Along with the rise in the importance of social media is the rise in the need to manage your social media presence on search engines. Google has recently begun to include listing from the likes of twitter and facebook in their SERPs, and our Director of Search Marketing, Adam Riff penned a great article on the topic for DMNews that can be found here.

Look for more great thought leadership in the coming days from the Mediawhiz team

In a recent article penned by Mediawhiz CEO Jonathan Shapiro and published by iMedia Connection, Jonathan makes the argument that traditional marketing budgets should be tossed out the window. To his point, the Internet allows brands more visibility into the performance of their marketing efforts than ever had before. Combine the visibility the Internet allows with performance based distribution channels and you’ll see there is no cap on what you can spend.

In Jonathan’s words;

“Future winners in the online marketing space will understand that success means investing in performance marketing programs of continuous improvement that provide increasing and demonstrable profits. That’s performance marketing, and you won’t want to cap its success with an annual budget.”

Read the whole article here.

Death of the Marketing Budget

Adam Riff, the Director of Search at MediaWhiz was published in DMNews on June 30, 2008. Read his article below.

With increasing costs and competition in search, marketers must continue to be creative to achieve a high return on advertising spend. One answer may be fusion search, which is a method of “fusing” data to execute multiple search techniques simultaneously. These methods include pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO) and, more recently, social media optimization (SMO) and video SEO.

PPC is at the top of the list for two basic reasons. First, there is no other method that can deliver more data in less time. Also, PPC data will allow you to identify the long-tail keywords that you will use in your fusion campaign (provided you did your keyword research). Fusion campaigns are based on those long-tail keywords that cost little and return a lot.

For example, let’s say you’re running an account for a travel client that sells trips to the Bahamas. You’ll likely come up with several thousand key­words that include misspellings, buying phrases, long-tail and competitor domains. After iden­tifying these keywords, you can run a PPC campaign and begin accumulating your data.

Search marketers know that “Bahamas trip” will elicit high volume and a low conversion rate. It will also be expensive and highly competitive, which will result in a cost per action that your client may or may not be able to afford. Savvy search marketers will begin mining their PPC data for the thousands of long-tail terms they added, such as “Bahamas cruises” or “look­ing for the best price on a Bahamas cruise,” that have one to two conversions over a sufficient data period (let’s say two weeks). You would then utilize these long-tail or “fusion” keywords to formulate a multifaceted search campaign across the other chan­nels at your disposal that include SEO, SMO and video SEO.

For SMO, you could create a lens on HubPages, a popular social media site, that centers around your keyword “looking for the best price on a Bahamas cruise” and will link to your client’s site. With the right methodology, your client’s site and the Hub­Pages lens will likely get ranked organically for “looking for the best price on a Bahamas cruise.”

For video SEO — assuming that the client has video content or you create it for them — you can tag that video with the same keyword used in the above example and use specific techniques to get your video ranked for that keyword.

You’ve now utilized your data to fuse the highest converting, lowest competition keywords into an extremely effective, multi-faceted strategy, which will achieve a higher return as well as build long-term organic reach.

Read the original article here

Learn more about MediaWhiz Search