As I worked this morning to prepare for some upcoming meetings, I came up with a blog that provides definitions of common strategic marketing and marketing communications, explains why they are important to develop and some best practices for each.

Strategic Marketing

Brand

What is it?
• The promise made AND kept (with your audience).

Why is it important to develop?
• Your brand defines your personality, describes what you stand for and should clearly communicate what makes you unique and better than your competitors.

Best practices
• Has to be honest, straightforward and reliable.
• Must be anchored in reality, yet also inspire and reach your audience on an emotional level (THINK PASSION).

Content Strategy

What is it?
• Establishes what you will communicate about your brand.
• It’s what you will talk about – and when combined with your brand – how you will talk about it.

Why is it important to develop?
Your content strategy will guide all communications:
• Website
• Social media profiles (blog, Facebook, Twitter, video, photos)
• Public Relations (Interviews, announcements, community involvement)
• Conversations you have with people in the industry

Best practices
• Adherence to the strategy is imperative – don’t deviate! If you’re considering communicating something, participating in a particular event or even offering an opinion, be sure to reflect on your brand and content strategy. Does it match up with what has been defined and established?
• Every interaction with your company/brand should be guided by the content strategy.

Your BRAND drives your CONTENT STRATEGY which guides your COMMUNICATIONS

Marketing Communications

Website

What is it?
• A website is today’s primary marketing communications tool.
• Enables the communication of your brand and content strategy.

Why is it important to develop?
• You control the story, the visuals and all communications, so the story is told how you want it told.
Without it, you will not be real.
• When done poorly, you will make a bad impression and do your brand a complete injustice.

Best practices
• Does it meet my audience’s needs?
• Is my website guided by my brand and content strategy?

Social Media (Blog/Facebook/Twitter/Video/Flickr)

What is it?
• Marketing channel for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.
• Social media uses web-based technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogues.
Don’t get lost!!! It’s just another way to communicate with your audience. And it’s great because it offers two-way communications.

Why is it important to develop?
• Helps your audience feel a direct connection and a “behind-the-scenes” feeling

Best practices
• Be natural, but adhere to your brand and content strategy.
• Don’t ever forget that this is NOT a casual conversation with a friend. You may have connections with friends, but when you are representing your professional brand you can’t ever let your guard down.
• Stick to the old rule, “If you say it or put it in writing, make sure you would feel comfortable with it being listed on the front page of the newspaper the next morning.”

Public Relations (Interviews, Announcements, Events, Community Involvement)

What is it?
• Management of your company image with the media and community/charitable organizations.
• Public relations and social media have significant overlap, and share numerous qualities.

Why is it important to develop?
• Support from local and national media, as well as your community is key to success. If these people aren’t in your corner, you will have an uphill battle.

Best practices
• Identify the key contacts in your industry, and have a plan for how you will build relationships with these players. This is where social media can really help.
• Get training. Even the top CEOs, sports figures and stars go through regular media training.
• See social media best practices above.

What are some other best practices you follow? What works for you?

With so much to keep up with in the niche of search engine optimization (SEO), thank goodness for Danny Dover and the folks over at SEOMoz.  This whiteboard video helps explain the recent changes to the way local search is handled by Google, and how results are displayed.

Overall, it sounds like good news for local businesses, as the main takeaway is that local search optimization practices are melding with regular search practices.  Soon we won’t need to distinguish.

SEOmoz – SEO Software

Do you hear people talking about Twitter, Facebook, flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube and how they are using these social media sites to grow their business?  Do you lock up in pain because you have no idea what these words mean?  Do you light up with excitement because you know you want to leverage these powerful sites?

Either way, this guide will help.  Not every social media site is included, but the most popular destinations are here.

(By the way, a CMO is the Chief Marketing Officer.  If you are a small business owner, this guide works for you too).

PDF version of the Social Media Guide

Though nobody knows what truly drives search engine page rankings, SEOMoz has polled a team of SEO Experts and published the following:

SEOMoz Overall Ranking Algorithm

Thanks to SEO Copywriter Melanie Seibert for providing this information during the SEO Track of the Interactive Strategies Conference 2010.

I am attending!  This is one of the things I do for myself as a marketer, and ultimately for my clients to ensure that I stay educated.  I am a volunteer on the Programs Committee of HiMA, a non-profit organization founded to be the advocate for Houston’s interactive marketing community.

Join us on September 2 for a luncheon panel discussion on Universal/Accessible Design:

In the not-so-distant future, the competitive edge will belong to companies that understand the power of accessibility and who design their websites for universal access. When it comes to accessibility and universal design, the question we should be asking today isn’t “Why?” but rather “Why not?”

Learn more and register

It’s clear from this great visual from the folks at HubSpot that blogging has a direct positive impact on the number of leads for both B2B and B2C companies.  These stats should at least convince a small business owner to discuss the possibility of a blog further.

Of course there is more to consider: who will write the blog, manage the blog on an ongoing basis, design and build the blog, drive traffic to the blog, etc.  All great strategic questions that should be reviewed and discussed prior to diving in.

[Visit Social Media B2B Website's 10 Business Blogging Best Practices for some additional great thoughts.]

What are some other things you are either considering or considered prior to starting your blog?

Image Source: State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Report – http://bit.ly/cVMpkn

As a small business owner, you face difficult decisions every day. If you’re smart, you find ways to better manage your time and prioritize based on both short-term and long-term goals. Because if things are working even decently, you won’t have time to get to your complete to-do list every day. As it relates to marketing and sales, small business owners face the same challenge.

You can’t do it all! Not only do you not have the time – you don’t have the budget. So you’re faced with difficult questions…What type of marketing should I invest in? Should I have a Facebook page? Should I have a Twitter account? Will I get more business if I run a print ad? What about running search engine ads?

If you want clear answers to these questions, you have to identify your target audience. Whether you are new, or have been in business for a while, you should be able to write this down in about 5-10 minutes. In fact, you probably have a primary and a secondary target audience. Write them both down. This includes gender, age (will be a range), marital status, income level (a range, probably an educated guess), kids/no kids, etc. This list of identifiers won’t capture all of your customers, but it should cover a large majority (think of the 80/20 rule).

Now think about where these people spend their time. Let’s say your target audience is a suburban housewives between the ages of 35-55, and their household income is between $80,000-$120,000 per year. You can either do some online research, or make some solid educated guesses about where your audience spends their time. Do both. Then cater your marketing plan and budget around your audience.

What do you know about your target audience? What challenges do you face with this audience?

Just got a wonderful opportunity to serve on the Programs Committee for HiMA! I will be responsible for helping plan the luncheons, workshops and webinars, including identifying topics, speakers and working with the marketing team to promote the events. I am very grateful for this and am excited to start on the September 2 luncheon on Universal Website Design.

With Facebook reaching the 500 million user milestone in July, it’s hard to believe that 47% of small business owners don’t think that Facebook, Twitter or even LinkedIn are beneficial to their business. Here are some additional staggering facts:

* 81% of entrepreneurs still don’t take advantage of social media
* 47% don’t think that Facebook, Twitter or even LinkedIn are beneficial to their business (I know this is a repeat, but I still can’t believe it!)
* 40% of small businesses don’t have a web site
* 84% don’t provide for e-commerce
* 62% don’t use email marketing

CitiBank survey

Why is this? Small business owners are busy…trying to run their small business. How could you possibly make time for building a solid email list when you hardly have time to do payroll each week? And what if you don’t even know how to go about gathering email addresses, know the system where you should collect them, what you would send them if you had these addresses. This is all overwhelming.

There are numerous low-cost and even free tools available to help get you started, not to mention great online marketing experts. 

I recently came up with a great marketing analogy for one of my clients who is an avid fisherman.  He was overwhelmed with the amount of things he needed to accomplish in order to re-launch his business that had been stagnant for the last 7 years.  He needed a way to organize the litany of to-do’s (set up a Facebook page, redesign my website, email campaigns, create marketing brochures, etc).  Where to start?  The following are the 5 simple steps to organizing your activities and ultimately building an effective marketing strategy:

1. What Kind of Fisherman am I? – With everything from freshwater to saltwater, lakes to streams, fly fishing to deep sea fishing, you have to determine what type of fisherman you would like to be.  In our analogy this translates to building your brand and overall corporate identity.  What are our values, what does our brand stand for?  Who is our target audience?  What are their needs?  What makes us different and better than our competitors?   From here you can name your business/brand/product, obtain your website URL, design your logo and write your tagline.
2. Build the Boat – Without a boat, how are you going to fish?  Ok, we know that if you are a wade fisher you may not need a boat, but work with me here!  The boat, in our analogy, is your website.  You need a professional and reliable place to send people to gather information, get answers to their questions and ultimately communicate with you.  So your number one priority is to develop a web strategy (fully optimized for search) and determine the information you need to provide to potential customers.  We would also include basic corporate materials such as a corporate brochure, product slicks and business cards here as well.
3. The Fish Tracker – Again, we know that not all fisherman will need a fish tracker to find and track their dinner.  But in the world of online marketing, it is IMPERATIVE that you set up some simple tools to track your programs.  As your business matures, your tracking tools and programs can mature as well.  To get started, you should have a site metrics program such as Google Analytics impemented on your site, and you should have some type of a lead database you can use to manage your prospects.  There are literally hundreds of free or low-cost tools available.
4. Setting the Bait -  Every good fisherman knows that on top of his skill with his equipment, he’s got to have something good to attract the fish.  A business needs a solid set of content that proves your expertise.  Everything from white papers, to case studies, to articles, webinars, blogs and customer testimonials.  Start with a basic set and continuously add to your “customer knowledge library.”
5. Get the Line in the Water – Ok the boat is ready, you’ve got your tackle box together and the sandwiches are made.  Now it’s time to get your line in water and start reeling them in!  Some effective online tactics to help drive traffic to your website include email campaigns and newsletters, paid search advertising, social media programs (Facebook, Twitter, link exchanges, etc.) and strategic partnerships (businesses who have a vested interest in your success, and you in theirs).

Now you’re pulling in fish and you’ll need to determine how you’ll identify your strongest prospects.  There are specific strategies and tools you can implement to help determine how you separate the keepers from the junk.

Do I have to complete these in order?  That would be optimal, but certainly not realistic…especially given these economic times.  Companies need ways to generate some results while they are building their overall marketing machine.  And that’s what it’s all about!  Results…oh, and fish!