Reverse direct marketing

We are officially in the era of the self-building, self-selecting marketing prospect list, as predicted by the Cluetrain Manifesto. For a brand that’s the good news — the audience if defined and segmented by need, where they are in the pipeline, and their criteria for purchase. The bad news: they have even more information about you. They know what you're good at and what you're not. And if they don't now, they soon will.

So what’s today’s marketer to do? First, remember that beyond all the new fangled technical wizardry, the same marketing and sales principles still apply: focus on who you’re selling to specifically, learn your basic sales process to the point that it is second nature, focus on removing obstacles — real and imagined — from the buying process, and let the chips fall where they may. Search engines are simply a service. For the most part they, do connect the person looking for goods or services and the provider of these goods and services. Done all that? OK, now we can really get to work.

Since you know your sales process inside and out you probably know what gets people interested. Recommendations from others, technical superiority, uniqueness, and brand appeal are some of the usual suspects — so how do we translate that online?

The key is keywords

First, it all boils down to what you’re reading right now: the words. What words would you associate with what you sell and how do those overlap with words that people are searching for? To start, make a list of what you think and head over to the Overture keyword tool here. Try some words and phrases and see how they rate in popularity. Now here’s the rub: the more popular, the more likely keywords will draw an audience, which makes them the hardest to own. Less popular terms draw fewer searches, but are easier to ‘own.’ This is part of the reason the company is called idea34… it’s a somewhat easy term to own as any search engine result will show you.

Now you’ve that made a decision on what terms make sense, let’s talk about making your content ‘friendly’ for those terms. Head on over to a keyword density checker like the one at Webmastertoolkit.com. and try your current web content to see how it stacks up. Typically a density between 2% and 7% is ideal because the search engine bots like to filter out obvious attempts to ‘spam’ against particular keywords (remember the old days when every search yielded some form of porn?) So how’d your content stack up? Not so great? Here’s a host of little technical tricks that will work until everyone starts doing them: