Which Marketing Director Are You?

As the marketing director at a large company, you are very, very busy. You have a full calendar of deadlines. You worked long and hard at the end of last year to develop this calendar. Your ad agency worked side by side with you to make sure your new product roll outs, your trade shows and your seasonal selling efforts were all mapped out with all the advertising, marketing and pr activities coordinated. You took care of your website last year, complete revamp looks pretty good if you do say so yourself. Full content management system put in that log analysis software so you would know how much traffic you get. And the web developer you used said it was optimized for search. So the website isn't even on your list. The agency did recommend some banner ads. But you are not sure how those work and you just don't think your company is ready for online advertising. Maybe next year. Life is good. Ignorance truly is bliss. You don't even realize how far behind your company is. You don't know that your main competition is the highest bidder for keywords including you brand and your product names. You don't realize that there was a huge chain of blog postings about your company's lousy customer service. You have no clue that the list of keywords used to optimize your site last year was put together by the web developer's part time receptionist. You haven't even noticed that every page on your site has the same title. If you search for your company name, boom, there you are. Top of the page in Google. Life is good. OK stop! maybe this scenario is outdated sooooo 2003. Let's paint a different picture with the exact same consequences. Busy marketing director. Working with the ad agency. Got everything working, moving, happening. Ads, brochures, trade shows. Doing some coordinated online ad campaigns with some retail partners. Cool. Seems to have this online thing going. But, the webmaster in IT keeps talking about search. He's asked if he can do some things to the website to help with the organic search results. You gave him a list of keywords that you thought were important and told him to please take care of it. The president wants to be first in Google for many of those words. And you are back to your to-do list. Ads, brochures, trade shows. Your IT guy has the search thing under control. You still don't know about your competitor's pay-per-click campaign that's eating your lunch. You still don't know about the blog chatter that is eating your company's reputation bit-by-bit. There’s that ignorance thing again. OK one more this marketing director has the same busy day, but last year he met with a firm that specializes in online marketing. He called in his ad agency, his IT department and his PR department and they all sat in on meetings with the online marketing firm. With everyone working together you got a solid, coordinated game plan for the year. Ads, brochures, trade shows, ongoing search optimization, and a solid pay-per-click campaign, all with ongoing metrics and analysis. The online guys did extensive keyword analysis. The final list was distributed to everyone: ad agency, writers, IT, PR, everyone. You know what your customers are searching for and you are now creating optimized content so they can find it. The online marketing firm worked with your IT department and the site has been optimized as much as possible without sacrificing its purpose. The organic results are starting to come around. You are getting regular positioning and keyword search reports. You are on the first page of results for many targeted words and phrases. All coordinated with the pay-per-click campaign. You spent time testing the copy in your pay-per-click ads and you have the winning ads linked to the landing pages you developed for each of your product lines. The landing pages are designed to get the response you want from the user. The ROI on the pay-per-click has shot way up. The corporate communications department is working on a corporate blog strategy. The company’s best engineers have started their first blog and folks in the industry are reading and linking to it. There is also a system in place to monitor blog chatter and respond to any negative post found. The PR machine is rolling and everything is ending up on the web with links back to the site. You have ongoing meetings with everyone to analyze all the data generated by your online marketing efforts. You are able to make decisions and adjust everything as you go along. Learning more, getting better. And you are looking forward to next year. You will probably pull money out of your ad, brochure, and trade show budgets and do more online. The return on investment is simply better. You know what your customers and potential customers are looking for online and you are giving it to them. You are making search happen. So which marketing director are you? Which one do you want to be?