Web marketing is more integrated than you think (Small Business E-commerce Link Digest – October 7, 2011)

Marketing on the Internet seems to get harder all the time, doesn’t it? Content marketing, paid search, natural search/SEO, display advertising, remarketing, and on and on and on. How can anyone expect to keep up?

Well, happily, here’s a secret: They’re all much more related than you might think. You build content to meet your customer’s needs. That’s a landing page. Make sure it’s got some appropriate keywords in it, get some folks to link to it, and you’re doing SEO (admittedly, a simplified version, but it’s better than nothing). The better its relevance, the less you pay for clicks if you point paid search or display ads to it. And so on.

Happily, loads of resources exist to help you tie your activities together. Here are just a handful of excellent posts to help you start:

• Google’s Agency Blog has a great look at using Audience insights to improve your ad campaigns. While Google’s presentation focuses on paid search and display media advertising, the tools offered can help you develop better content and understand your customers’ behaviors more readily, too. (I’ve added the full video below if you’ve got the time to watch it.)
• Rimm Kaufman Group’s RKGBlog (one of the Thinks 2011 All-Stars), explores paid search conversion by position. Very cool.
• What, you don’t do and paid search or display advertising? You might want to consider it. The Certified Knowledge blog shows how to use PPC to test SEO. Sweet. (And sorry about their “enroll” popup when you land there. The content’s still worth reading.)
• Social Media Explorer follows up this theme of “content meets search meets SEO” with this post that, well, explores the future of content in SEO. Very much worth the read.
• Now, in case you wonder why all of this is a good idea, check out Drew McLellan’s report on mixing media types. It seems customers exposed to the same message in multiple media channels (surprise, surprise) showed better recall than those seeing the message in only one. Offering the same message, in multiple channels, targeted to the right customer, goes a long way to achieving your best results.

Have a great weekend, folks. And remember, we’re here at Thinks every day helping you untangle the Web to improve your marketing and e-commerce activities. Why not subscribe via email and get these updates delivered to you?

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure your business makes the most of the local, mobile, social web? thinks helps you understand how to grow your business via the web, every day. Get more than just news. Get understanding. Add thinks to your feed reader today.

Or subscribe via email.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to follow Tim on Twitter.

Tim Peter & Associates helps companies from startups to the Fortune 500 use the web to reach more customers, more effectively every day. Take a look and see how we can help you.

Technorati Tags: brand building, branding, content marketing, content strategy, conversion rate optimization, E-commerce, e-commerce, E-commerce strategy, e-marketing, ecommerce, google, google adwords, internet business, internet marketing, landing page design, landing page optimization, marketing, marketing best practices, online brand building, online marketing, ppc, ppc marketing, Rimm-Kaufmann, search, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo, strategy, integrated marketing