I was asked that question in a rather indirect way recently. It wasn’t exactly said outright, but the pained expression at the mere suggestion of doing it, told me all I needed to know.
The answer, in short, is Yes. Whether you’re a multi-national corporation, a high street retailer or a taxi service in Leeds, if you want to trade on the web or you want people to know who you are or what you do or where to find you, then yes, you need to be doing it. If it’s your business, you can’t leave this stuff to Lady Luck. Especially, as it’s highly likely your competitors are already doing it.
Okay, makes sense. Anything else good about it?
Plenty. In this economic climate, if you want a business online, you should certainly be looking to make it an integral part of your marketing mix.
- It doesn’t cost a great deal to get started
- It can grow with your budget
- You can be incredibly targeted with it
- You can limit wastage by only paying for action, not exposure (Pay-per-click)
- You can get people to your website for free (SEO – apart from your time resource obviously)
How many of your other marketing activities can have that said about them?
Hmmm, so what should I be doing first?
If you read the media today, then apparently the most important thing you should be doing is signing up to Twitter and Facebook to look after your online brand reputation. That’s great, and a topic for another day, but perhaps not your most pressing need.
If you’re being smart about your marketing – and you need to be in this tough economic climate – you’ll already be looking at your marketing activity and checking what is working and what isn’t.
To do this, you’ll need to be very clear on what your objectives are. Ultimately, for any business, there will be a financial objective, so perhaps you’re be looking at which marketing activities are bringing in the greatest return on investment in terms of sales.
Or, depending on your business model, there may be other types of interactions you’ll be tracking – such as subscriptions, job applications, podcast downloads or sales leads. Or you may just be interested in visitor numbers (if supported by display advertising) or trying to raise your brand awareness levels.
The important point here is the need to measure your goals. The old adage applies…
‘You won’t know you’ve got there, unless you know where you’re going’
With some marketing activities it’s hard to measure the impact. Print advertising and PR are two prime examples. There is no direct link to a transaction, so you need to find alternative ways of monitoring, such as econometric tracking.
With search it can be much simpler. A web analytics package, such as Google Analytics, Intellitracker or Web Trends, can tell you all sorts of information about the visitors that come to your site, including what they did whilst they were there and where they came from. If you can tie this into your transactional data, you’ll have a very clear idea of the return on investment.
So is it Pay-per-Click (PPC) or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that I should be doing?
It depends on your situation really, but potentially both.
If you have a brand new site, it will take a while for it to get listed in the search engines and for you to start seeing free traffic arriving. Paid search (PPC) can be used in the interim to bring visitors in immediately. Great if you need to raise awareness or generate revenue quickly.
If you’re on a tight budget and are not relying on immediate revenue streams from your website, then you can park the PPC and concentrate on SEO. This approach is often utilised by smaller businesses that generate revenue offline and are looking to reach a wider audience via the web.
In an ideal world, paid advertising should be a short term solution for your business, good for building immediate presence and then supporting specific campaigns, whilst SEO is your focus for long term success.
For bigger brands, using PPC for continuous traffic driving has become an expensive business. It’s easy to rely on PPC traffic from Google et al to provide all your new business, but in the long run it’s not a great way of reducing your cost per acquisition.
To avoid this, you need to ensure you devote time and resource to ensuring your site is continuously optmised – it’s not a ‘do it once and it’s done forever’ deal. The effort is worth it though, as the SEO costs are usually considerably smaller than your PPC expenditure.
In future posts I’ll be looking to answer the common questions:
Should I do my search marketing myself or should I outsource it?
How do I choose the right search marketing agency?
If you have any comments on this article please do feel free to share them here. Likewise, let me know your thoughts on the two questions above.
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Written by Gary Robinson
Topics: Natural Search Marketing, Paid Search Marketing, Search Engine Marketing