Is the Marketing Campaign Dead?

For years, I've believed that the notion of a marketing 'campaign' is dead. And I’m not the only one who thinks it. In the words of Joseph Jaffe, “Marketing is not a campaign, it's a commitment.” And Eric Wheeler wrote in the AdAge article "Ad Campaigns Are Dead," “Power has shifted away from brands to consumers ... Suddenly, it's no longer about the campaign.”

Paul Dunay has written, "there is no campaign in social media," while Joe Pulizzi said in a video interview that "content marketing is not a campaign, it is a promise to our customers." Even Bill Lee, in his Harvard Business Review article, "Marketing Is Dead," said, "Traditional marketing may be dead, but the new possibilities of peer influence-based, community-oriented marketing ..." (which some of us might call 'inbound marketing' ... wink wink) “... hold much greater promise for creating sustained growth through authentic customer relationships.”

Finally, three years ago, Brian Halligan wrote in his 2010 marketing wish list, "My blood curdles every time I hear someone talk about doing a 'social media campaign' or 'blog campaign.' Blogs and social media behave like compound interest, so if you treat them like 'campaigns,' you lose all the benefits. Marketers should be permanently creating, optimizing, promoting, converting, and analyzing."

So, if the marketing campaign is dead, why is it dead, and what do we do now? Let’s start off with some of the reasons why it's dead ...

CAMPAIGNS ARE TEMPORARY, BUT TODAY, THE INTERNET IS FOREVER.

Traditionally, ads would last as long as you paid for them to be aired on TV or printed in a newspaper or magazine. Now, people can read your blog posts from 2006 and watch your music videos from 2007. So what exactly does this mean? Well, it means that you might not want to use an animated lizard in a campaign for six months, and then use a spotted dog in some ads for the next three months ... and then use a talking baby in some ads for the next four months. Consistency and commitment to your brand, message, and voice is increasingly important when all the content you've ever created is completely accessible to anyone at any time. If you're all about the talking babies campaign now but what pops up for people in Google is lizard videos, are you really promoting the campaign you think you are?

CAMPAIGNS ARE ABOUT YOU, BUT TODAY, (INBOUND) MARKETING IS ABOUT THE CUSTOMER.

Marketing used to involve a company deciding what they wanted to brainwash their potential buyers with, and then programming that message into advertisements they would force feed to people because they had no choice. Now, the consumer is in control. Consumers have more and more technologies like DVRs, caller ID, and spam blockers that enable them to avoid unwanted advertising and messages. This means that, in order to get their attention, you have to earn their permission. As a result, your marketing needs to be about them, not you -- at least until they trust you enough to want to know more about you and your products. If your campaigns are about what your company wants to tell people, then you’re doing inbound marketing backwards.

CAMPAIGNS ARE PLANNED AND SLOW, BUT TODAY, CONVERSATION IS DYNAMIC AND RESPONSIVE.

In the old world of marketing, you could run a campaign of ads that promoted your product, and then you could turn off all of your marketing for a while. You could stop and start on a whim. Today, once you start engaging with people, they expect you to be there in the future. And when you do inbound marketing right, you become a publisher or a media company for your industry. Imagine if you started publishing a business blog, or engaging with potential customers on Facebook, and then one day you just stopped showing up? In today’s inbound world, that would be akin to a TV network going off the air one day just because they got lazy. Sure, you can do it -- but it is not a great idea. People expect responses when they contact you on your website or blog or in social media, and when they subscribe to something you publish, they expect to get regular updates on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis -- whatever you promised them. Joseph Jaffe is right. "Marketing is a commitment."

WHAT NEXT? WHERE DO I GO FROM HERE?  

Start by making a commitment to inbound marketing. Stop the madness of coming up with an entirely new theme and creative concept every three months. Start having a long-term view of your brand, message, and voice -- and what value your company can add to your industry. Stop blasting and interrupting people with advertisements about you. Start being helpful and interesting. Start listening. Start communicating. Start publishing. Stop advertising. Start marketing.

What do you think? Is the marketing campaign dead?

This Little Box – The Death of Hotel SEO? Dream On

The basis of these claims is that by squeezing in the Google Hotel Finder paid search box into the initial results page, Google has pushed all organic hotel or OTA listings ‘below the fold’: ie everything the consumer immediately sees, has to be paid for by advertisers.

But Georg Ruebensal, Managing Director of Expedia Australia, said: “We have not seen an impact on SEO at this stage, either for domestic or international searches. Travel SEO has been pronounced dead a couple of times before but it hasn’t happened. There’s still a lot of opportunity to invest in SEO.”

Mr Ruebensal says the most likely impact will be to increase paid search rates because Google has reduced the number of paid ads at the top of the page from three or four to just two to make room for Hotel Finder.

“The top spots are the place to be from an SEM perspective and (reducing inventory) simply increases competition and drives up the cost per click,” he says.

Kate Gamble, Kate Gamble, Director of SEO, Social Media and Digital Content Strategy at Bruce Clay Australia, which oversees search for the Toga Hospitality and Best Western accommodation brands, says has seen no impact on SEO conversion at this early stage of the Google Hotel Finder rollout.

“It’s not really going to change SEO,” she says. “I think evidence from previous Google changes tells us that, for a period of time, some users get distracted but then revert back to their original behavior.” By that she means scrolling down the first page of results to find a natural result that suits their search.

And the reality is that the days when natural results appeared well above the fold are ancient history in web terms. In fact, there are now more natural results on the first Google results page than ever before – up to 29 or 30 for some searches, with paid accounting for roughly 60% and paid 40% – plus a map.

In the golden olden days, it was all text and there may have been 10 organic listings. But it was easier to get seen because there was so much less competition. Search was only being seriously deployed by a savvy few. The rest were yet to catch on.

Now everyone is doing and the competition is cut-throat. The web isn’t fun anymore – just a very expensive necessity.

SEO in 2013, the Importance of AuthorRank

One of the biggest trends we are going to see changing SEO for this coming year is AuthorRank. If you have heard of Pagerank, you have an idea of what sort of tool this is. AuthorRank won’t be a replacement for Pagerank, rather used to inform Pagerank, in the hopes of enabling Google to rank quality content more appropriately. The most important changes are;

1) AuthorRank uses Google Plus profiles

2) Content quality will no longer be based solely on domain or Web page, it will now be reputation based and take into consideration the “authority” of the individual that authored the content. So what can we do to meet AuthorRank’s SEO standards?

Authors
In the AuthorRank world, we need to have an author who is an “authority”, meaning he or she has a lot of “natural” links and he/she is optimized for their blogs on Google Plus. If no one in your organization holds a strong online reputation, start building up the AuthorRank of your chosen “agent” within the organization to leverage in the long term. To leverage this author, here are 3 key steps;

1. Add a Rel=Author code to your wordpress website. Here are the detailed instructions from Google.
   
2. It is suggested that your author should interact as often as possible with Google Plus (authors are ranked on the number of Google Plus circles they are included in).
   
3. Stick to one topic. If the author writes about a whole host of subjects it is assumed that the content will be weaker. Google ranks honed authors higher.

Google Plus
The interesting part about this new algorithm is that it requires you use Google Plus. So bloggers are now going to be encouraged to use Google Plus to boost SEO. Here is how: At the bottom of your Google Plus profile page (in edit mode) you will see a contributor section; this is where you can enter in which blogs you are contributing to. By doing this, you create a relationship that increases your SEO. This action will also make your listing more prominent in a search because it causes your profile picture to show up.

Measure
Once you set up Google Authorship, go and track down all the (quality) content you have created in your specific area of expertise. How do you see if you are measuring well? Use the Rich Snippet Testing Tool. You will verify authorship and then see your results.

Huge change?
The normal SEO criteria will still be highly valued; don’t walk away from reading this thinking all you need to do now is become active on Google Plus! The biggest change we are going to see is more and more bloggers on Google Plus. It’s very sneaky of Google making their social networking site essential for SEO, but just as most bloggers will submit to this requirement and start using Google Plus, Google is doing what they have to do to gain more customers

Google Penguin Update Will Affect Many SEO Companies, Marketing Expert Fiona Lewis Believes

It is true that many (and major) SEO companies have grown complacent during the last years and that they have been optimizing for search engines in ways that are not very Googthodox.

However, this month a new announcement came from Google and the phrase which is now terrifying the World Wide Web is ‘you don’t want the next Penguin update’, uttered by Matt Cutts, Google specialist in SEO issues.

While nobody knows what he really means, Fiona Lewis and many other internet marketing experts are already wondering about the future of SEO companies who have been cheating their ways into good rankings.

The update has already received several nicknames such as ‘Googageddon’ or ‘carnage’, but the latter seems to resonate the most with people. When asked about her opinion on this denomination, Ms Lewis answered, “It will be carnage for many companies and business owners. I feel sorry especially for the businesses that pay good money to slack SEO companies who didn't see this coming.”

According to Ms Lewis, SEO companies have about three months to get things straight with their practices before their clients will start noticing problems. Fiona Lewis puts the blame on the SEOers who have been lazily crawling their clients’ websites to the top: “The worst part is that they have been doing bad practise for so long and were lazy, and business owners trust the SEO companies are doing the right thing.”

What seems to be the end of many SEO companies, will be, however, a good thing for those using Google as their search engine. It is predicted that Google will show random or unexpected results which will not affect the everyday user, but it will affect a website’s ranking.

In a nutshell, while internet users will not suffer from this update, it is the SEO companies and their clients who will have to deal with the consequences.

Ms Lewis highlights the importance of having a “real business, with real influence, that interacts with its clients – real people – and is active online.

I admit that at sometimes this new approach to SEO can be a bit frustrating and I am sure that many internet marketers will pass through some hard times switching to these new methods.

I’m already doing everything Google wants, but that doesn’t mean that I can pull my hair down and relax. SEO will never be about laziness and relaxation.”