Marketing Strategy

There are several ways to conduct online advertising campaigns. You can pay search engines or other Internet publishers hosting your ads each time one of your ads is clicked, every 1,000 times the ad is seen, or every time the ad prompts a more sales-related action.

Our illustrious founder and VP of product development, Larry Kim, is presenting tomorrow, March 9, at SearchFest 2010, an SEMpdx event, taking place at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. (Click here for the full agenda.)

Larry will be talking about competitive intelligence:

Your marketing efforts do not exist in a vacuum. Effective competitive analysis gives you the information you need to ‘remove the blinders’ in terms of viewing your company and brands as customers do, and to highly tune your Paid Search Marketing strategies for success. This session identifies which competitive intelligence efforts enable you to determine what your competitors are doing to drive their online businesses, so that you can either emulate their PPC successes, or exploit their PPC weaknesses.

The recession forced all businesses to reconsider each and every dollar spent, and search marketing was no exception. We saw our own PPC software client, 1-800-Mattress, side-step the recession after implementing a well-organized pay-per-click campaign. However, Ken's salary survey suggested the recession lowered online marketers' income; his data showed that the average salary was down from industry surveys of the previous year.

Give me someone's name, and I'll find their personal email address. Sure, it may take some extensive digging and sleuthing, but I'll find you eventually. And I'm not paying to root you out or buying your private info from a lead gen company (though sometimes that would be easier). This is just good old fashioned, organic searching, scanning and scouring the Internet like a Web gumshoe. And not stopping until I ferret out that personal email.

Why is it important to obtain someone's personal email address?

If you're sending out an important email that you really want to be taken seriously and improve your chances of getting an actual response, you need to go directly to the source. Sending an important, personal email to the info[at]companyX.com, or dumping it into a "Contact Us" form is a virtual black hole.

There is a very interesting project underway over at Cluetrain Plus 10 where bloggers are creating content to speak to the 95 theses enumerated in the book. A bit late, I’ve decided to take a swing and offer something to the project (it’s a very cool idea; if you haven’t yet, hop over and check out some of the people who’ve contributed; lots of great stuff). Anyway my question is 66: 

66. As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?