By Tom Pick | Online Marketing Executive | KC Associates
With a lingering recession, the U.S. unemployment rate still near 10%, and uncertain prospects for a quick recovery, marketers need to keep two things in mind. First, that it’s important to continue investing in marketing through the downturn. And second, that funds will be limited and must be spent very carefully. So how should your prioritize spending for next year?
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – this is the ultimate no-brainer. Virtually every b2b buying decision involves some level of research on the web. Based on my own anecdotal research, natural search typically drives at least 40% and average more than half of all unpaid traffic to b2b websites. Buyers won’t buy from you if they can’t find you. Create helpful and link-worthy content, optimize your pages, and get other sites linking to yours in order to improve your site’s position in the search engines. There are lots of excellent articles on SEO that provide guidance and tips. If you don’t have in-house SEO resources, hire an agency or consultant, but either way, make SEO an ongoing priority.
2. Social Media – according to a study early this year by Forrester Research, 91% of technology b2b decision makers use social media in some form (blogs, video, customer reviews, social networking sites, Twitter, etc.). ROI may take time, and can be challenging to measure accurately, but your prospects are using these sites and talking about your industry, your competitors, quite possibly even your company. You can’t afford not to be part of that conversation. What’s more, social media supports SEO and even branding activities.
Start by listening to the conversations already happening, using a social media monitoring tool like Radian6 or Techrigy SM2. Keep up with the leading b2b bloggers by subscribing to the B2B Marketing Zone and regularly visiting this new site, B2Bbloggers.com. Get your company listed with b2b-focused social media site FYIndOut.com, and encourage your best customers to contribute reviews. Create content on a blog or produce videos, and promote using Digg, Twitter, and other social bookmarking and social networking sites.
3. It Depends – do you absolutely, positively need leads NOW or can you take advantage of the downturn to build your brand for the longer term? If you need immediate opportunities, search engine marketing (SEM) programs such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing provide a competitive ROI, make it easy to control spending, and can start generating results as soon as they’re flipped live. However, they are as “instant off” as they are “instant on”—the moment you pause or delete a campaign, the lead flow stops. These programs provide very little if any lasting branding benefit.
Public relations (PR) is pretty much the opposite—it produces limited immediate and direct results, but builds your brand in the eyes of prospects, the media, analysts and other influencers over the long term.
Ideally, do both.
So how do these different activities affect your visibility on the web? Consider the two broad categories of search types, “generic” searches (e.g. facilities management software) and branded searches (e.g. Acme Software Inc.).
For generic term searches, SEO helps get your site in the top results. Social media and PR support this by providing both more links to your website and more places, other than your site, where information about your company and products can be found. SEM gets you on the front page for any keywords you bid on, but only in the paid search results.
For branded searches, you shouldn’t need SEO or SEM—unless your site is truly horribly coded, it should show up well anyway. But this is where social media activities and PR can really help, because they can increase brand awareness and image leading to more searches for your branded terms.
The bottom line is that it’s critical to continue marketing through economic downturns. Online visibility, lead generation and brand-building are all important. By carefully spending scarce marketing funds on the activities above, you can continue generating leads in the short term while building brand equity for the long term, even in the midst of a stubborn recession.
About t
he BtoBblogger: Tom Pick is an online marketing executive with KC Associates (http://www.kc-associates.com), a marketing and PR firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, focused on b2b technology clients. He helps clients improve business results through search engine optimization (SEO), search marketing, interactive PR and social media programs. Tom also writes the award-winning WebMarketCentral blog (http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com), a blog about B2B lead generation, social media, interactive PR, SEO and search engine marketing.
