There are basically two objectives to select from when deciding which one should be the primary focus for your website;

1. Getting found
2. Making an impression

Let’s use an example to make the distinction clear. If you are a new or relatively unknown company and have a unique or unfamiliar product to sell, your objective will most likely be getting found. You can’t sell your product until someone knows about it, so you need to attract potential customers to your website. In this example, you may choose to invest in optimizing your website for search rather than, for example, custom graphics or expensive animation.

In contrast, if you are an established, well known company that must maintain a high image profile, such as an ad agency, you may choose to invest in graphics and design rather than search. Your potential customers most likely know your name, and so you prefer to impress them rather than be found by them.

In reality, most companies will select elements of both objectives, and the objectives may change over time as the marketing objectives change. For example, you don’t want a website that is not professionally designed and that alienates visitors.

In visual terms, think of your Web objective as a slider: one side of the scale is search optimized, the other side is image optimized.

For small businesses just beginning their Web programs, it will be advantageous to devote resources primarily to one objective and that objective will most likely be getting found.

It’s a litany of frustrations that I hear over and over from business owners/CEOs concerning Internet Marketing. Here are the top ten:

1. How should I set objectives? What are my options?
2. What are all the pieces to Internet marketing?
3. SEO, blogs, social media: How do these pieces fit together?
4. What step comes first, second, etc.?
5. Who can help me?
6. How do I know if the service or company pitching my business really knows what they are talking about?
7. How do I track Return On Investment (ROI)?
8. Can I keep it simple?
9. Can I do parts of it in-house?
10. Can I scale it up?

Up until now I wasn’t sure of the answers, but I am testing the small business offering from Hubspot and it appears to be the all-in-one solution that business owners have been asking for. Check it out and let me know what you think.

I really like Brett Virmalo’s post today “2010: Marketing is not Marketing.” He points us away from the “artificial or half-true brand stories’ that, sadly, characterize much of what consumers are fed today, and points us to activities of “uncovering, fostering, sharing, and engaging with employees and consumers around the true stories that make your brand unique.” These are the activities of today’s Marketing. He looks at how various departments in an organization form today’s real marketing department. They include product design and development, and customer support.

More to the point, in today’s Marketing every department is a marketing department, and every employee is a marketing department of one.

Stepping back and taking a broad view of the business model, what appears to be happening today is the merging of traditionally independent departments or focus areas. This is more than removing silos-it is a whole new way of operating. Today, every department is a marketing department, every company is a media company, and every company is a green company.

This is filed under the topic “counter-intuitive” marketing. In my experience, research is about asking the right questions in the right way. Do this and the answers will come.

Organizations often don’t dig deeply enough into what they really want to accomplish and consequently don’t ask the right questions. They get data that fills impressive presentation portfolios that lie on shelves gathering dust rather than solving business problems.

Research is a cost. The only thing that conducting research guarantees is that a cost will be incurred. Research is not a solution to a business problem but rather part of the path to a solution.

So, how do we use research effectively to help solve business problems?

You do this by asking the right questions in a 3-step process that begins at the “end.”

The end is the business goal you want to reach. For example, you want to reverse membership declines and establish consistent, sustainable net member growth of 2%-3% per year. In this way you are rooted in results.

Next, identify all areas in which actionable information will guide decisions. At this step it is important to follow the web of implications for any piece of new information. For example, the decision to evaluate current customer satisfaction raises the question of what prospective customers want. Will prospective customers be identical to current customers in their wants and needs? Using this process, you develop a research strategy rooted in the business objective.

Finally, let the research strategy determine the research approach or tactic.

All of this is to ensure that the right questions are asked. You want to avoid the following: You are approached after the research is completed and someone says, “I thought you were going to ask this question” (which wasn’t asked) or “We should have asked that question.” Or, even worse, you have data that does not address your business goal.

Think and create like a publisher.

This is the message from Avitage in their concise and comprehensive microsite on content marketing strategy and executive. It’s filled with step-by-step directions with video explanations. This is a good place to start if you are considering a content marketing strategy.

In the online world, content is king. To provide relevant and useful content, businesses need a content strategy. Here is a useful approach by Michele Linn from a recent post on Junta42 “What’s Most Important About Content? It’s Not The Format“:

I love it when clients are enthusiastic about creating a content marketing strategy, but one of the first questions they often pose is,  ”What type of content should we create?” As Ardath Albee states in a recent post on her blog, Marketing Interactions, you should focus on these three things before thinking about the format:

Buyers, Prospects, Customers and Influencers – whose attention do you want to capture and keep?

Priorities, Problems, Issues, Objectives, Needs and Situations -what issue can you help your audience solve?

Buying stages – what information do your prospects need for wherever they are in the buying process?

Ardath walks readers through a great example of how to develop a content marketing program, which is much more than stringing together a few types of custom content. Instead of writing a white paper or an eBook because you need some new content, think of content as part of your brand building strategy.

Consider what your an audience has responded positively to and build content related to that. You can then reference other related white paper, webcasts, case studies, etc.

As Ardath says, “If you start with format, you’ll likely end up with one-off content that doesn’t attract the kind of extended attention you need to get people to stick with you all the way through the buying cycle.”

Real estate can refer to more than a physical address. For example, I’ve used it to describe storefront real estate- the amount of window display space. I’ve also used it to refer to the space on a restaurant table- tabletop real estate. Both usages mean that however the expression is used, real estate is valuable.

David Scarlett talks about website real estate and claims that “Centimeter For Centimeter, Your Website Is Likely To Be The Most Valuable Piece of Real Estate You’ll Ever Own!” I agree. And to support this statement, he sports a 6 minute and 3 second video describing what to do to maximize this real estate investment. It’s a video worth viewing. Follow his post here, and the video here.

Every business, small or large, is or will shortly be a greenmedia* business. This is inevitable based upon two inexorable trends: sustainability and social media.

Sustainability. It makes no difference if you are in the green industry directly or not. Your clients or the clients of your clients are-and so you are tied-in with them. Perhaps your employees support a green initiative. Eventually, they or your customers, or politicians or community advocates will ask for your support. Just out of curiosity, look for plaques commending green efforts on the walls of your customers’ offices-they are appearing with greater frequency. It’s best to get onboard now. This makes goods sense from the perspective of personal environmental stewardship and, given the billions the government is spending in this area, will definitely help your bottom line.

Social Media. It’s growing at an increasingly rapid rate, as is its presence in marketing initiatives. “Media” encompasses your website, social media platforms including blogging, and even news releases. Even if your company doesn’t have or believe in traditional media, you must begin to engage in social media. It’s the new listening post; your competitors are engaged, and they know what the marketplace is saying about you. Want to continue to “touch” your customers? They are increasingly tuning out of traditional forms of communication.

*Note source: “Every Company Is A Media Company” is a post from Brook Ellingwood.

According to Joe Pulizzi at junta42, 6 in 10 marketers will spend more in 2010. Significant for small businesses is their relatively larger emphasis on content marketing. Get his full post and a link to his whitepaper.

Do the math-inbound marketing is more cost effective than outbound marketing. Traditional outbound marketing has a linear relationship to spending; double spending on TV, for example, and double reach or frequency. In contrast, inbound marketing may have an exponential relationship to spending; in fact, there really is no limit to what great content-the cornerstone of inbound marketing-can produce.

This was one of the points made by Mike Volpe (@mvolpe) at a Hubspot webinar on “Website Redesign Strategy for 2010.” Connect with Mike and Hubspot for more insights.