The way businesses think about Internet marketing is critical to realizing positive ROI, growth and significant success. We ask our clients to think about these three levels of social media communication:

1. Talk to your customers in an authentic voice to be believable
2. Allow your customers to talk to you to show you are listening
3. Enable your customers to talk to each-other and create a vibrant community

Today’s best marketing practices require businesses to minimize old-school outbound tactics like static web pages, direct mail, email blasts and replace them with communication based on the use of an authentic voice. Today’s consumer is conditioned to ignore most of these (and so are the search engines). If you’re going to talk effectively to your customers, you must do it in a more conversational voice using a blog, podcast or video by telling relevant stories and offering genuine testimonies and reviews. Get away from the agency-generated copy as your only way of describing yourself. Loosen up and reveal the real you that your customers really want to get to know and believe.

Allowing your customers to talk to you is the second level of updating your marketing presence. It is easily done by allowing comments on your blog, encouraging customer feedback everywhere possible, and showing that you’re listening by responding to every piece of relevant input. Increase the use of customer comments in all your marketing materials, and respond publicly to positive and negative comments. Businesses that ignore their customers position themselves in turn to be ignored by their customers.

The third level of communication is by far the best—enabling and encouraging your customers to talk to each-other. Unpaid and unsolicited advocates are a marketer’s dream, not just because they cost next to nothing to acquire, but the words of adoring fans are a lot more effective than you tooting your own horn. Set up and nurture any platform you have at your disposal, be it a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a discussion forum, or through blog comments. Prime the pump by asking for comments, respond to comments with appreciation and encouragement, and let it discussion flourish. Then pay attention to what they’re saying and react to the valuable input and ideas they provide.

The best example I’ve seen of customers talking to customers and taking over on a specific platform is Dunkin’ Donuts Facebook page. Scroll down the page and notice the ratio of DD’s comments vs Fan comments. That marketing campaign appears to be on auto pilot. Good job DD!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key to increasing traffic to a website. Gaining high page rank—listing at the top of page one of the search results—isn’t easy, but well worth the time and effort.

Search engines—primarily Google, Yahoo, and Bing—use software knows as “spiders” to crawl your site and index the text and links it finds on each page. When a prospective customer types their query, the search engine scans its database to find and display the page descriptions and links that best match the search terms. The result of the search is a listing of pages based on relevance—repetition of keywords—and page popularity, so having the right keywords on your page is important. We’ll deal with other factors—like popularity—in a future post.

Keyword Research: To properly perform search engine optimization, you must carefully analyze a number of sources that will help you build a list of keywords; phrases that your prospects are thinking when they search for your site. These sources include:

• The content on your website
• Previous and current website statistics, e.g. Google Analytics
• Audience preferences and perceptions about your business
• The websites of your strongest competition
• Keyword suggestion tools

Keyword dictionary: The list of words and phrases you create as a result from doing this research constitutes a dictionary that you’ll use as a resource for optimizing your static web pages, your blog and your social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter.

Optimize: This keyword dictionary isn’t everything you need to optimize. You’ll also know how and where to optimize. SEO requires knowledge of how and where add these keywords. Here’s a list of the primary places to put your keywords:

• Page Meta title—the title that appears at the very top of the browser window—known as the title bar
• Page meta description—the description that shows up in the search engines
• The web page file name, e.g. “keyword-placment.html”
• Titles and sub-titles in the body of the page text
• The body text, of course, but it’s best to put most of your keywords near the top of your body copy
• Links to other pages
• Image titles, e.g. keyword-placement-graphic.jpg”
• Alt tags—the a text description you can assign to the graphics on the page, e.g. “graphic that shows where to add keywords”

Optimizing your site is only the beginning. Upcoming posts will cover in-bound links and social media for SEO.

As we strive for continuous improvement in the delivery of internet marketing services to clients, I pay close attention to concepts related to this field, as well as how my peers and competitors describe them.

It’s wasn’t too long ago that I considered the best description of what we do as Internet marketing. In the past year I became aware of the term in-bound marketing. Traditional marketing consists of tactics related to reaching out to an audience, e.g. direct mail, advertising and email blasts. In-bound marketing, on the other hand, describes how your customers find you; mostly through search engines, social networks and word-of-mouth.

Most recently, I read about another perspective on marketing known asinteractive marketing, which describes what’s going on when customers and prospects interacting with your brand by:

• commenting on your blog
• participating in your forum
• watching a video on YouTube
• becoming a Fan on Facebook
• following you on Twitter
• taking a survey
• filling out a questionnaire
• voting in a poll
• posting an article or a product to digg or delicious
• and so much more

Whichever words or phrases we use to describe it, the mission of Davis Interactive is to help you:

• expose your website and content to the search engines
• provide as large a footprint on the universe of the Internet as possible
• leverage your existing content
• create new content
• create community among employees, vendors, customers, friends, etc.
• enable authentic company/customer interaction
• deliver great user experiences
• promote viral sharing,

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, or observations about this, please feel free to leave a comment to this blog entry, email on our contact page, or on Twitter or Facebook. If you’d prefer to leave a voicemail message, call our Google Voice line at 314-485-9633.