Click on the images below to read the most recent articles and see the videos I produced for Intermountain’s medical group leaders, physicians, and other providers.

Google sent me this certificate after helping the Positive Coaching Alliance with its Google Ad campaign. In an emailed message, Google’s marketing team said, “Congratulations on completing the requirements for your Certificate of Completion from the Google Ad Grants Online Marketing Challenge! To be one of the top teams who completes the program is a great accomplishment, which you should be very proud of.”

I am proud of it. It was a lot of work! This was just part of the MBA work I’ve been doing with SOU. It’s paying off.

Internet marketing and e-commerce are vast and ever-changing subjects to study. It has been thrilling to see how marketers can reach target audiences in various ways online. The seven weeks of projects for Southern Oregon University’s MBA 536 class has been rewarding. As I reflect upon all the many tips of the internet-marketing icebergs, there are five final takeaways I’d like to share.

UX
Creating a website for specific clients or users is fun and all but understanding the simple design details that will delight visitors is where the rewards come. Before MBA 536, I had no idea that user experience is represented by the term UX. There are many variations of UX such as user experience design (UXD, sometimes UED), user interface (UI), and user-centered design (UCD). I learned at the center of a website visitor’s experience, it is the user’s perspective that matters most. To create the best UX content creators should be mindful of six qualities. From now on as I develop this website I will constantly be trying to improve the findability, accessibility, desirability, usability, credibility, and usefulness of its content.

SlideDocs
Anyone can make slides or documents to share with colleagues or clients, but can they combine the two? Yes, they can. I learned from Nancy Duarte’s website the art of making Slidedocs. In a nutshell, Slidedocs helps break down ideas into readable chunks – with text in columns put on slides that can be supplemented with visuals. Slidedocs are meant to be read and allow users to take in information at their own pace. No bullet points are to be used like conventional PowerPoint slide decks. Nancy’s website provides fantastic templates containing a variety of Slidedocs anyone can use to effectively communicate their next great idea.

Google Analytics
Google is sharing its power of data tracking with Google Ads and Google Analytics. What’s great about using the internet search engine to gain customers is that with the right tools you can track how and why customers are finding what you want them to find. With all the data being exchanged online, it would be most advantageous to see the stories behind that data. Online marketers can use Google Analytics as a tool to see what data decisions are being made by customers. Marketers can easily compare internet campaigns and create reports to display progress and opportunities to stakeholders. With so much data traffic being exchanged every second worldwide there are plenty of great business decisions that can be made to capture attention and sales. A user can go as deep or shallow into data with Google Analytics. Users can also take free courses to learn and get certified as a guru of Google Analytics. I received my Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) thanks to the encouragement of MBA 536.

Persona
Marketers need to know exactly who they’re targeting for clients, especially online. From my mass commercial communications background, it was enlightening to learn just how specific your reach in marketing can be when you build a Persona. Hubspot and other websites provide questionnaires and templates to identify the type of person a company is marketing to. I teamed up with some classmates to support Google Ad campaigns for a nonprofit called Positive Coaching Alliance. Before executing our campaigns we had to identify who we’re trying to find to donate to the nonprofit. You can take a look at the Persona we made by clicking here. It really helped to narrow our focus to the customers most likely to contribute to the Positive Coaching Alliance’s online goals.

Affiliate Marketing
My friend from college, Mark Hamilton, is an example of an affiliate marketer. His YouTube channel is called “Mark Reviews” and he reviews various products and services given to him from companies. These companies consider him an online influencer hoping he’ll reach the desired target market. I’m not sure whether he utilizes data analytics to get a cut of what his channel contributes, but I know he gets a lot of cool, free stuff. Better examples of affiliate marketing include third-party advertisers of products or services for a merchant in return for a sales commission or lead. MBA 536 taught me how affiliate marketing is more effective online than it is offline because on the world wide web referrals are easier to track. Check out Mark’s channel! Maybe I can track your click and Mark will give me a cut of what he enjoys from contributing companies.

What stands out as being the most useful of these takeaways is Google Analytics. Companies small and large need more people to help them make data-driven decisions and grow their online presence. Be receiving the GAIQ, an industry standard for interpreting online search engine and website customer decisions, I feel more confident in boosting a company’s growth with online customers. Now more than ever, we can track online users’ habits and decisions through data analytics. I’m grateful for MBA 536 in sharing how to use Google Analytics and to try out Google Ads with a nonprofit for an enlightening and educational campaign.

De Rurange CRM Presentation Slide Doc

Simplicity and brevity are best for marketing communications on user experience (UX), blogs, search engine optimization (SEO) and website design. This concept is what I call the digital dangling carrot. As a marketer, we don’t want too much thrown in the face of our customer. Certainly, variety is important, but let’s not throw every variety at the customer at the same time. We should identify who our customer is and what he wants. Once that is found, then use that hot button to entice the customer to get more variety. When marketing this carrot to the consumer in the online world, a savvy person should follow some of the following best practices:

User Experience and Website Design
I think user experience begins with what that user sees – hence, website design is the starting point. Among the top seven things Elementor’s chief marketing officer Ben Pines says people should practice for the best online user experience (UX), three of his points caught my eye.

First, he says the website “design should concentrate on user experience” (Pines, 2018). Like storytelling, digital marketers should make the website memorable. Ben says that is more important than what the website’s content actually says. To stand out in front of my friendly marketing competitor’s websites, I chose the Orange fruit theme to make it memorable. I like other fruits too, but D. Orange is meant to link my personality to my marketing style. There are still some tweaks needed on this site, but I think it’s off to a good start of getting the user curious about the content of this site because of its original and fruity design. With great website design and a delightful UX, people will remember the site and may come back to look for more details.

Second, Ben says websites are scanned, not read. Who’s got the time to read everything from their favorite websites? Not me. Ben says infographics and visuals are the best way to capture these scanners (Pines, 2018). On this D. Orange website, I plan to make some simple video elements that will further engage users. If I can get the scanners to read some of the content then I’ll get closer to getting that valuable attention needed for business.

Third, users want clarity and simplicity, according to Ben’s article. We shouldn’t make it difficult for users to find what they actually want. As I said at the beginning of this squirt (blog) post, “simplicity and brevity” are key. I’m amazed at how easy it is to shop on Apple’s website despite the complexity of all its products. Apple keeps it simple. It was French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal who identified the value of simplicity and brevity despite having put a lot of thought and revision to the work. He said, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” (Chandler, 2019). So it is with making websites with the better user experience.

Blogs
According to Forbes, the number one best practice a marketer can do for an effective blog is to focus on quality over quantity. The Forbes authors say marketing communicators should not write frequently just to blog regularly. He says there is no evidence that producing more frequent blogs that are less in-depth means more traffic – leading to more sales. The Forbes Agency Council says marketers should “focus on producing the very best in-depth articles that are better than anything else out on the internet in that vertical” (Dreyer, 2018). I think blogs should be thoughtful, revised, updated and relevant to the user a marketer is targeting. If you’re just blogging for blog’s sake, then you’re not going to keep and retain clients to your website. Everything on it – including your blog – tells a story about you and what kind of relationship you want with the user.

SEO
When crafting a digital marketing strategy, it’s best to make your website easy to find in a web search – through a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. According to Rob Stokes’ “eMarketing” textbook, the best practice of SEO involves “optimizing your website to rank higher on the search engine results. SEO involves creating relevant, fresh and user-friendly content that search engines index and serve when people enter a search term that is relevant to your product or service” (Stokes, 2013). SEO has been a tactic for years and is getting more sophisticated for marketing outcomes as time clicks away. A common outcome of SEO is to acquire and retain customers (Stokes 2013). By digital marketers taking the time to follow Google Ad fundamentals as an example, they would take the time to think of keywords and phrases that would align with what they think their targeted customer would be looking for online.

Those are just some of the best practices I have noticed for SEO, UX and blogs. There are many, many more. It’s also interesting to see how blogs and SEO have evolved as Google and other online technologies have become more sophisticated in gathering user data. I think it’s fascinating to see websites from the early 2000s compared to the ones today. What have you noticed in the evolution of UX, SEO, blogs and website design? Be sure to comment below!

 

References

Chandler, O. (2019). Blaise Pascal Quotes. Retrieved from www.goodreads.com: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/10994.Blaise_Pascal

Dreyer, C. (2018, March 28). 15 Best Practices For Your New Company Blog. Retrieved from www.Forbes.com: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/03/28/15-best-practices-for-your-new-company-blog/#4e1906e43a9a

Pines, B. (2018, May 29). 7 UX Principles For Creating a Great Website. Retrieved from www.webdesignerdepot.com: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/05/7-ux-principles-for-creating-a-great-website/

Stokes, R. (2013). eMarketing: The essential guide to marketing in a digital world. Minneapolis: Quirk Education Ltd.