Managing top priority online marketing activities

Here's some more food for thought on the need to develop relevant content for your market segments, and how to spend time on your most important online marketing activities.

"Digital content will continue to expand exponentially as new marketing channels surface. This makes effective management and efficient use of content essential to maximizing return on marketing investment." -- Aberdeen Research

As I have said a lot recently -- Content Is King!  Creating and managing that content and using it in relevant ways is going to get even more important.  Paying attention to the content is of vital importance to the long-term effectiveness of your marketing investment.  Tools that allow you to be nimble and responsive in your online marketing activities, and where you publish your "relevant content" are key to achieving success with your marketing investment. When your technology makes your life easier, you can naturally give content the high priority attention it deserves.

In case you have been wondering what online marketing activities should be focused on, and how much time should be spent on these activities as a percentage of a work week, I ran across an interesting article at SEOMoz.org, entitled, "Time Distribution for Effective Online Marketing".  It has a great pie chart that outlines the following activities (not suprisingly, content is at the top of the list). These are based on a 40 hour work-week:

1. Building Viral-Worthy, Authoritative Content (40%) - 16 hours/wk
2. Developing New Features/Designs (25%) - 10 hours/wk
3. Keyword, Industry, & Competitive Research (10%) - 4 hours/wk
4. Participating in Online Communities (10%) - 4 hours/wk
5. Testing/Refining Based on Visitor Data (10%) - 4 hours/wk
6. Manual Link Building (5%) - 2 hours/wk

How many of these do you focus on?  What is your time distribution focus?  How are you doing building relevant content for your target segments? Can you think of changes to your technology that would free up more mindshare to create great content?

Comments

[Internet marketing]

Its a very good article about Internet marketing.I think it in relevant ways is going to get even more important. Paying attention to the content is of vital importance to the long-term effectiveness of your marketing investment

[Soren Ryherd]

I love this topic. The problem with a pie chart like the one referenced is that it assumes that the same activities carry the same weight with every campaign, whether new/old, small/large, local/national. In reality, the top priority (as measured in moving the needle on client profitability) changes based on a number of things, including how long it will take to accomplish the task and how long it has been since it was last done. We've built internal tools to help us with this, but it was not an easy exercise.

[Jody Pellerin]

For those of us who aren't working quite 40 hours a week (even though it feels like it sometimes), this chart gives some useful ratios to keep in mind for marketing activities. And since I am pretty new at marketing, this also tells me some of the things I still need to learn about.