The Searchies

Not long ago, seemingly every company rushed into the blogosphere with its home grown corporate blog. The thinking was the company could use this platform as a marketing megaphone to amplify the buzz around its latest products, events, and more. Companies soon realized that the excitement of hosting a blog soon died off and their blogs floundered never to be touched again. At Red Bricks Media, we often encourage our clients to make the plunge, but not before a serious gut check. Many articles focus on the philosophy of blogging; I’m going to discuss the practicality and logistics of blog ownership, an oft overlooked topic.

[Read more →]

A typical marketer’s gut reaction when asked about its marketing objectives is to scream emphatically “MORE SALES”. As we saw in my previous post, driving sales is only one aspect of well run paid search campaigns. Paid search campaigns can also build awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads. After all, no one is going to buy your product if they don’t know it’s there or why it’s worthwhile. Best in class paid search marketers utilize paid search for all four objectives, reverse the sales funnel to think like their customers, and use apples to apples metrics to assess the performance of their campaigns. This post addresses reversing the sales funnel.

[Read more →]

I suspect that many marketers sweat the “Launch” phase more than any other. They’ve seen other marketing efforts tank after tons of planning and want to get it just right. The bad news is that like with a book, the opening chapter of a paid search campaign sets the stage for what’s to come. Mess it up and the rest isn’t worth the bother. The good news is that it’s harder to mess up than most marketers expect. This post (and subsequent ones) will help you get your campaign on the right track from the start. Today, I’ll focus on marketing objectives.

[Read more →]

Most paid search campaigns evolve with time, information, and experience. Don’t expect to get the campaign absolutely right from the start. You can’t! You don’t have enough information! Paid search campaigns need to embrace trial and error to blossom. You may have all the experience in the world running paid search campaigns, but that alone will only take you so far in this business.

Generally, you can think about this evolution in terms of three distinct phases: launch, optimize, and sustain. Each phase should have its own goals, expectations, and challenges. Below, I’ve given a taste of how each phase will play out. In my upcoming posts, I will dig deeper into some specifics of each phase.

[Read more →]

DEMO 08 happened a few weeks back. As the technology world reveled in the latest game changers, my eyes were squarely trained on one company, TubeMogul. This company has the potential to revolutionize online video distribution, analysis, and monetization. Online video is booming and offers a compelling new channel for marketers to peddle their products and services. It’s still in its infancy, though, and marketers are still figuring out how best to capitalize on it. The process of uploading videos to sites and then tracking them afterwards is very manual and time consuming. Also, it’s difficult to develop insights about who is actually watching the videos. It would be fine if there were only one site, but the landscape is fragmented with lots of sites vying for market share.

When planning campaigns, I must make difficult decisions. Which content should I use? Which site should I use – YouTube, Revver, Brightcove, Metacafe? Which results should I analyze?

Based in the Bay Area, TubeMogul has stepped in to the rescue. Its online video distribution, tracking, and analysis platform is best of breed and addresses many of the pain points previously mentioned. Now, I can upload a video once and then distribute it out to 12 video sharing sites. Then, it automatically begins tracking valuable performance data – like views, comments, etc – and gives me tools to slice and dice the data in meaningful ways. These are only some of the many features offered. All of this is free up to 150 videos per month!

So thanks TubeMogul! I can’t wait to see what new tools you’ll unveil next.

How about I kick off my newly minted search marketing blog with a brief Twitter-style self-introduction?

SharkSmack I’ve never scribed a blog before
SharkSmack I’ve never even penned a journal
SharkSmack I’ve got a lot to say about search marketing
SharkSmack I’d rather share my thoughts with you than continue boring my friends
SharkSmack I recently graduated from the Haas School of Business and now happily work at Red Bricks Media in San Francisco. My LinkedIn profile covers the rest
SharkSmack I hope you’ll leave lots of comments
SharkSmack More to come

Visit the About Scott Tieman section for more information about the author.