10.07.08

Digital Marketing Series

We have lately fielded an increasing number of calls about online digital marketing services and strategies, so in the spirit of sharing decided it was time to put together a primer that outlines digital marketing basics such as social media, bookmarking, video/podcasts, RSS, and so on. Since it’s too much information to share in a single post, we have broken our primer into a series of tips and tactics that not only answer the questions of ‘how’ and ‘why’ but also offer practical steps for integrating these practices into your own online endeavors.

Powerful Marketing Tools
We have seen firsthand the power of how this works. A few years ago mightybytes.com was a fun but difficult to update site that relied heavily on Flash and, if we were lucky, received a few thousand hits each month. The design was clever, the animation was engaging, but since it was rarely updated and all content was hidden from search engines via barriers formed by the Flash Player it was hard to find. As such, it certainly didn’t live up its marketing potential. When we converted to a standards-based site our hit count went up significantly just by the mere fact that Google and other search engines could now understand and interpret our content and serve us up in results accordingly.

But that was only half the challenge. Since the launch, we have marketed the site and our company online with tools like blogs, social media, social bookmarking, and so on. We update site content as much as our schedules will allow and aggregate each update via RSS and other tools in the hopes of reaching the widest possible audience. As a result we have seen traffic (and business) rise on a level proportionate to our efforts. The site now regularly gets between 100,000 and 150,000 hits per month and has been on a steady incline since we started all this digital marketing madness.

The Almighty Link
In a nutshell, online digital marketing is mostly about the almighty link. The hope is to foster an environment that makes it easy for users (i.e. potential customers) to find links to your content. ‘Link Love’ isn’t the only element of digital marketing, of course, but it plays a huge role. Search engines evaluate your site based on the number of external links coming to you and how those sites rank in terms of traffic and reliability. The more external links there are leading to your site, the higher your site will rank and the more often it will appear in search engine results. Many of the strategies outlined in this series are built around this concept.

Personal Relationships
Digital marketing is also about personal relationships. Transparency is the modus operandi in today’s digital marketing world and folks who are insincere about their product or service run the very real risk of being called out and blacklisted. The internet has an uncanny knack of crying shenanigans on charlatans and snake-oil salesman, so if your product or service is anything less than reputable you might want to rethink it. Many of the tips and suggestions outlined in this series allow you to quickly and effectively communicate on a personal level with a large amount of people. When you do so, make sure you are being honest, sincere and, dare I say it, personal. Social media by its very nature blurs the lines between business and personal and in my humble opinion it is the wise digital marketer who embraces that fact. People want to build business relationships with people not faceless corporations. Keeping it real can go a long way toward making this happen.

Myth: Digital Marketing is Free
Let’s also debunk the myth that social media and online marketing are free. Sure, it doesn’t cost anything to create a Facebook profile or sign up for a Digg account, but if time is indeed money, anyone looking to embark on a digital marketing journey should realize that what digital marketing offers in terms of free services, it more than makes up for in time needed to do a good job. On any given week I can spend as little as a few hours or as many as twenty updating profiles, status, photostreams, blog entries, or submitting content to YouTube, Digg, Technorati and their ilk.

All this said, please enjoy (and comment prolifically on) our series of digital marketing tips. For more in-depth and detailed information on these topics and more, check out the excellent content at MarketingProfs, Hubspot, Marketing Sherpa and others.

Also, David Meerman Scott book titled The New Rules of Marketing and PR is an excellent resource to help get you started. To see all posts related to digital marketing on this blog, click on that category to the right.

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