The Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) is the moment you become aware of a product or service and start researching it online. 

Let’s say you see a commercial for a cool new barbeque grill. While you continue watching the episode of Law & Order you’ve seen five times, you Google the grill on your iPad. You check out the grill’s website and read reviews on another site. Later that day, while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, you pull out your phone and compare grill prices. The next day at work you watch the grill in action on YouTube and then ask your Facebook friends if anyone’s used one. If everything checks out, you head over to Grills’ Galore or Amazon.com to buy it.

That’s how we shop these days. And not just for grills and cars and big screen TVs. It’s how we shop for food, movies, healthcare, insurance, education – everything from antiques to international travel.

The Zero Moment of Truth has changed marketing forever.

Think of it this way: It takes a village to raise a brand. Integrated marketing brings together stakeholders from multiple departments to strategically connect all of a brand’s consumer touch points – advertising, promotions, mobile, point-of-sale, even PR. It’s a big undertaking but one well worth the effort, boosting ROI while shortening sales cycles. But before you start connecting the dots, make sure everyone is on the same page. Carol gives you the whole story.

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Is your website easy come, easy go? You may have optimized your site to get great organic search engine results – and lots of visitors – but if people don’t like what they see when they get there, they’ll bail. The bounce rate indicates how often that happens by giving you the percentage of visitors who view only a single page of your site before leaving. Deflate your bounce rate by making sure you have valuable, relevant content that encourages visitors to stick around – and keeps them coming back for more.

AdWords is Google’s paid search advertising program. Through AdWords, you identify keywords that describe what you’re selling, then write short text ads that include those keywords. When people search using those keywords, your ads show up in the paid ad section on the search engine results page. With AdWords, you bid on keywords to determine the placement of your ad (versus your competitors’ ads) and how much you’ll have to pay when people click on it.

Think of local search like you would the yellow pages – only without those annoying tissue-thin pages. While you want to make sure you include geographic information so that your site shows up in organic searches, you also need to pay attention to local search engines like Google Places. Local search engines automatically create listings, but it’s up to you to “own” your business and add as much detail as possible. Things like photos, hours of operation, even videos will all help you show up higher in the directory results.

Instagram is a photo-sharing application that was recently purchased by Facebook for a whopping $1 billion. With Instagram, you use an app to take a photo with your mobile phone, apply a filter to that photo, then upload it and share it on various social media sites. Instagram photos have a retro, quirky vibe, but the real advantage is the ease with which you can share photos across social platforms. And while it’s fun for individuals to use, some of the world’s biggest brands are using Instagram as a marketing tool to engage customers and create a sense of community through visual storytelling.

RSS, which stands for “really simple syndication” or “rich site summary,” is a tool that delivers frequently updated web content, like blogs or e-newsletters, to subscribers. You just choose an RSS reader, like Google Reader and Feedly, and then choose what content you want delivered to you. It’s a great way to stay current with your favorite sites, but it’s also an ideal tool for Internet marketers to keep people engaged. But just having an RSS feed on your site isn’t enough – the content it delivers needs to be valuable and relevant (see content marketing).  

If crowdsourcing has a rallying cry, it’s probably “power to the people!” Crowdsourcing is all about taking a task that would generally be assigned to one person or group (usually employees) and farming it out to the public at large. Like Ben & Jerry’s “Do the World a Flavor” project, in which the company’s newest ice cream flavor was determined by an online contest (the winner has yet to be announced). And Foldit, which asks people to “solve puzzles for science” in an effort to help cure diseases. But crowdsourcing is not without its critics: Some worry that it results in substandard work, while others question the ethics of soliciting free or low-paying work.

If you boiled the web down to one simple imperative, it would be, “Help people find what they’re looking for.” That’s certainly what search engines are intended to do. But once you land on a website, the same rule applies. And that’s where Information Architecture comes in. It’s the art and science of organizing a website’s information in ways that make sense to most people, always keeping in mind a site’s goals and its users’ needs.  Good information architecture can mean better site engagement, improved search engine optimization and higher conversion rates.

Google Analytics is a service that gives you a host of information about your website visitors – how many, how long they stay, where they come from, where they go after visiting your site and more. The basic version is free; you can upgrade to premium for a fee. You just include a bit of code on each page of your site and then view the data using Google’s dashboard feature. And it can be integrated with pay-per-click and display advertising campaigns so you can see how well your online advertising is performing.