Should I or Shouldn’t I?

by Mark Treager Our Blog

With the Search Engine Marketing industry in North America generating more than $10 billion annually, most marketers know that search needs to be a part of their plan. What they seem less certain about, however, is SEM management – in-house, or outsource all SEM campaigns. How do you determine what’s best for your organization? Here are some questions you might want to ask:

Do you have, or can you get, the necessary personnel for a solid search effort? Effective SEM management of campaigns require a broad range of skills—from copywriting to programming.

Do you have someone who can dedicate the time to keep up with the constantly changing rules, trends and behaviors of search? Google, for example, releases small changes to its search algorithm weekly, and large changes monthly. Being aware of these changes can have a significant effect on results.

Can you afford the personnel you need? You can expect to pay an in-house professional $85,000/year; plus, you’ll need to fund other hiring, managing, benefits, equipment, and ongoing training.

Would a hybrid plan work best for you? A good solution might be to use an outside firm to develop a 12-month plan, and execute it using in-house resources, he suggests.

Our Point: Explore the “in’s and out’s” of search. Before you engage in your next campaign, research your SEM management options. In the end results matter most, not who is providing them.

It’s Time To Go Organic

by Mark Treager Design

According to comScore, Americans conducted 11.5 billion searches in June 2008, 61.5% of those searches using Google. This is living proof, if we still needed it, that marketers should not only be investing in paid search, they should be optimizing their sites to be picked up in unpaid, organic search results as well. The following tips will help you harness the power of organic search for your marketing efforts. The key? Freshening up your content:

  1. Pick good page titles (each one unique) that include keywords relevant to the target audience. Search engines look at these first to determine what the page is about.
  2. Be smart about URLs. Because the URL is how search engines track and manage your company’s reputation online, it’s best to have your own domain rather than to use a free one.
  3. Start a blog. If you run a blog correctly, you are updating content on a frequent basis—and search engines love fresh content. Also, blogs are magnets to links.
  4. Leverage your PR program. Make sure there are links that lead back to your Web site in all your press releases, and in online articles written about your company or products.
  5. Use social media to build links by contributing to conversations in online communities, groups, blogs and networks where your audience hangs out. But never give a sales pitch.

Our Po!nt: It’s time to freshen up and go organic! Competitors can outbid you for paid search listings, but by using a few smart tactics like the ones above, you can gain real power over organic results.

Is It Time For A Website Makeover?

by Mark Treager Marketing

Shrinking sales. Fewer prospects. Tightening budgets. All the classic signs of a recession are here. So, what’s the next logical step for a B2B company to take? Website makeover!

OK, that idea may sound absurd at first. But according to Bill Gadless, there’s no time like a recession to revamp your Web presence. He offers three good reasons why:

In a downturn, smart companies seek to grow market share. “It turns out that down economies are the cheapest time to improve your market share,” Gadless reports, “because so many companies—probably including at least some of your competitors—will retrench.” Investing now in a makeover will put your company in a much stronger position coming out of the downturn.

Your prospects won’t stop buying, but they’ll think about it longer. According to Gadless: “[W]hile many of your prospects will still buy, they’ll spend more time than ever researching alternatives … on the Web.” All the more reason to revamp.

You can’t find prospects any more cost-effectively than via Web marketing. Regardless of the economic situation, this fact apparently holds true. “Study after study has shown that online marketing is the highest-ROI, most cost-effective marketing you can do,” he says. Investing in your Web site, therefore, is simply never a bad idea.

Our Po!nt: Keep your Web presence up even in a downturn. “To help recession-proof your company, your Web site and lead-generation process should be performing optimally,” Gadless advises.

Source: B2B Website Strategy. Read the full blogpost here.

Help Me Grow My Online Leads

by Mark Treager Design Marketing

According to a recent white paper from Pontiflex, generating online leads grew 71% in the 2006-2007 time frame, more than twice as fast as the online ad market. But conducting a good campaign can present “publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies with serious difficulties,” says Zephrin Lasker. He offers four tips to “make online lead generation simple and efficient”:

Simplify your campaign set-up. Your lead-gen solution should enable all partners to “set up their profile only once, and be able to communicate [easily] with each other,” Lasker says. Tip: make sure data flows smoothly through each partner’s deployed standards.

Simplify and secure the lead-data transfer process. Lasker suggests following the Internet Advertising Bureau’s lead-generation guidelines. Example: they encourage publishers, advertisers and agencies to adhere to a common set of data-transfer field-naming conventions.

Implement solutions to facilitate timely reporting and follow-up marketing. The ideal solution is “one that enables real-time transmission of lead data and reports between the publisher and the advertiser/agency,” Lasker says.

Improve campaign transparency. Again, solid guidelines will help. Sample tips for advertisers: always know where your offers are running; avoid forced selections (pre-checked boxes that users have to un-check).

Our Po!nt: Consult industry guidelines to optimize your online leads campaigns. Knowing the roadblocks up front—and how to avoid them—will help boost results.

Source: Pontiflex. Download the white paper here.

How Your Business Can Survive the Recession

by Mark Treager Our Blog

It’s a recession, folks. They have officially brought out the “R” word across all news media. Because they used the “R” word everybody’s first reaction seems to be to pull back. Time to give up. Acting just plain old scared. Are those days gone when a B2B team would take risks by pushing creative boundaries? Stuff they normally do day in and day out. It may be time to get practical. Here’s a list of some of the Practical Trends in B2B Marketing that we are seeing that present a wealth of creative opportunities for your team right now. Here are just a few of the time-tested ideas to help keep your B2B outreach vital and help your business survive the recession:

Get Their “Attention”: You need to get the customers attention by using the Internet to stay in touch with your customer base and some good ole word-of-mouth to break through the short attention barrier many people are having right now.

Test, Test and Test Everything: If you have a list of 1,000 names develop 3-4 campaigns of 25 each to test so you can find out which one has the highest conversion rate.  This is the best way to discover what works.  Don’t over test but at least test two campaigns to a small group in order to find the one that works best.

Create Great Landing Pages. In any email campaign sending traffic to a specific landing page “Sending traffic to a landing page related to your offer can [always]  will improve conversions and by following following landing page best practices can raise them another 40 points.

Help Buyers Research Early in the Process. Hesitant B2B buyers are researching every detail online before they will engage in the sales process with your company. If you will take the time to educate your potential customer you can establish your company as a trusted adviser that understands their problems.

Measure Your Relationship Depth. Be sure and track the number and quality of marketing interactions with each prospect company, so you know the next best marketing steps to take.

Manage Leads: Marketers who excel at managing leads (i.e. acquiring, scoring, nurturing, and routing leads) can more than double the number of marketing leads that turn into a sale.

Lead Nurturing: It’s hard to believe but 95% of the prospects on your site are not ready to speak with sales. Leads that are nurtured before going to sales buy more, require less discounting, and have shorter sales cycles.

Measure relationship depth: Take the time to rack the number and quality of marketing interactions with each prospect, so you know the next best marketing actions to take in future campaigns.

Investment vs. Cost: Help your CEO and CFO think of marketing as asset that drives revenue, not as a liability that needs to be reduce.  Take a moment in framing the issue of marketing spending in terms of revenue and growth instead of a cost.  Especially during what management may term a “R”.

Invest in Marketing Automation: As marketing operations are become increasingly complex, marketers will need to find ways to automate key processes through technology.

The Bra!nstorm: Don’t stifle yourself in today’s “R” economy. By adhering to today’s tested B2B best practices , your creative outreach efforts can shine while staying on message, on task and under budget.

We welcome your comments and ideas of any of the trends you are observing or that we may of missed.