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 it for the rest of us!). As I mentioned in my Search Engine Land column earlier this month, 3 Dead …

Marketing technology as your ZMOT engine of war Continue Reading »

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 at their moment of expressed “intent.” But the design canvas — trying to market to people with a maximum of …

Google *finally* innovating with search ads Continue Reading »

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 want greater usability than you can possibly fathom. You weep for FrontPage software and you curse user-centered design. You …

A Few Good Marketers Continue Reading »

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 these subdisciplines of marketing grow independently of each other. Ultimately, however, they’re all focused on building connections and bonds with …

Content marketing + conversion optimization Continue Reading »

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 Engine Land. P.S. If you’re a professional designer and my PowerPoint-based illustration makes you cringe, I’d be thrilled to have …

The Mother of All Post-Click Marketing Diagrams Continue Reading »

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 of themselves, friends, family, pets, etc., and transpose their faces onto animated dancing elves — and then share those e-cards …

Experimental marketing: 1 out of 20 ain’t bad Continue Reading »

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 “sponsored answers” (i.e., ads) that show up with the results for those queries. While there’s a lot of chatter about …

Q&A threat to Google that marketers should watch Continue Reading »

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 it works: Xmarks is a free browser add-on for Firefox, IE, Safari, and Chrome. It was originally designed to synchronize …

Crowd sourced ads in Google — outside Google’s control Continue Reading »

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 a blog post that study reveals issues with search ads — trust and usefulness. (I have since also read similar …

Ratings in Google search ads address trust Continue Reading »

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 the argument: a deep-pocketed competitor can come along anytime, say flush with VC cash, and outspend you. One day you …

Risk in PPC vs. social media marketing Continue Reading »