Harness the power of the Internet to market your business

A chicken and egg story: Are electronic marketing tactics being adapted to cultural changes or are cultural changes being impacted by electronic marketing tactics? Expenditures on Internet marketing have been growing exponentially over the past five years and will continue to grow at a rapid pace. The under-40 population has grown up with computers as part of their lives - education, entertainment, games, communications, language (text messaging), lifestyle. And now even the older population, including retired, is becoming competent and effective with utilization and achieving the benefits of the Internet.

Internet marketing evolved as a catch-all phrase in the 1990s that included all traffic that flows to any particular Web site, to e-mail marketing, to social media marketing and to Pay-Per-Click marketing. However, with technology innovation, Internet marketing has grown into the opportunity for targeted marketing traffic flow not just to a Web site but also to specific pages, specific products, specific attitudes, specific affinity groups and specific practices. This has become available through the recent evolution of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Social Media Optimization (SMO).

Of all of the Web site traffic that is being driven by Internet marketing, a current estimate is that about 70 percent of the total traffic to Web sites is being driven through search engines. According to MarketingSherpa 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide, the dominant player is Google with 68 percent of traffic in the U.S. The other key search engines are Yahoo with 14 percent share, Microsoft with 8 percent and ASK.com with 4 percent. This same report indicates that search marketing spending has grown from $9.9 billion in 2006 to $16.5 billion in 2008 and is forecast to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011.

It did not take long for Web site owners to start to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked in search engine results. This quickly led to the evolution of SEM and SEO as tools for a higher level of targeted marketing sophistication. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan in his article in June 2004 in Search Engine Watch, the earliest known use of the phrase 'search engine optimization' was a spam message posted Usenet on July 26, 1997.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a search engine while they were graduate students at Stanford University and this became Google in 1998. This search engine relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of Web pages with the number being calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, being a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a Web user who randomly surfs and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer. (On a personal level, it is still beyond my comprehension how I can put in a three- or four-word query into Google, hit 'Google Search', and in less than a second I have more than 100 answers from anywhere in the world to my query!)

Over the past couple of years, SEO has evolved to a more sophisticated process of reaching social groups of Internet participants through Social Media Optimization (SMO) that involves bringing targeted Social Networks to the client site. "Social Media" is defined in Wikipedia as "an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio". Examples of these media include: MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

SMO marketing opportunities have greatest potential for consumer oriented businesses and have less impact in Business-to-Business marketing. When is the right time to talk to an expert to investigate whether developing SMO is appropriate for your business? NOW. As Jeff Meundel, natural search analyst for Netconcepts, a leading Internet marketing firm in Madison, said at his recent presentation to the American Marketing Association, "If you are not using Social Media optimization, your competition certainly are!"

In his presentation, Meundel discussed details on incorporating SMO into a company's marketing tactics for today's business world. There are three areas that are involved in assessing the work needed to introduce SMO to Internet marketing:

1. Web site architecture and technical optimization

2. Keyword research and website content optimization

3. Link building

With the rapid growth of social networking sites and with usage increasing from 0.46 to 0.58 billion people from June 2007 to June 2008, an increase of 26 percent, corporations and businesses are beginning to realize the role of social networking in expanding their customer relations, particularly with women. In the case of both MySpace and Facebook, 63 percent of users are female.

In the end, it doesn't really matter whether electronic marketing tactics are being adapted to cultural change or whether cultural change is being impacted by electronic marketing tactics; new and effective integrated electronic marketing tools are dramatically impacting the business marketplace. For any business owner over 40, now is the time to find that younger expert who is experienced in this rapidly developing marketing culture change. And particularly in these tough economic times, as Vince Lombardi said, "Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all the time thing."