There are two different lines of thought in marketing – the feel gooders and the analyzers. Feel gooders look at trending, human behavior, and endeavor to uncover what makes human beings tick. The analyzers look at hard numbers, popular word choices, times of day people are in the stores, and anything else you can assign a hard and fast number to. Feel gooders rely on intuition and gut to guide them. Analyzers rely on facts and figures.

See where I’m going with this?

Ideally, every office would have a balance of the two. You want there to be some hard and fast numbers behind everything, but you do have to rely on gut and human emotion to guide your decision making process in marketing as well.

Online, there is a new kind of marketer emerging. This marketer takes the best of both worlds – the feel good stuff and the numbers stuff. This marketer creates content online using the trending data, and then makes informed word decisions using Google’s Keyword Tool, pulling together lists of 25-50 keyword terms. Usually, this marketer has already internalized those keywords and optimized the online content without even having to think about it. This marketer optimizes everything.

This marketer is constantly testing ad campaigns and brand movements using different word choices, different trending influences, while analyzing click thru rates, impressions and conversions.

This marketer is a bad ass.

It does raise the question – what comes first? The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or the Content?

Every marketer has their own way of doing things. I think the most important question to answer for any business, client, product or service is: why am I online? Is it to connect with potential customers or find other business partners? How will people find you? Is your URL memorable or are you relying on people searching for key terms to find you on Google, Yahoo, or Bing?

Regardless of what you answer; SEO should be part of your plan. Whether or not you use it to drive decisions behind your content is an informed choice that only you can make for your business.