Chris Baggott's Guide to Blogging

It was a good Wall Street Journal Today. Page R10 has a nice piece called "Mistakes Marketers Make". The article punches some holes in accepted marketing wisdom on things like: "Loyal Customers are the Most Valuable", but my favorite was the section titled: "Marketing is all about hunting and capturing clients."

"No, not anymore. These days, in the Internet Age, marketing is sometimes about the company being the prey.
The role of marketers has long been to hunt out clients and, with the aid of salespeople, capture this prey. However, particularly with the maturation of the Internet, the tide is turning. For instance, in the vacation market now, many people hunt out the holiday they want themselves. They use the Internet to find and then make choices, sometimes interrogating potential sellers online. In industries like this, the role of marketing is to make sure that a company's products or services are easily found online, and that the company responds effectively to potential customers."

This is what I'm talking about when I advocate for data-driven corporate blogging. A blog page is the most search optimized page you can possibly have to target a single phrase. The key to search success is to have as many blog pages as possible targeting as many terms as possible. It's the marketers job, not to hunt, but to be found. Blog best practices require that you target as many potential keywords as possible.

Comments for Marketing is NOT about hunting and capturing clients

Monday, October 20, 2008 by robert:: How true it is... most advertisers are sitting by wondering why there ROI is dwindling, while they AREN'T realizing that the "hunters" are now the consumers. Well over 90% of people are turning to Google to search for businesses, products, and services - this is clear representation of the consumer becoming the hunter. I'm actually surprised that the Wall Street journal would even publish such an article... actually, not really, since they're entire business model has been founded on generating advertising for their printed publication. However, even on the Internet, ROI is difficult to achieve with platforms such as Google Adwords - this primarily being because of cost. As you've stated, and as I 100% agree, blogging, and specifically keyword rich targeted blogging, will outperform even the most highly optimized Adwords campaign!