Marketing Tactics

I finally got around to reading ZMOT: Winning The Zero Moment of Truth by Jim Lecinski, published by Google. If you haven’t read it yet, go grab a copy — it’s free. It’s actually a brilliant example of content marketing by Google — a company not exactly renown for their own content marketing (despite enabling […]

Maybe it’s the Mad Men marketer in my hybrid DNA, but I’ve always been a little underwhelmed with Google AdWords. The business model of pay-per-click (PPC) is great. The ability to scale to thousands of micro-targeted ads is great. The analytics and testing capabilities are pretty good. And, hey, major hats off to intercepting buyers

Jessep: You want conversions? Kaffee: I think I’m entitled to them. Jessep: You want conversions? Kaffee: I want the clicks. Jessep: You can’t handle the clicks! Son, we live in a world that has web pages. And those web pages have to be built for persuasion. Who’s going to do it? You? You, IT manager?

I’m a big believer in the power of “intersections,” as described by Frans Johansson in his inspiring book on innovation, The Medici Effect. The intersection of marketing and the-domain-formerly-known-as-IT is one, of course. But recently I’ve also been exploring some fascinating ideas by mixing concepts from the 131 different kinds of marketing. Often, many of

For my latest column on Search Engine Land, I sketched out a post-click marketing heuristic to help visualize the different factors at work in conversion optimization. Or, as I call it more informally, The Mother of All Post-Click Marketing Diagrams (click to enlarge): To read the article that explains this diagram, click over to Search

If you think a hit rate of 1 out of 20 for marketing ideas is a poor showing, go Elf Yourself. No, really. Take a lesson from OfficeMax’s “Elf Yourself” holiday campaign, that has been a viral brand marketing hit for four Christmas seasons in a row. The www.elfyourself.com web site lets people upload photos

Search engines created a new ecosystem for consumers and marketers — and in the process made Google worth around $200 billion. If you put aside the hype, the core value proposition is simple: people go to Google looking for things, and marketers whose products or services are related to those things are thrilled to buy

What if you could enhance your ads in Google with collective intelligence — without going through Google? Earlier this month, browser bookmark extension company Xmarks unveiled their plans to monetize their business with a service called SearchBoost. They take the idea of Google including ratings in ads to a whole new a level. Here’s how

I woke up this morning to read an incredibly exciting story on Search Engine Land, Yelp Ratings Appear In Google AdWords. This may be one of the most game changing experiments in the history of advertising. Here’s why. Last year, I did a research project on people’s attitudes towards sponsored search advertising, which led to

There’s an argument that’s been circulating in social media marketing circles about how “dangerous” it can be for marketers to rely on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, as compared to more organic ways of building traffic. You know, social media doesn’t have to be positioned as the destructor of advertising to justify its existence. The gist of