Digital marketing insights.

As you might know, Kayak was recently nominated as a finalist for two small business awards by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. Ultimately, we weren't chosen for either, but the experience did give me a bit of time to reflect on just how far our little company has come, what the success we have had really means, and what lessons I could share with the world about it.

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.

Recently, we found ourselves on a conference call with a prospective new client that took on a slightly strange (but sadly not entirely unusual) direction – the client wanted to spend quite a bit of money on a website redesign, and we did our very best to talk them out of it.

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.

Several times a year, major auto shows are held in cities like Paris, New York, and Milan, so the world's top car designers can meet to show off their concepts. According to media reports, it isn't unusual for the companies in attendance to spend several hundreds of thousands of dollars just to make the trip and participate.

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.

In some ways, doing business over the Internet (or starting new business relationships online) represents something of a Catch-22 for customers and clients.

"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.

Most business people realize by now that search optimization (and by extension, a big degree of success or failure in Internet marketing as a whole) comes down to having strong content and a good link profile.

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.

The world isn't flat, there is no fountain of youth to be found in Florida, and drinking snake oil isn't going to give you any superhuman powers. Strange as it might seem, however, these were all once popular enough beliefs to get people to go to pretty great lengths (or part with big chunks of their own savings) just to find out.

If you like food, it is a great time to own a television. Not only are the cable channels filled with cooking competitions searching for the best professional and amateur chefs, but, are cooking shows all about entertainment, or is there something 'marketing' to be learned at the same time?

Even though the digital marketing world has pages and pixels instead of forests and trees, it's safe to say that business owners and executives still miss one for the other far more often than they should.

Has your previously successful and profitable website stopped being interesting to customers in the way it once was, despite trying ineffective ways to gain attention?