The Online Marketing Movement: Unlocking the Potential of Digital Marketing

The Online Marketing Movement

Unlocking the Potential of Digital Marketing

© 2023, Brad Post. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-54395-311-4

eBook ISBN: 979-8-35090-100-9

To my loving wife Stacey, and my three wonderful children,

Madylaine, Solomon and Isaiah for giving me the support and encouragement to finish this.

Contents

Part 1: Vision, Leadership, Inspiration and Creativity

Creativity vs. Innovation

The Power of an Idea

A Successful Project

Establishing and Meeting Expectations

Four Easy Ways to Streamline Technology

How Do You Create A Movement

What Is Truth?

Give To Get

Lose To Win

Put Suspects First

Put Prospects First

Put Customers First

Put Employees First

Forgive Those Who Offend You

Success Out Of Failure

Passion Will Always Start With a Purpose

Busy Bees Make Sour Honey

Sit In Your Client’s Seat

Be The Idea You Want To Express

Why Company Culture Matters

Creating A Life Giving Work Culture

Cause And Effect

Marketing Is A Two Way Street

Business To Business Marketing Tips

Require Transparency

Part 2: Branding Your Business

The Importance of Strong Branding in Your Marketing Strategy

The Components of Marketing

Developing Movement

Continuing to Develop Movement

Our Business Has Changed

What Is A Logo?

The Creative Process: Finding The Idea

Influence For Sale?

Perception Inception vs. Deception

Does Your Company Need a Facelift?

Be The Red Umbrella

The Cost of Lost Business

Mitigate The Cost With Website Branding

Why So Many Questions?

Finding Your Voice  

Three Reasons You May Need To Rebrand

Part 3: Website Design

Why Your Site May Need A Redesign

Build A Search Friendly Site

Not Just Another Pretty Site

Websites Done Right

Clutter Kills Conversions

Part 4: SEO

The Basics

Web Design

Traffic Building And Monitoring

The Importance of SEO in Digital Marketing

Organic Rankings: At the Heart of Customer Acquisition

Search Engine Marketing: SEM vs. SEO

SEO Terms

Google Clarifies Key SEO Terms

Why Your Website Needs SEO

Website Link Building

Is SEO Dead?

The Consistency of Consistency

The Endless Possibilities of SEO

It’s Not All About Links

Our Least Favorite Question to Answer

Bounce Off Bounce Rates

The Secret In The Sauce

The Difference Between Local and Organic Results

If You Ask Them, They Will Review

Pay Per Click, The Basics and Your Business

Part 5: Social Media

Social Media For Small Businesses

Additional Strategy For Social Media

Ways To Use Social Media for a Small Business

Simple Steps To Social Media Engagement

Social Media Whys

Social Media Increase and Conversions

Social Media Etiquette After a Tragedy

Part 6: Content Blogging and Blog

Introduction: Content Creation

The Importance Of Social Media and Creating Content

The Importance of Social Media Platforms

The Importance of Creating Content

How To Make The Right Content

Making the Most of Your Blog Posts

Your Story VS. Marketing Ad

I Wrote My Blog, Now What?

Steps To A Great Blog

Why Should I Blog?

Part 1

Vision, Leadership, Inspiration and Creativity

Creativity vs. Innovation

There is a difference in innovation and creativity.  Innovation is often thought of as creativity. But the difference is huge. It’s the difference between thinking about doing, and actually doing something.

Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.  Theodore Levitt

Think of innovation as the process of:

Identifying problems, needs, or opportunities

Generating ideas to address selected problems, needs, or opportunities

Moving the best ideas to completion

Generating value from those ideas

While the sequence or steps may differ, innovation always involves the generation of an idea and the shepherding of that idea into successful usage.  

Creativity is the ability to make connections that result in ideas. It is a skill exercised throughout the process of innovation. We often think of using creativity to build a new product or idea, or to invent a new technology, but creativity is core to every stage of the innovation process. It’s only found in learning (or re-learning) to see with the eyes of a child—assuming nothing.

Creativity is used in finding useful patterns in statistical data. Creativity is how to approach user interaction; to find that right question to unlock hidden gems.

Creativity is how to overcome barriers in production, it’s how you improve margins, streamline process, and it holds the keys to the wisdom to create a movement around your product.

Creativity is a skill, and innovation is a process. That’s how they differ. The skill of creativity is applied throughout the process of innovation—in many different ways—to improve the likelihood of success. That’s how they interact.

The Power of an Idea

The fulcrum and the lever

Archimedes said, Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

An idea is a powerful thing. In business, having the right idea can make your marketing work immeasurably more effective. Sometimes, it’s the effort to do the research that wins the game. The differentiating idea is a fulcrum that can increase your power to influence exponentially. For effective marketing, branding, and SEO (search engine optimization), you’ve got to start with the right idea.

The building materials for your fulcrum are the questions you ask. Start with the probing questions to learn what the people inside know, but rarely know how to communicate well. From there, you turn those questions to discover the perception (which is the reality) of the people whose problems you exist to solve. Find out what people are looking for, and you will have the right implement.

You will accomplish much with much less using the right tool.

Once you have the fulcrum, your research, preparation, and experience is the strong lever. Create the best roadmap you can. I’ve started with the right idea, only to execute it horribly because I didn’t prepare as well as I could have. However, this still can be more effective long-term, than delivering the wrong idea with excellence.

When you have a fulcrum, you lift with leverage.

With the right idea placed strategically under a well- managed process, your talented team can get to work, and the impossible becomes reality.

A Successful Project

A successful project is not merely a well-executed task, whether it’s a logo, a complete website redesign, a grassroots campaign, or creating a Guggenheim. A successful project is a masterfully woven process.

Tapestry

I love the metaphor of tapestry: Weaving divergent pieces together by design to communicate something that only makes sense when viewed as a whole.

Project process management is the blend of cultivating ownership:

Managing perceptions

Establishing and meeting expectations

Hashing through the big changes early on (or thrashing early to use Seth Godin’s beautiful concept)

Masterful presentation

Creating an environment that demands timely feedback.

If you don’t have buy-in everywhere it counts, you have an idea that just died in the delivery room.

Establishing and Meeting Expectations

The heart of a successful project is well-curated expectations.

A missed deadline is a deathblow to a relationship. When the trust erodes, it’s the beginning of the end. It’s most likely something that your client relationship will never recover from. Just a few blown opportunities like that can actually ruin your business. This is a big deal.  

An ancient proverb says this best:

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire, when it comes to pass, is a tree of life. – Proverbs 13:12

The applications are limitless, and the message here is about perspective. An expectation that is on its way, and an expectation that is put off for another day actually could be different perspectives on the exact same event.

Trusted Leadership

The big difference between the two experiences is the context of a trustworthy relationship. Your leadership and experience can set the stage for your project to be a tree of life.

Know your team

Manage your resources

Define the variables and unknowns

Set accurate, attainable expectations

Add more margin

Then work your butt off to exceed their expectations

I have also seen the ugly other end of this, when bureaucracy is substituted for leadership, and projects that should take weeks, if effectively managed, turn into years. Education and Government projects are notorious for this. This is critical: you have to deliver.

Well-Curated Relationships

In my early days, the desire to please our clients created some project disasters, with more than a few all-nighters, and even the occasional missed deadline. You can’t guide the process based on a hope. Accurate timelines, with buffers built in are the key.

Four Easy Ways to Streamline Technology

Technology continues to introduce convenience after convenience. Lost in an unfamiliar part of town? Map your way home with your GPS. Not around to watch your favorite shows during primetime? TiVo them!

You get the picture. But technology can also be a huge time-waster. There’s so much information out there, it can be overwhelming to keep up with. (And a little addicting.) Here are some ways you can streamline your technology input, avoid distractions and focus on more productive things:

Declutter your computer, smartphone and email. Delete old emails and apps you don’t use anymore and move old files to an external hard drive. Move apps and files you don’t use much from your desktop/home screen to a folder. It’s a lot easier to navigate technology when it’s just the bare-bone basics you use on a daily basis

Turn off notifications. When you’re working or trying to focus on something else, sometimes it’s impossible to ignore the shiny cute kitten video that pops up on the screen. Disabling notifications helps you stay focused on the present. And being intentional about one thing (okay, fewer things) at a time will help you get into a flow and ramp up your productivity.

Streamline the content you read. If you’ve accumulated a pile of bookmarks for news sources, blogs, and websites you read each day–or you’re consistently clicking on the links in your social media feeds–make your life easier by starting a free account with an RSS reader. (Feedly is one example.) Having all of your information in one place will help save time and encourage you to read at designated intervals of the day instead of scattered throughout.

Unsubscribe from any unnecessary junk email. Since progressive social media tactics dictate attracting people to sign up for an email list, you probably press Delete a lot when you wake up in the morning. Don’t be afraid to unsubscribe from automated daily deals/coupon emails, excessive newsletters, redundant notifications and other things you usually delete without reading. Most of the major email platforms are shifting to divided inboxes, where all promotional emails go in one place.

But ensuring only the necessary email makes it to you will save so much time and effort. Hopefully streamlining your electronic footprint will give you more time for what’s important and help you breathe a little more easily.

How Do You Create A Movement

Those who have created lasting movements have built certain qualities into them. We’ve identified six such qualities that we will investigate. This list is by no means exhaustive. We will add more as we think of them, do research and ask questions to see what else we can uncover, and we invite you