Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Branding

  • The Importance of Relevance in Branding

    A great commentary in Forbes by Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak of Reason Inc on the upcoming iPhone launch that speaks to much of what I’ve said recently on branding in the digital age. One quote stands out: “A brand is neither a goal nor a means, but a result of consistent delivery against…

  • How Brand, Product & Community Influence Intention

    In my last post I wrote that all user intentions can be boiled down to one of two goals, discovery or recovery. To create marketing strategies for these intentions we must begin by understanding the way users think in the course of trying to achieve these goals. Users respond to what they know. This can…

  • Brand Marketing in the Digital Age

    Brand is many things but at its core it is an emotional connection between a user and a product or service. That connection has its greatest impact at the experience level where an interaction between the user and the product or service takes place. So what is interactive marketing then if not branding? And how…

  • 4 Strategies for Optimizing Name Tags

    How Changes in User Behaviors and Search Results can Increase Traffic, Drive Engagement and Deliver Relevance for Your Name, Event, Brand and Product I have noticed an interesting referrer trend in my analytics. A growing number Organic search traffic visitors are coming to my blog off name queries. Not my name but names of those…

  • The Next Generation of Digital Marketing Agencies

    A few weeks ago I was listening to an interview with the President of a digital marketing agency conglomerate and heard the following: “You think, what do I want the consumers to do, and then you plan your campaign from there.” Here’s how I would rephrase the comment: “You think, what do consumers want to…

  • Buy Branded Keywords? A Case Study on Traffic, Conversion and RPV

    Part 3 of 3 This is the last part of my deep dive into a question that is asked quite often. Brand keywords have seemed to be a conundrum for many in the Marketing and Brandings worlds. This series of posts and research has yielded some interesting data. Like any good testing and optimization they…

  • 7 Ways to Optimize Your YouTube Tags

    I can’t get YouTube off my mind. With apologies to Gil Scott Heron, the revolution is being videoized. Contrary to popular opinion it just may be an ad revolution. H&R Block’s recent promo for their TaxCut online filing includes the most linked to comedy video in the history of YouTube. There has also been a…

  • Marketing Darwinism: Is Anheuser-Busch’s $40M Gamble on Digital Content Moving Online Marketing Forward or Back?

    This Sunday New York Times Magazine will run a piece titled “Brew Tube” that focuses on Monday’s launch of Bud.tv, an effort of A&B’s marketing team to reach the young and wired demographic with a marketer owned channel of original digital content. I read the article with some skepticism as to the effect that this…

  • Real Behavioral Targeting Focuses on Intent

    Dave Morgan of Tacoda has an insightful essay “When Will We Deliver the Promise” that addresses a question asked to him by WSJ technology writer Walter Mossberg: when will online advertising deliver on the promise of right ad, right, customer, right time? The question is great one. However, I’m afraid the folks in display media…

  • ROI Factors of Brand Keywords: Paid vs. Organic

    Part 2 of 3 In part 1 I discussed the thinking and strategy behind running tests on whether it was worth it for our client to have ads running on their brand keywords, especially in light of the recent Google changes to the result presentation. Would these clicks just end up going to the natural…

  • Do I Purchase My Brand Keywords or Has Google Improved So Much I Don’t Need To?

    Part 1 of 3 Recently Google has changed the way search results on brand queries appear for many businesses. They have provided them with added real estate at the top of the SERP by listing four links to internal sections below the main result and description (interestingly it seems for everyone but Amazon & their…

  • User Goals and Conversion from Search

    Understanding user goals forms the foundation of my methodology for landing page and search ad optimization. Goal discovery also forms the core of searcher behavior research. This is all due to the fact that delivering relevance can only be done by first understanding the goals of users. Through my experience, research and user observation I’ve…

  • Why (Insert Your Brand or Product Here)?

    True story. I’m on the subway heading downtown in NYC. I notice an ad for Fiji Water. It was a picture of the bottle and this copy: Message In A Bottle FIJI water is from Fiji What caught my interest most of all was the question “WHY?” handwritten in black pen next to the bottom…

  • How Starbucks Segments and Targets its Brand

    The lead story in The New York Times Arts & Leisure section this Sunday was “The Starbucks Aesthetic” and it’s worth a read. It actually would have been better placed as the lead story in the Business section. What the story made clear is that Starbucks has successfully expanded its product offerings, revenues and brand…

  • Social Media Optimization & Branding

    Pathways to Experience Your brand value is in large part made up of the many different experiences your users have with it. The value increases as more new users have good experiences and your existing user’s expectations are met. Our job as marketers is to create the awareness and expectations that feed user desire to…

  • Optimizing Your Content Pages

    https://s3.amazonaws.com:443/slideshare/ssplayer.swf?id=3622&doc=omma-new-york-when-every-page-is-a-landing-page-14215 This past week at OMMA New York I spoke to content providers. The session was titled “When Every Page is a Landing Page.” This indeed is the case and exemplifies the power of digital marketing (namely search) to deconstruct traditional forms of media and the long held practices around them. The idea of presenting…

  • The State of the State: Afterthoughts on SES San Jose

    Online marketing and in particular search is still very much a nascent insurgency. I try to remember that. But at the end of this latest SES, after I had the chance to talk with the leaders in strategy, technology, analytics as well as reps from the engines themselves I walked away (once again) with a…

  • Branding & Search – Part 2

    Branding Optimization through Search The words optimization and branding have rarely been seen together in a sentence on search engine marketing. I’m out to change that (in fact I just did). Let’s start this conversation by understanding that Search marketers are finding a number of ways to measure branding impact in search. Myself, and others…

  • Intelligence Through Impression Data

    Following my first post in the series on Branding and Search, NY Times has a piece on how Impression data can be used for business intelligence (BI) somewhere buried in this puff piece on John Battelle (who’s his PR guy?) and Google. So I’ve been thinking over the holiday… Why aren’t search impressions valued more?…

  • Branding & Search – Part 1

    Branding Intelligence and Search For more and more of us each day search is the pathway to our experiences with brands and products. If as I believe, brand is ultimately defined by one’s experiences with the product, then the search engine results page is for many the first impression of your brand. Making search and…