into their website’s performance and provides detailed metrics on how to optimize a site’s performance. So what data should you be pulling from WT? Read the rest of this entry »