There’s a ton of information about Internet marketing strategy floating around online. Yet precious little of that presents the practical elements needed for a viable online strategy.

It’s a pet peeve of mine — and a couple of these elements just aren’t found in B-school textbooks. When these practical elements aren’t done right or included (often the case), everything else under-performs, requiring unplanned course-correcting measures to get back on track.

1. Balance

Balance in all things — a balanced mix of areas factored into your Internet marketing strategy and a pragmatic balance of the internal resources needed to build, launch and performance manage execution of the strategy.

2. Online Branding Presence

Organizations need to go way beyond Internet brand advertising and think about how the brand (and its representatives) participate and come across in key online marketing channels — most notably Social Networks.

Are you transparent? Are you perceived as authentic? Is this more than an internal slogan? Check our podcast with Linda Popky What’s the Value of Online Branding for more ideas.

3. Keyword Research

OK — this is really my pet peeve. If you talk to rock-star Internet marketers they will all tell you one thing — they really, really, truly really to the max obsess over their keyword list. And, their obsession is not a one-time event.

Keyword phrases are how people who don’t know about you find you… get very, very serious about this. Check out Internet Marketing Best Practices: Smart Keyword Marketing.

4. Conversion Functionality

The vast majority of businesses stop short of defining this in their online marketing strategy. An online strategy that only factors in driving traffic to the website is missing the point — what actions do you want them to take once they get there?

My experience? If you don’t spell out the conversion functionality expectations for your website in the strategy, don’t expect the planning and execution to deliver great results.

5. Online Competition

Ahem… I said AHEM! Hello? What’s your competition online doing? It is SO easy to reverse engineer your Internet competition and develop a strategy to eclipse them and build a competitive advantage.

While we’re at it, PLEASE understand this: competitors are any entity in a higher position than yours in the Search Engine results pages for your targeted keywords. When you consider that the #1 position on Google gets 42% of the clicks and the #2 position drops to 12% — you quickly start to think differently about what constitutes a “competitor.”

Some of these elements get overlooked because they’re “soft” items — looking at Balance elements such as: time constraints, internal skills vs. outsourcing, organizational temperament, etc. A solid Internet marketing strategy includes these items to drive attainable results they can count on for success.

Recently I sat down with Linda Popky — The Marketing Master and President of L2M Associates — for a wide-ranging discussion about Online Branding and recorded that conversation for our OnCompeting podcast.

Linda’s take on Online Branding as a component of Internet marketing was thought-provoking and filled with great insight and tips.

In case you were wondering if online branding really matters — here’s an interesting factoid: recent research showed that 20% of Twitter communications have a brand mention.

A monumental shift is taking place in how people get healthcare and medical information. These changes are so profound that ignoring them could upend healthcare providers.

Consider this: a 2009 Pew Research Center study, The Social Life of Health Information, finds that 61% of American adults look online for health information. There’s even a new term for these folks: e-patients. 20% of e-patients use social networking sites and websites that foster participation with medical professional and patients

This PEW research study is just chock full of insight on how behavior is shifting to favor Internet sources for all types of health-related learning and decisions. It’s a must-read for healthcare executives and marketers.

There’s also plenty of anecdotal information pointing to  the growing popularity of the Internet for healthcare information:

• iPhone Apps –  such as: WebMD Mobile, GivUp, Natural Cures, Eat This, Not That! and my favorite — Am I Pregnant Quiz
• Audio Podcasts – such as: Nutrition Diva, More Attention — Less Deficit, SCCM Podcast — iCritical Care
• Video Podcasts – such as: Oprah’s Health & Wellness, Good Morning American Health, Health Matters at Work
• Websites & Blogs – such as Patients Like Me, or Booster Shots
• Social Networking Sites – such as Daily Strength, or eHealth Forum
• Rating & Review Sites – such as MDJunction, or Health Grades

These represent a small fraction of the endless channel opportunities that include YouTube, SlideShare and more. Clearly the Internet is becoming “a contender” for healthcare marketing resources.

Opportunity abounds — particularly if your competitors have not yet caught up with this shift. Healthcare marketers should be giving the numerous online channels serious consideration in their marketing strategy, budgets and plans. Indeed, Internet Healthcare Marketing is becoming a matter for all healthcare executives to embrace.

First — in case you don’t know what Meta Tags are — they are discrete pieces of information you add to the behind-the-scenes coding that tells Search Engines about your site and how to display it.

Specifically, I am referring to the title you designate for your web page, the description you assign to it and the keywords that you want to be known for. This Internet Marketing Tip is super-easy, no-cost and highly effective.

Why are Meta Tags So Important to Your Success?

• The vast majority of prospects who learn about your business find out about you (or check you out) via Search Engines. You can control how your site is presented in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) by informed development of your Meta Tags — they therefore function like advertisements for your business.

• Search Engines use Meta Tags in their ranking algorithms. So, when you build those tags using your targeted keyword phrases, you improve the likelihood of obtaining a higher ranking position.

If you don’t develop great Meta Tags for you web page, the Search Engine spider will just grab the first thing it “sees” on your page and use that. That can be really ugly — not compelling, sentences cutoff mid-point, lacking context, etc. You’ll squander a great opportunity to put your best foot forward and make a great impression — and you completely control this.

Meta tags can be a great performance management tool as well. If you are already in a top ranking position for your targeted keyword phrase yet are not seeing a robust volume of prospects come to your site one of the easiest ways to kick that up a notch is to change your Meta tags and make your title and description more compelling.

Adding keyword-rich Meta Tags to your site is super easy as well. If you have a Content Management System (CMS), you can readily add/change your Meta tags without knowing website coding. If you do have to add it directly to your website coding you’ll need a bit of upfront guidance, however, you’ll quickly pick it up and be off and running. Here’s what the Title and Description tags look like for this article to give you an idea of how easy it is:

<title>Internet Marketing Tip: You STILL Need Meta Tags for Your Site</title>
<meta name-"description" content="Don't miss this great Internet Marketing Tip that makes the case why you STILL need great Meta Tags for your website. An easy, no-cost way to influence your success." />

With just a little bit of guidance on how to build the tags (which you can readily find on the Web), you can take charge of your own destiny. Take the time to get guidance, as there are nuances to building powerful Meta Tags that can make a difference in your results.

Do this — Go to Google and put your favorite target keyword phrase in Google’s search box. Now, notice what comes up on the Search Engine Results Page. Do the titles and descriptions of the WebPages presented make you want to click through to the site? What good would it do you to be in a top ranking position if it didn’t drive strong targeted traffic to your site?

I don’t know about you but whenever I can influence ranking for my target keywords and control what people see about my business I think that’s is a good deal.

Last Item: if you’d like to see what the Meta Tags produced for this web page, go to Google’s search box and enter the title of this article. You should then see the title and description that I created with Meta Tags for this article in their SERPs. Neat.

2009 brought a seemingly unending array of new and noteworthy Internet marketing advances. Noteworthy, for sure, are the tools that make Internet marketing affordable and accessible to anyone who cares to expend the effort to learn.

Yet I think the big 2009 marketing story is this: Consumer Control. Consumers, in growing legions, are finding a “voice” in Internet forums, review and ratings sites, social networks and the like — and they are using these channels to express their opinions and preferences.

Why Does This Matter to You?

People are listening. Research is now consistently showing that people increasingly turn to and rely on online opinions and ratings to inform their decisions for person AND business use.

Classic marketing approaches geared toward shaping awareness, interest and reputation are increasingly less effective.

Conversely, understanding how to go with the flow of Consumer Control can represent tremendous opportunity.

Moreover, this is no longer just about deciding which consumer electronic gadgets to buy. These “citizen journalists” are shaping the fate of healthcare providers, charitable donations, business and personal reputations, organizational vitality, elections, restaurants, telecommunication providers, high tech sales and much, much more.

Why has Consumer Control reached a Tipping Point in 2009? A confluence of several factors:

• Unprecedented Publishing Access
• Ease of Use
• Social Networking Growth
• Abundant Multi-media Opportunities
• Erosion of Trust (in traditional channels)

Depending on your perspective, this can be a good thing… or not. Certainly, it should NOT represent business-as-usual. Success now relies on embracing this major shift, developing a new marketing philosophy and adopting Internet marketing strategies, plans and tactics that enable you to succeed in this era of Consumer Control.

Have you ever had the itch to prove your point? The folks at The Fun Theory (an initiative of Volkswagen) have a point to make: You Can Change People’s Behavior for the Better by Making it FUN. As they say “be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.”

And, to prove their point they have created the Fun Theory Award – winner to be announced in Sweden on December 15th.

Fascinating idea, yet even more interesting for those of us engaged in Internet Marketing is how the combination of Creative Ideas + Fun generates viral marketing momentum. For example, consider the case of the group in Odenplan Sweden that tackled the issue of how to get folks to take the stairs instead of the escalator in this Fun Stairs video.

The video has gone viral — as of the time I’m writing this article it garnered over 8M views on YouTube alone (it’s in other places). Consider this: the topic of the stairs is B-O-R-I-N-G. Boring, boring, boring. The juxtaposition of extremes — taking a boring topic and making it giggly-fun and then loading that into Web 2.0 and social networking channels is a winning combination.

The recipe for going viral in this mini case study:

• Creative Idea
• Creative Execution of the Concept
• Creative Use of Internet Marketing Channels

Internet Marketing Tip: make some of the less sexy aspects of your product or service fun and demonstrate it in Web 2.0/social networking channels.

How will you capture this and leverage emerging Internet marketing channels to give your message “wings?” The gauntlet is down.

A growing cadre of hospitals in the U.S. are embracing Social Media and Social Network Marketing — as shown in the graphic below.

Hospital Social Media Marketing

This information comes courtesy of Ed Bennett, Director of Web Strategy at the University of Maryland Medical Center, who is gaining renown for his research into the confluence of hospitals, healthcare and the Internet. According to his research, at least 402 hospitals in the US are using Social Media in varying forms to accomplish their goals.

Moreover, research conducted by Ad-ology Research’s Media Influence on Consumer Choice Study (available for purchase $495) as reported recently in Marketing Charts provides additional insight into the growing need for participation in these channels and establishing a robust website/web presence. Among their findings:

• Almost 40% of recent hospital/urgent care patients said that Social Media influenced them.
• More than 50% of the 25 – 34 year-olds reported that Social Media influences them. (Forums & Discussion Boards had a particularly significant influence on members of this demographic recently visiting for maternity.)
• Hospital & Urgent Care facility websites most influenced 18-24 year-olds.

And yes, they did also find that a significant number of people were influenced by traditional media such as direct mail, television and newspapers ads (!!).

The growing influence of Social Media in hospital marketing is just the tip of the iceberg. When you peel back the stats represented here and start reviewing some of the creative approaches used by some truly innovative marketers, it really starts painting a “healthier” picture for healthcare marketing — and in particular hospital marketing — in a cost-effective, relevant way.

Readers of this blog may recall a couple of months ago we published an article — Think Online Reputation Doesn’t Matter — Ask United. This was a story about how social media can immediately challenge your reputation and cause endless amounts of work to contain the damage.

Dave Carroll, a Canadian musician, took a major unresolved grievance with United to heart. The grievance? United damaged his Taylor guitar. Dave wrote a song about his unsatisfactory experience, loaded it up on YouTube and went from relative obscurity to fame as Everyman with a Voice.

His YouTube video (which he did with his band — Sons of Maxwell) has been viewed almost 6 million times — and that was just the first video! People who never would have heard this story listened to Dave and the band sing their story. They listened and shared online… and along the way millions of negative impressions about United Airlines were created.

In case you missed that great video — here’s the link to United Breaks Guitars.

Not only did the story/song go viral, traditional media outlets tripped over each other to interview him and give the story “legs” offline as well. This story had so many legs it put a centipede to shame!

His saga struck a chord with all of us who have ever been on the short end of the stick trying to get satisfaction with the Airline Lost Baggage folks. It doesn’t hurt that the song and video are snappy, either.

Credit: Vancouver Sun

In an incredible stroke of bad luck, just a few days ago United again messed with the wrong guy and lost his luggage somewhere along the way on a trip he took from Calgary Canada to Denver. When he arrived at Denver — no luggage. United employees told him he had to wait around; US Customs told him he had to leave. He left. And, three days later his luggage showed up.

Here’s the fun part: He was on his way to a speak to a conference of customer service execs about – United Broke My Guitar! It really just doesn’t get any better.

Once again United is in the middle of another PR disaster as one media channel after another — online and offline — retell the story of Dave at United’s expense. And they all seem to relish pointing out that Dave was on his way to speak to customer service execs.

The moral of this story? Manage the Beforemath, not the Aftermath… online reputation management is a reality for businesses today.

Two very potent forces are converging in the marketplace: economic turmoil and surging Internet use. Businesses that continue on as before will experience difficulty; those that adapt will stand a chance. Organizations that demonstrate creativity and innovation can gain competitive advantage.

This is a time when your competitive field can go Topsy-turvy and you can come out ahead.

That’s what the Creative Internet Marketing Stories series is about — real life stories about companies and people succeeding through creative and innovative use of Internet marketing as in the following story.

Creative Healthcare Marketing: HealthPartners Petey & Pokey

Healthcare is in the spotlight. Major understatement – no? Healthcare is also fairly notorious for rather conservative marketing. And, for good reason — personal and legal stakes are extremely high.

Even if the economy was booming, major shifts in consumer behavior favoring Internet information and influencers represents a seismic change to status quo marketing strategy, planning and tactics. So, when creativity and innovation happen to capitalize on that shift it’s worth taking note.

As in the case of HealthPartners and their marketing campaign “A New Way to Look at Healthcare” creating two unlikely characters: Petey and Pokey. Here’s the rub: Petey is a specimen pee cup and Pokey is a needle.

Healthcare Marketing Campaign Mascots

• Company: HealthPartners — 2 hospitals/25 clinics/~1 million members in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.
• Goal: Increase adoption rate of their Online Services (prescription refills, test results, medical records, appointment setting, bill payment, etc.)
• What: HealthPartners created two characters as part of the overall marketing campaign to increase adoption of their Online Services — Petey and Pokey — they are wildly successful. They were innovative in their use of emerging Web 2.0 capabilities and Social Media channels.
• Challenges: Not everyone associated with HealthPartners felt that this irreverent duo was appropriate for the serious nature of healthcare.
• Key: HealthPartners employees were early champions enthusiastically promoting Petey & Pokey, which in turn got viral growth rolling.

Petey & Pokey are fun, memorable mascots that appear at events, in advertisements and communications. HealthPartners integrated Petey & Pokey in a variety of classic offline and online marketing tactics.

That integration combination works – they are frequently seen “in-person” around the Minneapolis/St. Paul area in addition to a range of HealthPartner events AND they have their own accounts in key social media channels, such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. Offline events encourage fans to “friend” Petey & Pokey’s social media pages to get the latest on them. Online social networking promotes their offline events. Nice.

Petey & Pokey were so popular that they “went viral” (meaning word of mouth marketing set in within their target market). I’m pretty sure that the HealthPartners marketing team would tell us that Going Viral is not as accidental as it sounds. There are 3 basic elements at work here that facilitate that success:

1. Entertainment Value
2. Target Market Engagement
3. Relevant Education

These 3 elements — Entertainment — Engagement — Education — are the Secret Sauce that helps them build a strong Social Media following. As popularity of these characters spread (along with the messages they conveyed), so did the adoption of their Online Services.

HealthPartners then uses these social networks to update highly receptive fans, educate them about the value of their Online Services and send messages about upcoming events such as a the Grand Re-opening celebration for one of their clinics.

Their fans and friends in social media can then easily forward news, videos, pictures, event announcements or messages featuring Petey & Pokey to their own networks. In fact, they often don’t even have to do anything — the news automatically updates to their friends. Again, more publicity and goodwill for HealthPartners Online Services. How good is that?

HealthPartners Internet marketing team keeps trying new ways to leverage the popularity of Petey & Pokey. To see a list of the various channels they use, get ideas, and follow links to specific examples, check out our expanded coverage of this Creative Healthcare Marketing Idea.

Stay tuned… we’ll keep following the progress of this campaign and report back.

Local Internet Marketing is a great way to accelerate your business growth. One of the key tactics available to you, Local Search Engine Optimization (Local SEO), is also one of the easiest, quickest and least expensive tactics available to your business.

And, from my experience, it is among the most underrated and least understood online marketing tactics.

Why Local SEO Rocks for Your Business:

• Local Search is not just for “brick and mortar” retail storefronts. In fact, you don’t even have to have a physical location or product at all.

• Almost every business or organization markets their services locally — even if their primary target is global. For example, our business — based in San Francisco & Silicon Valley — also has clients in Seattle, Los Angeles, Japan, etc.

• Many people prefer to do business with local providers even though they could use a company anywhere in the world these days.

• Often the competition for top ranking in the “classic” Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) is prohibitively expensive and difficult. Local SEO is faster, requires far less specialized expertise, resources and intense oversight.

• Technology advances among the top Search Engines (most notably their ability to derive searchers geo location roughly 50% of the time) and the growth of mobile devices means more of the top results will contain local results.

• You now have the ability to go to the top of the search results and hold a competitive advantage over larger, deep-pockets businesses by virtue of your local status — and your application of the far easier “rules of the road” that Local SEO success requires.

I can just hear some of you thinking “I’m already in the local search results.” And your business may, in fact, be there by default. You don’t even need a website!

The top tier Search Engines — Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft (Bing) — know there is enormous financial opportunity for them to become the “go to” resource for people needing all sorts of local information. So, even if you haven’t registered your site with them, they have made it their business to find information about your business and add it to their index.

Courtesy: http://www.Wordle.net

However, you are not truly at a competitive advantage to simply let it go at that. Why not? You have not controlled how your business is being presented, you have not optimized your registration and website for maximum exposure in local results and you also may need to step up to some pretty aggressive online business competition and “trick out” your business listing. More about that in future posts.

So, how can you take control of this great opportunity? The first thing to do is register your website(s) with the top 3 Local Search Engines — its free:

1. Google Local Business Center
2. Yahoo! Local Listings
3. MSN Local Business Center

All three Search Engines require you to have accounts with them, which are free. In Google’s case, you access the Local Business Center through your Google Accounts Hub so you will not likely see a direct reference to Local on that link’s landing page.

Take the time to make sure the business description you use for your Local Search Engine submission is keyword-rich and compelling. Think of it like an advertisement, which it is.

Validation of Your Local Search Engine Submission Authority

You will need to validate that you are the owner of the website being registered or an authorized agent of the business you are listing. Google and MSN/Bing will provide you with a PIN code for that purpose; you then paste the code into your registration to complete your registration. Yahoo! does not require a PIN.

Generally you have the choice of getting this code in one of two ways: the Search Engines will call and provide you with the PIN code or they will send you snail mail with the code. The larger your company, the more difficult it is to make the phone call option work — unless you can guarantee that anyone who answers the phone when they call will diligently write down the code and get it to you or your webmaster. Snail mail is usually a better option for larger companies (and have them send it to your attention or to your webmaster), however, it does take longer.

Submitting and completing your site’s registration with the Local Search Engines is an important first step to growing your business success using Local Internet Marketing tactics.