After taking a bit of time off after a whirlwind year to enjoy some family time during the holidays, I’m back on the scene. I’m very excited at the prospect of 2010 and my place in it. I am excited learn more about online marketing and really dig deep into SEO strategies. The hunger to learn has been recharged so lets start the new decade- shall we?
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Hey All, sorry this is a weird post- just submitting to Technorati and they have a verification code to post: 2UUCC4WCV7Y2
Looks spammy and feels weird- hope this is all good!
The Wikipedia definition of search engine marketing is as follows:
Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.
You can also think of it as the variety of methods used to deliver your website or ad to based on a search query. Think of how powerful that is. People are looking for specific goods or services based on targeted keyword queries. Show them relevent information and content you are already light years ahead of the curve and in the first stages of the sales funnel. Instead of treating your ad as something disruptive to their experience they are ready for engagement and purchase.
Make sure that you are optimizing for the right keywords and phrases. Make sure your content is relevent to what you are optimizing for. Know your target audience and how they will search for your product. Just because someone in the industry refers to it as a Whatchacallit, your audience might know it more commonly as a Whoozerwhatzle. Are you optimizing for Whoozerwhatzle? Because if you are not, someone else probably is.
Jay Berkowitz, one of my instructors from my USF Internet Marketing program has started a great social network group on Ning called InternetMarketingClub.org. This is a great spot for all things related to the online world of marketing with videos, a forum space, upcoming event notifications, networking and a blog space. Hope to see you there!
We adjust our message based on our audience. We do this every day when talking to friends, co-workers or family. If I am at a networking event talking about my job the jargon that I use will be vastly different than if I’m talking to my Grandma. If I am talking to someone that has never cooked more than mac and cheese out of a box my description of how I made this soup will be vastly different than if I am talking to a foodie friend. Don’t forget these principles when working on a project. Sometimes we get so deep into something that we can no longer see it at a top line level and lose who our true audience is.
I was working on a project I learned quickly that things that made complete sense to me were not user friendly for the intended audience- I forgot to adjust my message. It’s because I was in too deep. Realizing my error, I started my own mini focus groups – a small sample of my target audience and polled them. Can you use this? Do you understand this? Is there a better way? In the end the outcome I intended was less painful for all involved as my audience was less frustrated and more apt to return clean results.
Just remember who you are targeting and ask them “Does this make sense?”
So at this point you might be wondering to yourself, “Why marketing on target?”
I started in the marketing field when I was 15. Now, it wasn’t officially called marketing it was called being a server at the local golf course restaurant- but stay with me. At that time little did I know but I was learning the intricacies of figuring out my audience. Through the years I became better and better at the finesse of it and post college landed a coveted job in an established restaurant in downtown Omaha called M’s Pub. (A small aside, I did finish college with a graphic design degree but I was sure at that point I wasn’t ready to sit down in a cube) At M’s the saying was M’s supplies the product and the space, but you need to sell it and make it a great experience for your diners, aka audience. I learned about people. How they behave in their leisure time, how they react, what they expect and how to react to them. I figured out how to continually adjust my marketing message shift to shift, table by table, customer by customer.
After a few years the lure of the regular hours and 401k started to look quite appealing. A friend that I worked with at the time recommended I apply at my current company. Thankfully the manager that interviewed me saw my transferable skills and hired me. Now audience targeting at a granular level is my central focus. Through the years I have been involved with different stages of the service that we provide but the overall message is the same: Find your target audience and eliminate wasteful media spending. So, I am back to (or I guess I never left it) how do they behave, how do they react, what do they expect and how do we react to them on behalf of the client. Concepts ring true, only the tools are different. How do we adjust the message market by market, system by system, household by household?
The top layer of my marketing experience is the degree that I am currently working on in Internet Marketing. I have found a passion with online marketing as I think the audience targeting and analytics potentials are amazing. Tracking is at a level never been seen before in media and so the how and what of the audience is getting sharper by the day. Geographic, demographic and psychographic behaviors crossed with quantitative elements can create a user experience that is practically mind blowing.
So, how do we adjust the message page by page, click by click and minute by minute?
My name is Jessica Knobbe and I am a Chicago based marketing strategist specializing in audience targeting through Internet and traditional media planning, analytics and campaign management. In this space I want to talk about my own experiences using targeted marketing as well as comment on the ever (and rapidly) changing landscape where advertising is becoming more precisely focused and marketers are being held ever more accountable.
I might post on an article that I read, an experience that I had or even about my challenges as I move my efforts from a broadcast background into the vastness that is online. The concepts are the same, the executions are different but in the end it’s all pretty cool stuff.
Welcome to Marketing on Target.
