June 2006
Where Companies Are Getting Search Engine Marketing Results
By definition Search Engine Marketing refers to both paid search and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), where the former is based on a pay-per-click advertising model as companies bid on specific search terms or in the case of Google, AdWords, to get a more visible placement within search engine results. SEO refers to a series of website design processes by which companies tailor the content, keywords, and messaging on a website to improve its rankings in search engines. SEO by nature requires a commitment on the part of companies to continually compete for top rankings in their chosen search areas. SEO is never a one-and-done proposition but a continual re-fueling of sites with fresh content to keep its rankings up in search engines.
Between paid search and SEO, many companies are hedging their bets on both, hoping on the one hand that paid search will eventually pay off but getting the majority of their hits and leads from organic searches, mostly from Google and Yahoo.
Lessons Learned on Search Engine Marketing Strategies
From the small business owners I’ve spoken with on this topic, which include the owner of a local HVAC service company, charter flight service, a chain of retail stores, and a components manufacturer, here are their lessons learned in balancing both sides of the Search Engine Marketing spending equation:
- The majority of marketing budgets for every small business spoken with is now dominated by paid search, with the average being between 50% to 70% of their online budget, and nearly 30% of total marketing budgets. The smaller the company the higher the reliance on paid search and the higher percentage of total spending.
- SEO is overtaking spending on banner ads for one manufacturer, as they focus on training existing Web team staff in these techniques and investing in education throughout Marketing on how to create content that is optimized for search engines in the first place.
- The most aggressive company on SEO spoken with is devoting 10% of all marketing budgeting to becoming globally known in their specific manufacturing area. They are a components supplier and are actively competing with Chinese, Taiwanese and European manufacturers, and have seen their best leads come through non-paid Google search results. It’s interesting to note that this manufacturer also cancelled all banner ads on industry sites and didn’t see a drop-off in lead generation either.
- One retailer said that unless they can get on the first three pages of AdWords ads in Google for their specific keywords, it’s a waste of money. He said that when through both keyword inflation and competitor’s moves in AdWords their own company’s ad fell below 30th or 35th place, traffic dropped off quickly.
- A charter flight service says that the majority of their website hits, and how people find them is 75% attributable to the hits from within Google search results, and only 25% come from the advertisements. This company uses WebTrends, and also has Conversion Tracking enabled in their Google AdWords account.
- Conversion rates and other measures of performance in B2B companies often are not to the last mile; that is to say they don’t really capture sales. For B2B companies their conversion rate is a white paper download or opt-in for a webinar. Yet for the owner of a series of retailing outlets, they are measuring conversion rate by how many coupons available only online are redeemed in their stores. Conversion rate for this retailer is visitors who purchase due to the Web-based coupon divided by total visitors. The coupon is the call to action and is only available on their website.
- Turning clicks into leads is easier when the lead originated from a Google search versus an ad. When I asked these friends who own these businesses to quantify it, they couldn’t, yet their pipelines have ongoing opportunities and pending sales based on prospects who found them through search more than ads or paid search. For the components manufacturer it was on average a 2 to 1 ratio with less than 50 deals in the pipeline, a small sample size but a telling percentage.
Paid Search and SEO Dispel Myths of Market Saturation
Finding telemarketing and other forms of lead generation sending them signals their markets are saturated, manufacturers especially are turning to the Web to get new leads. Most troublesome about these existing approaches to lead generation is the mistaken perception of market saturation they give off from a lack of results, when in fact there are plenty of opportunities in their markets, the prospects are just using different means to find potential solutions to their problems and this is especially true in B2B markets.
Finding prospects starts with a paid search strategy for many companies and evolves into SEO. To get maximum results from these combined strategies companies need to commit to make SEO a part of their marketing strategies for the long-term; there is no one-and-done approach but rather a continual building of content that is relevant to prospects.
Consider the fact that Google spiders the web regularly with an emphasis on link popularity and freshness of content. Google qualifies a site by the links the site has from 3rd party sites, the popularity and surrounding text of these 3rd party sites, and only views the visible text on a page. Search engine results shown in blue at the top of each search page are driven by the top bidders for specific keywords.
Yahoo on the other hand also spiders the web to create an index and also uses a human-edited index, and sells the spaces at the top of search pages through Overture, and organizes entries by placing them in subject categories. Yahoo also visits sites and evaluates user suggestions as well.
Bottom line: Generating leads and closing sales is the ultimate measure of the success of Search Engine Marketing, and those companies getting results are balancing investments in paid search and SEO to find prospects that were unreachable through traditional lead generation techniques.
Posted by LOUISCOLUMBUS on June 21, 2006 at 08:45 PM in Business Growth, Customer Dialogue | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
How Marketing Is Getting Its Groove Back
In many companies, marketing is experiencing a resurgence and new relevance, a rejuvenation if you will towards aligning closer to customers than ever before. What’s most encouraging about this is the fact that strategies based on dated cause-and-effect relationships with clients are, through the use of blogs, more focused communication with customers through research, and Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs, finding entirely new meaning in marketing departments throughout many companies, especially those in manufacturing. What’s happening is tantamount to an entirely new and more focused set of cause-and-effect relationships being found with prospects and customers. Marketing is getting its groove back as a result.
Step 1: Switching off Marketing Auto-Pilot
For years marketing departments in manufacturing, and even a few in enterprise software, are like a 747 cruising between continents on auto-pilot. Set the budget, set the strategies, set the events, all anchored in assumptions about customers from maybe five years ago or more, and the year is set. Everyone loves this because life is predictable. The hardest work is wining and dining existing clients to keep them buying upgrades and in the fold; and marketers the world over clamor to get into sales forces where this is the case. Yet today existing customers don’t want to be wined and dined anymore, they want to know how manufacturers will get them to their goals, save their jobs and others’ in their company and in some cases community. In enterprise software this is definitely the case, as “new” doesn’t sell nearly as well as “needed”, as in “I need this to get to my objectives for the year and earn my bonus” or “I need this to get that peskity CFO off my back”.
Step 2: Find the voice of your customers in blogs
Let’s face it, blogs have overtaken many other more traditional forms of media as the primary trusted source of news and opinions on products. At a minimum everyone in a marketing department needs to be using a news aggregator to track what’s being said about topics of interest in blogs, and this includes all the way to the VP level of any department. While some members of the marketing elite come out and blast blogs as being nothing more than a stream of consciousness on a collective scale, the voices there are after all prospects, customers, and a few bloggers are now more important than industry analysts, so listening to what they have to say is important.
SAP for example brought in a group of bloggers to their Sapphire Conference in Orlando last month. The good, bad and ugly of the event was delivered; and after reading some of the accounts of the event, it was more immediate than reading the traditional round-ups that the larger media outlets deliver. Both are interested, yet the bloggers have a voice of immediacy and sense of being there. Vinnie Mirchandani’s account of Sapphire is here for your reference. SAP’s Jeff Nolan worked to make this possible. It was a bold move to bring in bloggers, and one that Oracle or Microsoft needs to imitate. Even if you’re not a multi-billion dollar infrastructure player, consider bringing in bloggers and letting them loose with your executives. Consumers crave credibility and transparency. Blogs are so popular because they deliver that, and more. A final note on blogs: there is this interesting dynamic emerging of competing companies starting blogs with the express purpose of waging a blogosphere battle with their competitors. This is a waste of time and doesn’t get to the goal of serving the reader, the prospect and your customer.
Step 3: Become a Survey Junkie Now
I am partial to this because I love primary research, I think it is pure and if done right, generates new knowledge and insights, and best of all, shoves the old assumptions about your prospects and customers out the door. And that is reason enough to become a survey junkie. The Voice of the Customer (VoC) strategies are the lifelines the best companies are using to stay in touch with customers and also blow up old assumptions that aren’t relevant anymore. What has to be at the center of customer research is how to keep staying relevant and not lose focus through being too complacent about serving customers. One of the best assumption-breakers coming out of VoC research in Marriott for example is that just because a business guest stays with you once, there is no guarantee they are coming back.
Step 4: Would you trust your company as a customer?
Get outside your company figuratively and look at how you interact with customers at all levels, from prospects, to new customers, to long-standing customers. Ask yourself “Would I trust my company to do business with?” Because trust is so critical today and such a major component of building out on the commitment of listening to customers, it is the currency that marketing departments are trading with today that “get it”. The slamming of thousands of product features is a waste of time, but selectively building value propositions that align with customers’ most urgent needs is critical. Much has been said about trusted advisors in service industries, yet in all industries marketing departments need to ask themselves if they are either contributing to or detracting from how much customers will trust them.
Summary
There are many other areas to cover in this discussion but just to crystallize it, marketing is getting its groove back by throwing out old and no longer valid assumptions about customers, and moving away from the “let’s bribe them to be our customers” to “let’s get them to their goals faster than our competitors”. There is a huge difference and in those strategies to generate trust is where marketing is getting its groove back.
Posted by LOUISCOLUMBUS on June 8, 2006 at 01:53 PM in Customer Dialogue | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
