Why being a strategic marketer is so important

Online Marketing

tonyadam January 4, 2010 at 9:45 am 14

I've spent the last week at my parents house in a little town in Los Angeles called LaCrescenta. It's been the first time I haven't been in an office for over 1 week in 10 years (side note: this is the first time I've been at my parents for this long for almost 5 years). It has been good to take some time and reflect on things and do a little bit of looking at things from that 10 thousand foot view. Which has led me to thinking about why it is ever so important to take time, take a step back, and think more strategically.

Looking at things strategically

As it turns out, having your head down and not taking the time to create a strategic approach to things isn't always the best...well...STRATEGY. I've learned a lot about how to think more holistically and strategically over the past 4-5 years. This has created opportunities for me to truly be strategic, innovate, and lead teams, while also delivering value tactically on a daily basis. As we all know, much of marketing and creating great products is really understanding an industry, verticals within it, the overall market, and/or a customer and their needs. The creation of the new types of media, such as social media sites like Twitter, has truly shined light on how important a customer is. You can find many posts around the web talking about engaging customers, honesty, and being transparent (funny thing is, thats all some social media people talk about, but I digress). The point is, the days of shouting at people via television ads isn't really "moving the needle" the way it use to, and, as consumers really look to at different forms of consuming media, we have to understand the people we are looking to reach even more.

Being strategic provides opportunities to see what you might have missed.

We are all in "go mode" and trying to make things happen daily, trying to "provide value." There are so many days that I sit there and engage in social media, work on editorial calendars, and put together plans, etc. for the companies I am working for that I don't have the time to think strategically. This becomes a problem because a lot of things that are glaring situations or opportunities tend to pass you by. But, the question is, when you are spinning your wheels just trying to get stuff done, are you really providing value to your organization? Your Client? and even more so, the consumer? In my opinion, you are not. That is why being more strategic provides opportunities and more value in the long run. Being strategic means stopping what you are doing, analyzing a consumer, and finding out what they are actually looking for. Analyzing a journalist and finding out what they would write about, what they would link to, who they would reach out to. Even better, looking at data to understand patterns, user behavior, etc. that will truthfully provide value to a consumer. Which means you, as a strategic thinker is providing more value by obtaining more customers or actively engaging, re-engaging, and retaining more customers.

Set aside time to think strategically

Taking the time out daily or weekly, gives you an opportunity to think more holistically as a marketer. Take time to think about what people want. Marketing is not about pushing a message or advertising your product. Marketing is truly understand what is important in any given marketplace. Marketing is the process of creating value in an industry that will ultimately lead to obtaining customers and retaining customers. An example of this can be a product you offer or a template that you develop for your website. Some time ago, I was putting together specifications for pages that should be built on a site. I threw them together from an SEO perspective. Title Tags, alt tags, URLs, etc...you name the technical requirement, and I had it spec'd out. The problem I didn't think through was, am I really creating value? Am I really understanding what people want out of those pages? Would customers be happy? Would the Media? Would Social Media Users? Overall, that was the problem I was not thinking through and that is an order of magnitude greater than any title tag or url in the long run. I hit this realization that I should not just try to get stuff done and should actually take some time to think through a problem. Now that I have, I have made sure that I dedicate time to actually blocking out periods of time to think more strategically on a weekly basis. During that time, I switch my surroundings and either go to a coffee shop, lock myself in a conference room at the office, or something of that sort.

Consultants can help with Strategy

There are three ways that bringing in consultants can help with the problem of thinking strategically as an organization: Consultants can provide a fresh set of eyes that are not tightly integrated with your business, along with being able to be objective about features, content, etc. because they are not vested in the design, for example. Hiring a strategic consultant also means they will not be inundated with trying to deliver on daily traffic goals, daily product meetings, etc. They will be able to work externally, analyze a business, an industry, and the consumer and make recommendations that you can implement. Hire consultants that are tacticians to help alleviate your daily support needs. Whether you are managing communities, doing something tied to SEO, managing PPC campaigns, etc. All that matters is that you are bringing someone in to alleviate the fact that you need free time to think more strategically. Many times, a business has learned so much about their industry that they have all the research necessary to think strategically and just needs to time and ability to step away from day to day processes to actually do just that, think strategically. Being a consultant now at days is no longer about specialization and more about strategy. Todd Malicoat just recently wrote about being a Business Management Consultant and I think its so important to think that way now. Just being a PPC consultant, SEO or Social Media Marketer isn't going to cut it going forward. It is the exact reason that I am happy that I have prided myself in becoming a generalist in technology and the Internet. Understanding all facets of project management, product development, ideation, marketing, etc. is so important. But, be careful, because, just like the ever so popular "Social Media Experts" that can talk about being one, but, don't really understand it. The same goes here, being a business consultant and advising businesses isn't just knowing a few things, it's being a generalist that understands all aspects deeply enough to truly provide holistic feedback to an organization about their market, their product, etc.

Overall Web Strategy is crucial

Overall, it is important to start thinking more strategically as businesses start to evolve online. Being strategic, being a leader, and understanding a market is more important now than it ever was. Being a true marketer involves understanding an industry and providing value. We should all be striving to provide more value to organizations going forward. Have you spend enough time on web strategy? Are you hoping to spend more time on it? I want to hear what people are thinking about thinking strategically overall!

Conferences

Social Media Marketing for your Business at SXSWi

tonyadam August 26, 2009 at 8:00 am 1

About two months ago, I reached out to Chris Winfield, Brent Csutoras, and Todd Malicoat about putting together a Social Media Marketing for your Business Panel at SXSW Interactive. We all thought it would be a great idea and I put it together. All of us particpates in some sort of Social Media Marketing, Optimization, and Promotion on a daily basis with clients and/or the companies we work for. We wanted to share the knowledge that we have all gained on how to successfully drive traffic to sites, how to measure that traffic, and how Social Media Marketing for your Business really works. We understand SXSW Interactive is a WAYS away at this point, but, the Panel Picker voting has been in full throttle and people have been talking about it like crazy on twitter. It's no surprise that everyone is trying to pimp their panels and get people to vote. Which is the reason for this post! A major part of the SXSW Panel Picker process is votes and feedback from the community on the panel ideas submitted. We have pitched a panel idea on "Social Media Marketing for YOUR Business" and WE NEED YOUR VOTE! Click on the SXSW 2010 Panel Picker thumbs up image here, click the thumbs up and leave us a comment with what you want to see, why you are excited about the Panel, and/or any feedback you have! We are all excited about the opportunity and looking forward to rocking it for you guys in Austin!

Conferences socialmedia sxsw

Online Marketing

Building Traction with Search and Social Media Visibility

tonyadam July 15, 2009 at 12:49 am 11

Over the last few months I’ve seen an interesting cross section of startups to large brands and marketers to developers that are all running businesses. There has been one thing that ties all of these people together, and that is gaining traction and visibility to your website or business online.

If you are a large brand, you already have that visibility, but it is hard to continue to be nimble and build quickly, therefore, you are typically left behind. While startups run into a different kind of problem, they are able to create cool cutting edge products, but, does anyone see these products? Many times, they are not visible and have no traction. I’ve talked to a number of developers, product guys, and “startup dudes” that all run into that problem. The reason being:

People don’t realize that just building a great product is not going to bring you buzz, traffic, or growth, it doesn’t work without visibility.

So, what do you do to solve this problem? There are a few things that you can do if you are a startup or your just a humble guy trying to make a living off a website that you own.

Search Visibility

SEO seemed like such a 4 letter word a few years ago. And, lately I’ve had interesting conversations around getting traffic in general, where I’ve been the SEO Evangelist, talking about how targeted and the high ROI of Search Traffic. It’s been exciting talking people and businesses that understand or are beginning to understand the importance for Search Visibility.

Creating Search Visibility is created by building Search Friendly websites that are authoritative to a given Search Engine.

How do I know what people are looking for?

A lot of people jump into SEO and try to build sites and throw popular phrases into h1’s, titles, etc. It’s important to understand the industry you are in and do the research that is required to know what it is people are searching for, this is called keyword research. For example, the knowing that people search for “cars” rather than “automobile.” (yes, I know that’s a crude example, but, you get the point!). SEOBook has a Free Keyword Research Tool to do this for you.

What is a Search Friendly Website?

A search friendly website is a website that is built so that a Search Engine will index and crawl their content, while adding importance, relevance, and authority to that sites content. Many times organizations will make mistakes by building a flash site or an Ajax site that is entirely unable to be indexed or crawled by a “search engine spider.” There are tips and tricks on on how to build Ajax SEO Friendly websites out there.

Creating authority is the key to visibility!

At the end of the day, no matter how much you’ve researched the keywords and how great you’ve built out your site so it is search friendly, you need external links. Without links to your site from external resources, you will not rank nor get search traffic, bottom line. Getting links isn’t an easy job either, it is the crux of the SEO problem. (i.e. It’s why we get paid the big bucks!)

Building links is an interesting mix of many different cross-functional skills. Whether it is the sales pitch to websites asking for links, the biz dev angle of partnering with other sites or buying links (while, I would NEVER condone that, wink wink!), or the art of building buzz around your content, product, or service through the Social Web.

Social Media Visibility

Ah, Social Media, the buzzword amongst all buzzwords across the web now at days, it’s amazing how much it is talked about. Amazingly enough, Social Media has become a part of the general web presence and we are moving away from it being a piece of the business, so to speak, but rather, the a fully conversational and connected Social Web.

Okay okay, I’ll get to the point: Getting visibility via the Social Web is done by being conversational, engaging, and invoking emotions.

Social Media news sites like Digg

Creating content that creates a conversation around a particular topic, whether it is hilarious, sad, resourceful, etc. Creating content like this is all about invoking the emotions. You want to create content that a user is going to want to Digg. You want to have a page that is going to make someone stop while “stumbling” through your site. But, it doesn’t stop there is still another really important factor of gaining visibility:

If influencers within the Social Media space do not know about your content, then guess what, it is not going to be made visible. People and the masses follow the influencers (and I’m not just talking about twitter) by watching them and seeing what they are talking about, they create the “water cooler conversations.” It is similar to Search in that you need to build a site that the search engines can not only see, but is authoritative.

Create conversations and engagement about your brand

Remember those conversations that I talked about, well, pay attention, because the conversations are happening all across the Social Web. But, you can do things to create those conversations and create engagement that is tied to your brand or your site.

Be insightful, engaging, and provocative when creating a conversation

Don’t be a feed, creating a twitter account and throwing your RSS feed is not participating in the Social Web, it’s a feed and nothing else. You want to create a conversation, think of ways that you can create conversations about your brand. If you are a sports site, talk about upcoming events, like the NBA Draft. If you are a political opinions site, then you might want to ask questions on the Social Web about legislation and elections.

When you create conversations and people are engaging with you and your brand, then you are essentially creating visibility.

The Visibility of Trends

Since moving more into the Publishing and Media side of the business from E-Commerce and Product Centric websites, I’ve learned a ton around insights around trends. Understanding trends gives you insight into the topics that are “buzzing” around a certain category or vertical. You can use a tool like Google Insights to give you that knowledge.

So, you’re sitting there going, “great, who cares what is buzzing!?”...fine , you probably aren’t. That said, this is extremely important to understand, because, creating content around these trends can create the Search and Social Media Visibility needed to grow your business.

Don’t be good, be GREAT!

Remember, your product or content will not survive on it’s sheer awesomeness (even though I’m sure it is!). Make sure that you are considering the visibility of your product and content: ONLY THEN, can your Product and Content be truly considered GREAT!

SEO socialmedia startups traction visiblity

Social Media

Skittles Aggregated Website, is this a Win or Fail?

tonyadam March 2, 2009 at 1:15 am 4

Lots a brewing on the Skittles madness tonight because of they're new "Social Media Aggregation" for their domain. The question I have is, was this a move of pure genius? Or, are they shooting themselves in the foot!

Age and Demographics to get Started:

To start with, before you start to interact with anything Skittles, they make you enter your age. Which, could be a great thing for the simple fact that they could start collecting the demographics of who their main audience is. But, how many people find this as a roadblock? Typically, unobtrusive UI is preferred for new users, but, it's even worse when every time you hit the dot com, they continue to ask you. This is both a intrusive UI and possibility for skewed deomagraphical data. End Result: FAIL

Twitter Search Home Page

After you've gotten past that point you are now stuck in a situation where you have to think about what you have to do. you are left with almost no outs and no where to go put to look at a twitter search screen and a modal window that has some links. If I was a normal user, my first thought was..."Um, I'm lost, I'm getting out of here." or "Hmm, I wonder if I hit the wrong page?" It wouldn't hit the normal user right away that there is a bit of a different user experience being exposed here. End Result: FAIL

Twitter Trending Topics

You'll notice that in Twitter Search, "#skittles" is a trending topic. But, this would obviously not last for long, otherwise, people would constantly initiate a twitter search on domains to create trending topics...but wait...did we just stumble upon a hole in the trending topics on twitter? We'll wait to see where that goes and how Twitter deals with it. Either way, this won't last for long, otherwise, "skittles" will be trending on twitter forever, and, I'm sure Twitter isn't okay with this. End Result: FAIL

Search Results and SEO

Lets take a minute to think about how this effects their Search Results and Traffic for skittles terms. As it stands sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, etc. need no help with SEO. But, this new UI provides no content on the skittles.com domain for any of their product or relevant content. Instead, Skittles is now linking to sites like Wikipedia. As a matter of fact, clicking on any of the product links in the widget through skittles takes you to Wikipedia. The only link that keeps you on Skittles.com, "Products," a generic search term. Helping sites like Wikipedia and YouTube doesn't help the SEO value on their domain. What it will do is a create a variety of sites that show up for brand related terms. The problem is that you could quite possibly be killing all internal SEO efforts and watching those sites rank and drive traffic outside your domain. End Result: Push

Conversation, and Publicity

That all said, lets take a look at the most important questions about the new aggregated website. Starting with Conversation and Publicity. While, skittles is trending on twitter and tons of people are talking about it, the question we have to ask is, are we the ones that they really want talking? We all have to remember that we are a part of the small fraction of the population and that we shouldn't live within the EchoChamber. The current conversation is definitely stuck within the tech community and we are all talking about it, which is good. The problem is, how much of us talking about it is their target audience, demographic, or is the average user they are trying to reach. To sum up, we are talking, the cutting edge of the tech crowds that are following on twitter and such, but, the everyday consumer, well, this conversation probably isn't getting to them...yet. End Result: Push

Branding

With regards to branding, I feel like they are leaving themselves an opportunity for many failures. From what is being mentioned on the homepage via twitter, to the links being injected into the twitter stream via the trending search term, to possible porn spam or injecting content via framebusting. (credit Michael Gray). Remember those Wikipedia pages I talked about a couple minutes ago, well, how about the people that will edit those pages and insert related content spam into Wikipedia. Those, those pages are editable, and, we could see an influx of spam on those pages. Finally, imagine if you are a parent and you are watching your kid play around with skittles.com and have a porn link passed to your child in a spammy way. Next thing you know, twitter is being sued by many a parent and the branding just took a nose dive because of bad publicity. End Result: FAIL Overall Result: FAIL (4-2) Make sure you Subscribe to my blog and check me out on twitter to keep the conversaton going!

SEO skittles socialmedia Twitter

SEO

Social Media – Part 2: Dominating the Search Engine Results Pages

tonyadam January 15, 2008 at 4:31 pm 4

Last week I talked about how to stay active, answer questions, etc. to keep brand awareness high and reputation management under control. This week, I'm going to give you an overview of how to dominate the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) by using Social Media to your advantage. We all know since the "Web 2.0 Evolution" there has been a massive influx of Social Media properties on the web. That being said, you can use this to your advantage from another Branding and Reputation Management aspect by using them to control the top 10 results listed in the SERPs for your branded search. (e.g. digg) Here is what you do: 1. Find Social Media sites that are relevant: Do some quick research and find the sites that are relevant to you. If you do real estate, using YouTube is a great site...at the same time...if you are a large tech company, TechCrunch's "CrunchBoard" is a great place to get a public profile about your company. Quick note though, keep this up to date...some brands do a bad job of this. 2. Build your branded social media page: Getting a public page on hot spots like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. is very easy to do and build. There is already a template behind them, all you need to do is adjust it so that you are branding your page appropriately. Some sites, (e.g. MySpace) require some markup/css, but still very simple. Most organizations have already done this, if you have, GREAT!, you're already one step closer to success. 3. Subdomians: Google has cracked down on the subdomain issue as of late, but, that being said for branding purposes, it is still helping out in dominating the SERPs. For example, having a careers or jobs mini-site/subdomain on your brand (e.g. careers.myawesomebrand.com) will give you yet another listing. 4. Blogging: O.K., I realize this is not so much related to a social media site...but it is related to the SERPs and control them. Blogging around your topic and creating linkbaitable items will not only get you a ton of traffic, but the true success comes from the amount of links for your site. So, be sure to set your blog up on your domain as a subfolder (http:://thegreatestbrandever.com/blog) or as a subdomain (blog.myreallycoolbrand.com). Along with all of that, you can use your blog as a great tool to pass some great PR value and Link Popularity to your Social Media sites. 5. Link Building: Doing link building on your ".com" is not the only place to focus. Granted, that being said, most social media sites do contain some heavy PR value and a good starting point. So, with very little effort, but an effort none-the-less, you will be able to rank those pages. So, send a link from your ".com", your blog, etc. and a small link building effort should help. Now, remember, these are the 5 steps to achieving Search Engine Results Page domination. Doing only 1 or 2 of these things will help your organization, but, you will receive the most effectiveness by following the steps and ensuring the dependencies. Overall, your goal for the overall effort is reputation management and ensuring that your brand is controlling the SERP for a branded search (e.g. "Digg"). Doing so can have a tremendous amount of value and reduce a ton of negative publicity for your brand.

SEO socialmedia

Tony Adam

Entrepreneur, Marketer, Aspiring Polymath

socialmedia

Looking at things strategically

Being strategic provides opportunities to see what you might have missed.

Set aside time to think strategically

Consultants can help with Strategy

Overall Web Strategy is crucial

Search Visibility

How do I know what people are looking for?

What is a Search Friendly Website?

Creating authority is the key to visibility!

Social Media Visibility

Social Media news sites like Digg

Create conversations and engagement about your brand

The Visibility of Trends

Don’t be good, be GREAT!

Tony Adam

I've been in tech since 2000. I've founded multiple businesses, worked at Myspace, Yahoo!, and PayPal, and have successfully grown many businesses. These are my stories and how I've done it.

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