I have tried to bust 8 common myths related to online marketing. These concern market messaging, PR, SEM/SEO/PPC, Email marketing, social media, and viral campaigning. Have a read through and see if your marketing engine has a few of those myths knocking around and how you can remove them.
In search engine marketing, you have to pick your battles very carefully. Sometimes concentrating on SEO makes more sense, other times you have to spend your money on paid search advertisings. The table below gives a break down on these two tactics.
SEO |
Paid Search ads |
|
| What is it? | Search Engine Optimization optimizes your website for higher organic rankings on search engines (Google, Yahoo or Bing.) | Pay-per-click or banner ads that go through Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter or Yahoo Search Marketing platforms. |
| How resource intensive is it? | A SEO strategy can be resource intensive task, especially for a SME. | Paid search advertising requires nominal effort only. |
| How quickly can I see results? | Results are slow (from weeks to months)
SEO listings can take a few weeks to materialize. A full SEO campaign can even take a year to be fully realized. |
Almost instantaneously (within days)
Search advertising can take a day to be setup and go live. But, once you turn ofF your budget, your ads are gone. |
| How well can I target my audience? | Broad Targeting
Organic searches are hard to target to a specific audience. |
Specific targeting
Ads can be targeted to specific demographics, geographics, time-of-day, negative word filtering, etc. |
| How much does it cost? | Higher startup, but low monthly costs.
Startup:
20% for monthly maintenance. |
Medium startup, but high running costs.
Startup:
200% for monthly advertisement costs. |
| What are the involved steps? | Spans your marketing, sales, and perhaps technical team. Some of the steps involved are:
|
Only requires a few marketing personnel. Some of the steps involved are:
|
| Do I need to hire external help? | Yes, better to get an SEO consultant SEO is a very complex and rapidly changing field. It’s best to hire someone who has current market knowledge. |
Good to have, but not necessary
Paid campaigns are easier to run and master. But if you don’t have the analytical marketing team then hire a PPC expert. |
| Summary | SEO is a good overall lead-generation tool.
It CAN NOT be used for a specific campaign. SEO takes longer to trickle through, but the investment pays off with a brand image. Visitors trust organic searches more than paid listings. |
Search ads are good for specific campaigns that have a start and stop date.
You CAN NOT build a brand using search advertising. It will just be too expensive and eventually break your bank. PPC advertising has a life span of your budget. Turn off the budget, you lose your ad traffic. |
Landing pages are very important to any online advertising program. A landing page is highly optimized page that has a targeted call-to-action. This call-to-action can be as simple as a download, signup or demo. When the visitor acts on the call-to-action, the visitor is said to have “converted.”
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A few statistics to keep in mind…
The year 2008 is long gone, and in the past weeks Advertisers have been working tirelessly to set their objectives and budgets for 2009. Marketing professionals know that they need to keep their eyes on media trends, and increasing evidence shows that online advertising will continue to grow at a steady pace.
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For the past few weeks, I’ve been testing three very different modes of online advertising including Google AdWords, LinkedIn Direct Ads and Facebook Ads. The Google network generates highly targeted, active leads and the other two leverage a pool of professional/social networking users. Read more… »
Factors to consider when focusing on SEO as a marketing strategy:
A Brief Explanation
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy based on the way Internet users view search results. Similar to print advertisements, studies show that a user will scan their search results from left to right, top to bottom. The theory is that links placed first, or highest on the list will get the most hits. Therefore, SEO focuses on editing the content, keywords, and HTML coding of a website to boost its relevance to specific search terms in order to achieve a higher ranking within search results.
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This is a continuation to the blog entry from a few days ago where I compiled a comparison matrix between the two advertising platforms. Read more… »
(C) 2009 Target Info Labs: The standard for digital marketing, SEO, SEM, demand generation and social media relations.
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07 16th, 2010| 