Digital marketing insights.

You've probably noticed that I'm a huge proponent of content marketing. I don’t just recommend posting articles for the sake of SEO, but more so as a way to start conversations and share knowledge. Most people I meet love this… right up until the moment they sit down and start typing.

It’s at this point they realize their minds have gone blank and they don’t know where to start.

A lot of businesses think that content marketing goes something like this: you write a bunch of articles, post them to your blog, share them in social, and magically see new leads come pouring in. What happens is quite different.

Ask almost any marketer what customers think about when viewing a website and they’ll tell you it comes down to, What’s in it for me? It's generally agreed that’s the big thing we have to get across. It's incentive to keep reading or to take action. The presumption is that “what’s in it for me?” neatly distils our buyers’ motivations into a very clear question. Or does it?

I had a chance to speak with a group of my peers recently. Rather than talk with them about the latest search engine optimization trends or lead generation tactics, I asked them a very simple question: were they vendors to their clients, or partners?

One of the guiding principles behind my firm – and really, my life – is that you need to be willing to try new things. That helps me stay young, I think, but also helps to avoid getting too complacent in an ever-changing digital marketing world.

Recently, a few of our more astute connections have noticed something interesting: in many cases, clicking on an image within a Google image search no longer takes you straight to the image or allows you to download it.

In the digital marketing field, blogging holds a pivotal role. It not only boosts your lead generation and search ranking efforts but also serves as a platform for your voice, a gateway to your community, and a facilitator of communication with the world.

Here at Kayak, we are big believers in the value of content creation and advanced CMS’s like HubSpot. We talk about them enthusiastically, and share the results we see from our own campaigns as well as the ones we deploy for our clients.

Most of us dream of writing a novel at some time or another. Who wouldn’t love the thought of sipping a latte, crafting a few words in a chapter of their novel, telling stories, and soaking up a healthy combination of royalty checks and public praise for the effort?

Most business owners and a few of us online marketers as well – who are concerned about search engine optimization and inbound lead generation – will obsess over the titles, keywords, and internal links used in their blog posts. And yet, many never stop to think about a critical conversion element that immediately draws attention and sets the mood: the image that accompanies the post itself.

The length of a landing page is a bit like the recipe for a good chilli: everyone has their own ideas about what should go in, and some passionate reasons why their version is superior to all others.

If you are in the business of producing blog posts, videos, and social content to improve your bottom line, then you’re probably used to watching these key metrics: visits, conversions, and sales.

Ask most businesses what SEO success would look like to them, and they’ll likely tell you it would be a number one search ranking on Google for their keywords.

As our clients and blog readers will know, Kayak's team members are big proponents of applying buyer personas to marketing goals in order to understand the various audiences on the receiving end of lead generation efforts.

Content may be king, but publishing content without structuring it is simply wasted effort. By strategically incorporating links, marketers can encourage click-throughs, improve page quality scores and keep visitors engaged.