Digital marketing insights.

Inbound lead generation campaigns look a lot like fishing trips: build a great website (find a stream), attract traffic (cast your lure), get visitors to sign up for offers (set your hook), and then cultivate the relationship (reel time). It's a format that has worked for thousands of companies, including our own online marketing clients.

If there is one error that is more common than any other in online marketing, it would probably be prioritizing the pieces over the puzzle.

For all the time, money, and discussion that are given to online marketing in companies of all sizes, it can seem a bit baffling that businesses still make basic, critical mistakes when it comes to putting a plan together. These miscues are easier to understand, however, when you consider that they are often the result of more simple (and surprisingly common) mistakes in thinking.

Halloween is always a special time for us here at Kayak Online Marketing, and not just because we've been dying to wear our superhero costumes to the office all year long. You see, October 31 is our official launch date, and so today marks the two-year anniversary of our company.

Traditionally, the process of generating leads through search engine optimization looks something like this: figure out what keywords your potential customers are likely to search for, make pages that are easy for Google to find, and then make some kind of offer on the page that convinces them to take the next step.

If there is anything every potential online marketing client in the world probably has in common, it's that they would prefer to see their investments pay off sooner rather than later. That's just the world we live in these days, and their impatience is understandable – business moves quickly, especially online. If you aren't getting ahead, you're falling behind, and there really isn't any time to waste.

In some of our previous posts (not to mention our highly recommended e-books, now available on Amazon), we've gone into a bit of detail describing our process for creating marketing personas – profiles of our best potential customers that allow us to communicate with them in a way that speaks to them.

As you might've heard or read in our blog, Kayak Online Marketing was recently named a finalist for a prestigious Calgary "breakout business" award, given to the small company making the biggest impact in its respective industry or market.

Regular Kayak clients and readers might already know that we aren't big fans of pay-per-click advertising, at least not as a long-term strategy for building traffic and generating sales opportunities.

Recently, we were pleasantly surprised to find that Kayak Online Marketing was named as a finalist for the Breakout Business Award, awarded annually by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce.

Over the life of the series, Breaking Bad has been big on drama, action, and suspense. One thing it hasn't had, however, is a lot in the way of practical business lessons – at least for the majority of us who don't spend our time running illegal black markets out in the desert.

Current Kayak clients and regular blog readers will already know that we are huge fans of "attractive" marketing, and do our best to avoid interruptive tactics. But until now, we haven't taken the time to spell out exactly why.

"Customer engagement" has become a popular buzzword in the online marketing industry in recent years, even inspiring a number of books and seminars designed to help creators and their clients get buyers more emotionally invested in companies and products.

It's no secret that images can be more powerful than words in marketing, but most companies don't understand how to use visual presentations to create an impact that lasts longer than a single momentary impression.

It is a rough time to be a sports fan. It doesn't matter what league or game you prefer, athletes are being busted left and right for cheating in the pharmaceutical sense, turning to experimental medications (and worse) just to gain a competitive edge.