Mediaboss Marketing

I was excited to interview John J Curtis, the SEO Manager at Walgreens about omni-channel marketing and why broad terms just arent working anymore. John is speaking at our next marketing conference, SEJ Summit Chicago, which is thisWednesday! If you can make it, westill have a few FREEtickets available for our Chicago event, courtesy of our partner, Searchmetrics.Request an invite!

#PROTIP: Because our content is enterprise-focused, if you are a consultant but work with big, enterprise brands, mention them in your job title/company when requesting an invite.

Without further adieu, heres my interview withJohn.

The important thing to remember is that your customer will be omni-channel.Ensuring your products and services are properly communicated and available across channels and platforms shouldnt be an initiative it needs to be the norm. Building omni-channel into everything has advantages. An omni-channel commitment builds customer retention and value, creates a competitive advantage for customer acquisition, and integrates customer communication into one message across channels.

I think you could say that SEO works together with almost anything: content, website features, in-store signage, etc. I like to think of SEO as a layer. SEO doesnt make things it makes things visible. The SEO layer applies particularly well to content because good content marketing is designed for your customer. That said, even content marketing has varying degrees of uses. Very topical, timely content may not have a long shelf life. For this, we want to have a program built in that ensures all pieces of content are visible, but we might get involved on a per-article basis as an SEO team. When it comes to resource-style content with a consistent customer interest, we want to make sure those pieces are fully addressing a customers needs and fully exploring the topic in language customers are using.

The biggest difference is volume. There is a critical mass for taking action in an enterprise setting because of the number of people who will touch a given code request, for example. Were unlikely to adjust elements on a single product page and more likely to create features and formulas that can apply to page templates, affecting thousands of pages at a time. There are a handful of high value pages we touch individually, and beyond that we try to do work that makes page types more visible on the whole.

Additionally, at an enterprise level, there will be things happening constantly that can impact our customers search experience. This is where creating the SEO layer throughout an organization can pay off. There is too much to keep track of for an SEO team in an enterprise environment.

By providing education and resources to other teams (such as product management, UX, social, etc.), you install the SEO layer in the organization and scale the practice of creating search visibility.

Its not that those phrases are inherently useless, but they also dont inherently mean anything. Often you will hear people say these things as if they are solutions. They are tools, though. And as with any tool, you have to use it properly for the job youre doing, and every tool isnt used for every job. In enterprise SEO, I find myself first needing to assess the issue at hand, identify the customer need, understand what I can affect within the parameters of the project, then decide what to grab from the toolbox.

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5 Answers on Omni-Channel Marketing With John J Curtis of Walgreens by @wonderwall7