#40 The Future of Marketing is...Social.

Audiences today do not want to be talked at. They want to be engaged in conversation. Social media gives us the power to do this, allowing us to define and control our brand. There is a shift from corporations and institutions to individuals and communities. Here are a few tips to take advantage of social media.

• Facebook. To help spread the word about a new campaign, why not ask employees to change their Facebook status to announce your latest campaign? If you have 20,000 employees, most likely 10,000 of them have Facebook. With the average person having 100 friends, your announcement could receive over 1 million impressions for free. Ask employees to include their LinkedIn Profiles – now you have 2 million impressions for free


• YouTube. Create a YouTube channel dedicated to teaching people more about your industry. This channel would feature a series of short, focused videos that educate your audience on related topics that help position you as an industry expert. The videos could highlight benefits and features of your products.


• Twitter. To help build and establish your company as an industry expert, top executives should create Twitter accounts to help position your company’s executives as thought leaders in the industry. Tweets should be business-related topics that talk about industry trends and forecasts. Zappos CEO has 1.6 million followers and is following almost 400K people. A total of 430 Zappos Employees have Twitter accounts. This presence helps Zappos engage and participate in conversations about their company.


• Flickr. Flickr is a great way to help promote events that your company sponsors. Photos can be optimized to show up in search results and increase brand awareness. Using Flickr to increase branding opportunities for KeyBank’s sponsorship of a 10K race, the Key “Bank to Bay” gallery has alone received 6,000 views following the event.

W6M: People visit social media sites every day, why not join them in what they are already doing?

#12 Online Marketing a Closer Look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks," the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

W6M: Search Engines are basically modern day phone book. If I needed a bank back in the day, you would have opened up the yellow pages and looked under "bank". Now a days, people go on on Search Engines like Google and search for the term or keyword "bank".

This may change by the time you read this, but Bank of America currently comes up first on the left hand side in what they call the natural listings (these are the non-paid listings). Basically, BofA did a good job of optimizing their site to come up first and Google granted them the #1 spot telling people that BofA is the most relevant website to your term.

How did BofA get to be #1 on Google?
That's are hard one. Google like other search engines, uses advanced algorithms that are proprietary to their companies. However, there are a few known variables that search engines consider when ranking you in their results. Here are some quick tips.

• Submit your site: You should submit your site to the major search engines to let them know you are around. They can't find you if they don't know you are there. Search for "Submit site to Google" and they will tell you how.


• DMOZ: This is the Open Directory Project. I always submit my sites here first. Read up how to suggest a URL and it will be worth your time.


• Content is King: If you continue to add relevant useful content to your site, search engines will notice and reward you for it.


• Keyword density: When adding copy to your site, it should focus on specific topics and repeat the keyword you are targeting. If you the BoA homepage has "bank" on the page a number of times, but keep in mind if you just repeat the word "bank" 50 times on your site they may consider you a spammer and knock you out of their results for good.


• Meta Tags: I have been told search engines don't look at these too much anymore, but I would add them on anyways. The Title Tag and Description Tags are used in the search engine results so these are helpful in getting people to click on your link when they do appear in the results. Keyword tags are they other tags that I like to include.


• Inbound Links: If a popular site considers you a good reference for their readers, they will link to you. Search Engines take this into account and will rank you higher the more time legit sites link to you. Sites with .edu, .org and .gov will help you rank even higher.


• Outbound Links: Offering a reciprocal link is a good way to get other sites to link to your site. If you promise to link to their site, often sites are willing to link to you. Not always the case though. Nike loves when you link to them, but as you will notice, they don't link to many external sites.

In Summary

There is a lot to learn about online advertising. You don't need to be an expert on everything, but you should be familiar with the basics. Staying on top of current trends is also important.

#11 Online Marketing

Online Marketing is defined as using the interactive technologies available via the Internet to further create a dialog with potential customers by connecting with them with good educational content about your company's products or service offerings.

W6M: Online Marketing includes using Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, Banner Advertising, Facebook, YouTube, Banner Ads and more. I will get into more details with the following posts on SEO, PPC and Social Media, but I just wanted to be clear that Online Marketing is basically the umbrella for all these efforts. The following posts have high level explanations, so the average marketer can understand what they will need to know to sell online marketing to their client.