Online Marketing Success: Accelerate Your Online Marketing Flywheel

In a recent blog post, Rand from Moz did a company evaluation through the lens of the book “Good to Great”. Let’s use this same technique to examine the acceleration of an online marketing flywheel. Through the lens of “egoless clarity,” review the 6 components below:

Does The Project Have Level 5 Leadership?

Level 5 Leadership is largely defined by 2 primary characteristics:

1. Personal Humility: Realistic about knowledge gaps, understands he/she must sometimes rely on others to successfully execute SEO recommendations.
2. Professional Will: Has determined that a successful online marketing campaign is important (if not urgent) for the organization; will relentlessly pursue campaign success.

With this in mind, let’s look at leadership:

• In-house Online Marketing Leadership
  Review the leadership of your natural and paid campaigns. Do they have the expertise as well as the resources necessary to ensure success? Put someone in place who can lead your online marketing campaign in a fearless manner. An employee who can set aside ego and admit knowledge gaps, someone who will commandeer the resources necessary for success.
•  Outsourced Online Marketing Leadership
  Take time to meet with your online marketing vendor to discuss expectations, goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Does the company culture encourage project managers to ask for help from their colleagues with no fear that exposing knowledge gaps will cause negative consequences? Choose an SEO/SEM company that behaves like a good personal trainer, providing expertise while pushing you to implement recommendations.

Do You Have the Right People in the Right Seats?

• In-house Online Marketing Project Managers
  Does IT understand Why online marketing is important? Does marketing have enough technical knowledge to be able to clearly communicate with IT? Do they understand enough of the How? In other words, if IT mentioned “Pi” would Marketing think “pie”?
• Outsourced Online Marketing Project Managers
  Is your SEO/SEM project manager providing appropriate, actionable recommendations and clearly communicating with company contacts? If SEO recommendations are not implemented it could be because the SEO project manager uses technical jargon. Good communication with no fear of exposing knowledge gaps is critical.

Have the Brutal Facts About The Project to Date been Confronted?

• Has the project been a financial drain?
• Have other projects suffered because of time spent managing online marketing?
• Have the recommendations of your SEO been implemented? If not, why?

What is Our Hedgehog Concept?

• Does the online marketing campaign further our goal to be the best in the world at what we do?
• Does managing the online marketing campaigns take us away from focusing on our core competencies?

Have We Created a Culture of Discipline?

• Commitment to doing the hard work and sometimes taking the hard road for end results that are more rewarding.
• Daily commitment to a blog or other ongoing labor intensive tasks.
• Timely implementation of recommendations that may not seem urgent.

Are We Turning the Flywheel?

• It takes a lot of jet fuel to get the plane off the ground. Are you doing the hard work today that will result in easy future success?

So there it is, a quick way to evaluate whether your company has an online marketing strategy that will help propel your company from Good to Great!