Clicksharp Marketing

A recent report published by eMarketer summarizes the findings of a survey of 600+ marketing executives run by Anderson Analytics.

Choosing from a wide range of marketing trends which included viral campaigns, innovative branding, new media and green marketing, the first and second most important marketing trends are Marketing Basics and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Or, to put this in slightly different terms: marketing executives believe that the most important key to success for 2008 is to get back to the fundamentals of marketing–and beyond that, search engine optimization is the most important marketing application on the web.

Does this maybe seem a bit contradictory? They’re saying we should go back to the drawing board, only to then turn our attention to a highly-interpretive sport whose rules are rewritten every day, making webmasters feel like they’re playing Mad Libs on a Nintendo Wii?

In fact, yes, because marketing basics are what make SEO tick:

• Competitive common sense will sometimes tell you to shoot for the #1 ranking in a lower-traffic, less competitive keyword or phrase using the KEI (or “Keyword Effectiveness Index” - Wordtracker makes this easy.)
• Your choice of keywords can help you execute push/pull strategies discussed last week.
• The indelible mark of every word, image, sound or video tied to your site can one day turn up in a search engine — making it all fodder for public relations.
• Marketing, like SEO, is both an art and a science. The marketing manager tirelessly assembles reams of data reflecting marketing insights, and then pores over the data and pulls it limb from limb. The SEO makes a hundred and one tactical decisions about word order in title tags, deep link ratio, and H1 tagging… but scrap all that in favor of eloquent copy which will be preferred by a human reader and ignored by Googlebot.

So if you’re planning the next big digital campaign for 2008, you wouldn’t be wasting your time by pulling out your go-to marketing text from business school. You can also dig around the net for good articles on marketing theory.

In case you’re wondering, the survey also unearthed some other valuable, if not predictable insights: the demographic of choice is baby boomers, the market of choice is China, and Seth Godin was named the most important marketing guru of today (beating out Steve Jobs, who might have gotten the nod if he sold just eight or nine more iPods).

That’s all the marketing wisdom you’ll need for now.

Epilogue - If you read all the way to the bottom, there’s a long list of the top books named by respondents. My advice is to read Blink, and if it doesn’t turn you into a genius, then read all the others.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 @ 9:44 pm on the category Copy writing, Marketing Theory, SEM, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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