By Kent Lewis, president and founder of Anvil Media, Inc., a search engine marketing agency based in Portland, Oregon.

When I entered into the marketing world as a PR intern in 1994, digital marketing consisted of multimedia demos on CD-ROM. The World Wide Web was just starting to take off and fax machines were preferred over e-mail for remote communications.

Since then, the digital universe has exploded, offering marketers unprecedented opportunities to reach prospective customers. Unfortunately, many of the “old dogs” of digital and traditional marketing are not quick to learn new tricks.

In the following article, I will outline 10 obsolete digital marketing strategies still in widespread use today. More importantly, I will suggest alternative approaches for each of the seven outdated techniques that are more likely to generate a positive return-on-investment (ROI).

1. Building a Digital Marketing Department: After nearly 15 years of corporations and agencies building “digital” marketing teams, some savvy companies are realizing this is outdated thinking. In this model, companies hire “digitally savvy” marketers (a.k.a. recent college graduates) to fill in gaps left by the traditional marketing team. The problem is that often times, neither party respects each other and thus collaboration is lacking.

By definition, marketing should be agnostic to media type, and so too should the strategist developing and implementing marketing campaigns. As such, companies need to conduct a skills assessment of existing marketing teams to determine who may need training or who may need to be replaced with talent that natively understands both digital and analog worlds. That doesn’t mean automatically hiring recent college grads either. While there are a host of training and consulting resources available to “teach” digital to traditional marketers, it can be just as challenging to teach traditional marketing to younger, less-experienced digital strategists. While ensuring your marketing team is able to truly integrate digital into campaigns can be challenging, it will be a requirement for companies looking to thrive in the new millennium.

2. Designing a Web site via Internal Stakeholder Committee: Take a look at any random corporate homepage and you will notice they all have something in common: poor design. Too few corporate Web sites are actually designed with the end user in mind (prospect, customer, partner, shareholder, Google, etc.). As such, the sites lack intuitive navigation, appropriate architecture hierarchy, relevant keywords or clear calls-to-action. The primary reason for the lack of user-centered design is that most websites are built by a host of departmental managers, who have ultimate say on colors, fonts, images and copy. The problem with committee-based design is that each representative makes decisions on their personal tastes and preferences versus those of the site’s intended user.

The frustrating part is that larger companies have available resources and budget to “do it right” with focus groups, surveys and other forms of user testing, yet rarely bother to ask or even listen when valuable feedback is provided. The most critical and common mistake in corporate website design is making sure every page of your Web site has a clear call-to-action relevant to the content, user and your own business objectives.

3. Managing eMarketing Campaigns to Impressions, Clicks or Budget Forecasts: In the Mad Men days of yore, marketing (particularly advertising) budgets were set based on limited historic and forecasting data. More recently, budgets during the dot-com heyday were based on generating “eyeballs.” Today, any marketer worth their salt will be managing all marketing (digital and otherwise) based on conversions and ROI.

The days of managing paid search campaigns to achieve a #1 position in Google, spending $50,000 a month on Yellow Page ads or buying a 30-second Superbowl spot, and not measuring the impact on revenue, are dead. Instead, companies should be managing paid search, print and broadcast advertising based on conversion rates, whether it be a target cost-per-action/acquisition or relative ratio.

4. Paying Third-Party Vendors to Represent Your Brand in Social Media: We all know social media is the shiny new penny with marketers these days. Unfortunately, vendors have been able to exploit the opportunity by selling their “expertise” and becoming “brand advocates” out on Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. In this scenario, a social media “expert” lurks on Twitter, forums and blogs, looking for opportunities to “spread the word” about a client’s products or services, not fully disclosing their relationship with the company.

The most common excuses for outsourcing social media management include a lack of internal resources and overall proficiency with social platforms. My response: every employee, partner and shareholder is a potential social media evangelist. In regards to the lack of proficiency issue: hire experienced consultants or agencies to help develop the overall strategy and provide necessary training and support. There is a big difference between getting help with strategy and having someone represent your brand when they’ve never purchased or used your services or even visited your offices.

Let us not forget that that social media is an inherently transparent community, and stakeholders will lash out against companies that are quick to outsource its brand. The issue is not unlike outsourcing customer support call centers, which can also damage your brand by providing a poor customer experience. Unfortunately, these experiences are then shared on social media for all to read, compounding the issue. Beyond the potential dangers of brand erosion from customer backlash, legal liability is also tremendous when outsourcing. A third party may not understand industry regulations on what can and cannot be disclosed via social media. The bottom line is that nobody knows your brand better than your employees, partners and other advocates. Let them spread the good word, not a low-paid college graduate working from home.

5. Doing Black Hat SEO: In 10^th grade, I learned the hard way that cutting corners doesn’t pay off when my Spanish teacher caught me cheating on a test. Google, like my Spanish teacher, penalizes websites that fail to follow their rules.  Unfortunately, large corporations are just as capable as small businesses in “cutting corners” in the world of search (and paying the price).

So how do you know if you’ve cut corners in Google’s eyes? The first rule of thumb is to put your “end user” cap on and judge whether or not the website experience is positive. Is the content in search results relevant to the page once I click through? If not, Google may feel you are pulling a bait-and-switch.

Google has developed a detailed set of guidelines for search-friendly Web site design. If you follow their rules, you will be much more likely to rank for desired search terms. Bing and Yahoo! operate on very similar terms: no IP-spoofing, redirects, hidden or duplicate text, etc. To boil it down, do good marketing and Google will reward you with higher rankings.

6. Renting E-mail Lists: In the fall of 2001, I joined forces with two friends to form an email marketing agency, e-mail ROI. We realized there was a tremendous demand for a reliable, yet affordable email marketing platform for small and mid-sized businesses. Those same companies also benefitted from our strategic consulting and creative design services. Unfortunately, we quickly ran into a problem: list rentals.

Some of our bigger brand clients (think world’s largest retailer and one of America’s largest emergency relief organizations) felt the only way they could effectively reach new audiences was through renting email lists from brokers. Even early on, we realized renting email lists was not a sound strategy, as few brokers and list owners properly groomed their lists. Against our best wishes, these companies pushed forward with significant list buys, resulting in a large number of SPAM complaints. Our clients then threatened to sue the list brokers and owners for selling names of people that did not expect or want to hear messages from third parties. At that point, we adopted a company policy not to advise or provide our clients with e-mail lists for rent or purchase.

With the understanding that building an email database in-house is still a highly effective sales and marketing strategy, how then can a company grow their list? Some of the more effective methods of building a house email list include: direct (mail) marketing, co-registration (email) with partners, contests (via social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook) and most importantly, search marketing. Of course, I’m biased towards the use of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) directing towards key pages on your site with an email registration as a call-to-action. The ideal scenario is to embed an email newsletter registration into your website template (every page), followed by registration for demos, trials and content like seminars and white papers.

7. Sending Unsegmented or Untargeted E-mails: Perhaps one of the most egregious but all-too-common obsolete marketing strategies still in use is the regular e-mail blast to a house list. Most commonly occurring as monthly newsletters or weekly e-mail promotions, far too many companies send the same e-mail to the entire list. Sending one e-mail to thousands if not millions of people with varying needs and interests is an efficient way to generate unsubscribes and generally disengage prospects and customers. Although e-mail targeting and segmentation has been available to marketers for more than a decade, too few companies make a serious effort at leveraging the capability to maximize response and conversion rates.

Spend the time to understand your e-mail list, by digging deep into the analytics, contact profiles. Consider expanding available data points by surveying your list. From there, create and target content based on the indicated preferences, demographic and psychographic information. Watch the value of each subscriber increase exponentially, with incremental effort.

In order for a business to succeed in this increasingly complicated and noisy digital world, marketers must let go of obsolete ideas and embrace the concept of continually testing evolving techniques and technologies. What worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow.