Search Engine Marketing
The Social Media Cart and the Marketing Horse
On Wednesday night, I attended the Ask The Experts event in which Liz Gaige (one of our SheTeam contributors)
Photo credit: woodsy, via stock.xchng
participated. The event’s goal was to give entrepreneurs a chance to get answers to dilemmas regarding branding, marketing, Web development and social media strategy.
As the night came to an end, I found myself reflecting on how the variety of experts in the panel illustrated the process that should optimally happen as a company ventures into Digital Marketing waters:
Marketing
Liz Gaige was the in-house expert in charge of addressing questions about marketing strategy and planning. As she answered questions from the room, I was reminded of how important it is to have a clear perspective on who your target market and product/offering are, before moving further toward branding, Web development, etc. Once you have identified who your target market is, and that it is indeed financially able to sustain your business, you are better equipped to analyze how your offering differs from the competition.
The wisdom that is gathered up until this point can now be transitioned toward the next phase…
…Branding
As Ryan Thompson expounded, branding is much more than a logo. It encompasses the perception you’d like your target market to have about your company, your offering. That impression is partially communicated through your business cards, logo and other collaterals, but it is ultimately about the mental picture that one absorbs about you – before, during and after a visual, online and print conversation.
Defining your brand is a key point in this process, since it dictates the tone of your communications later on, during the implementation of our next two points…
…Web development and social media strategy
Ideally, all the steps above will have taken place before you delve into Web development and social media strategy waters. The information that you have collected through your marketing and branding journey makes up your corporate DNA, upon which your Web development muscle, bones and cartilage can be built upon. How those muscles get put to use is another story.
In order to achieve your goals, should you participate in a sprint or a marathon? A sprint could be likened to an AdWords campaign – which can be implemented quicker, with faster returns, but demanding more energy up front – where as a marathon would be akin to search engine optimization: you’re in it for the long haul.
Is your offering best suited to be presented through a ballet or modern dance? In the realm of social media, LinkedIn is more formal and structured (such as in a ballet), whereas Twitter has a younger, more casual tone.
The bottom line is that there is an order of events that should take place before you even decide if your company should be “tweeting”, or if it should have a new Web site. Going through the marketing and branding stages is integral for a solid Web development campaign, upon which a successful social media strategy can then be built. So make sure that everything happens in the right order, and that your social media cart does not come before your marketing horse.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, and welcome your questions or comments.
Tags: branding, entrepreneur, LinkedIn, Social Media, strategy, Twitter
Podcast Production Tips – Loud and Clear
I admit it. In the world of $300 camcorders and YouTube videos produced for less than the cost of a Starbucks latte, my view of online audio/video standards may seem prehistoric. I was university educated in radio and television production and have spent twenty years producing big budget, prime time shows, agonizing over every last creative and technical detail.
I not only support, I fully embrace, the DIY spirit of the internet. Chris Anderson’s, “The Long Tail,” redefined my career and was in some ways, the impetus for Magnify Digital. The democratization of content production and distribution is the most exciting evolution in “broadcasting” since cable television.
At the same time, it has resulted in a lot of crap on the internet. That’s why I’m proud to be a dinosaur.
When it comes to using audio and/or video to communicate your company’s, or your client’s, message, professional technical standards need to be observed. It doesn’t matter how clever or compelling your podcast is if your audience can’t hear it, see it clearly, or if it takes too long to load.
In this post, I’ll address the simplest form — the audio podcast. Here are a few tips to help make sure your message is heard.
Tags: audio levels, get focused, prepare, recording, room tone
Rock Classics and SEO
Photo credit: imaginepaolo
Last week, as my beloved watched a TV special featuring Ron Hawkins amidst rock legends Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, it dawned on me that, just like classic rock tunes, some SEO guidelines never die. Yes, every once in a while Google performs one of its dreaded updates, adding some new rules into what makes sites rank first among thousands of results. However, there are some foundational principles that, though they can be considered “vintage”, should still be followed. Among them we have content, title tags and quality inbound links.
Content
As of late, Google has been improving its Flash-indexing capabilities, but it still encounters some difficulty crawling through Web sites with “special effects”. As far as Google is concerned, text is the best content you could use. Google encounters no hiccups “reading” through a page’s text when it’s plain HTML. Furthermore, when giving some thought to the copy for a Web page, remember to keep it relevant to what your visitors would expect to see, and you’re already ahead of the pack. Think of what your audience would like to read – what message would transform someone from a mere visitor to loyal customer, and use those words on your pages.
Title Tags
A Web page’s title is determined by the text displayed between the HTML tags <title> and </title> in a page’s source code. When a page is displayed on browsers, the title is rendered on the top part of the active window.
In the same way that humans refer to an article’s title to quickly decipher its topic, so does Google “read” a Web page’s title to judge what it is all about. For that reason, make the title descriptive of the subject of the page. One mistake that is commonly made is inserting only a company’s name as the title (“Acme, Inc.”, as an example), instead of what the page pertains to (for example, “Red Widget Solutions for Sustainable Turtles by Acme Inc”).
When composing a title, consider using the keyword that best describes the subject of that page. It will further help such page to rank better in search engine results (although it’s not as simple as that… otherwise, I’d be out of a job), while also increasing the user-friendliness. One caveat is to not overstuff your title tag with repeated keywords. That’s a no-no. It’s as outdated as one-hit wonders from the 90′s. And it’s not poised for a comeback anytime soon.
Inbound links
Continuing with the music hits analogy, just as a track is made popular largely because of the air-time it receives from large radio stations and MTV (or MuchMusic, here in Canada), so does a Web site’s level of success depend on the number of links that are driven to it from important, influencing sites. This has been the case for years, and that’s why professionals in the industry often talk about performing a link campaign when optimizing a Web site. The “one-hit wonder” counterpart to this would be to delve into shoddy practices just for the sake of securing links for a site – such as participating in “link farms” and getting unreputable domains to refer to yours just because of the link that they’re giving you. This will only do you harm. Don’t. Do. It.
What you’ve just read is merely a very light introduction to what makes a site successful with Google, as there are many other factors that go into play. One thing that you can count on is that “flavour of the month” SEO practices usually do fade away, and if not implemented properly, can cause your site more harm than good. Stick to the classics.
Guacira Naves
eMarketing Strategist
@OnlineStrategy
Tags: Search Engine Optimization, SEO
The Era of Collaboration
The internet imitates life. Or does life imitate the internet?
I’ve been contemplating this lately. I am fortunate to belong to a network of powerful business owners. These days when we meet, the same theme resurfaces — that the new era of business is all about collaboration. This from even the most crusty Alphas in the group! The trend is away from competition simply for the sake of winning, or watching your competitors bleed. Leaders and smart entrepreneurs are spending more time building alliances, looking for opportunities to collaborate with other businesses.
At first glance, this may not seem revolutionary. Since the beginning of time, successful businesses have been built on relationships. But, this is different. It’s about actively seeking collaboration with similar and complimentary businesses, rather than reserving relationship building for customers. It’s the realtor who collaborates with the accountant, conveyance lawyer, mortgage specialist, and home staging company. In our case, it’s alliances with the PR firm (the Tartan Group), boutique branding/design studio (Ideastream Design), WordPress specialist (Bluelime Media) to create a delicious win-win. Such collaborations mean one stop service for clients, no gaps, overlaps, miscommunications, or turf wars between service providers. For each contributor, it means a wider net for attracting clients and a forum for creative exchange.
Collaboration is what the internet is all about. Wikis, open source software, and mashups are now the norm, proving unequivocally that we can achieve greatness when we decide to work together.
So the question remains, is internet culture shifting real world business or is real world business simply following a course that began long before Google became a verb?
- Moyra Rodger
CEO, Magnify Digital Inc.
Tags: brand design, collaboration, new era, pr firm, women in business, WordPress
