We’re continually amazed by the number of our good clients who are happy for us to help them with search engine optimization (SEO) …until it comes time for link building. They’re quite happy for us to worry about their keyword/keyphrase identification, page or H1 tags, alt-tags …all that gritty technoid stuff. But mention inbound links, and often as not we observe a glazed-over expression and hear, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll take care of that over the next month or so.”
Come to find out, on our 3rd or 4th monthly SEO checkup, that virtually nothing was done on the link-building front. Result? …their site is hovering on about the 9th or so page of SERP results, when everything else (more…)
July 17th, 2008
Posted by: Matt Roche
It’s an article of well-placed faith among B2B companies – where sales cycles are nearly always lengthy – that lead nurturing is vitally important.
And that’s in good times, when you may have gotten used to picking off new business like it was low-hanging fruit. But as Anne Holland says in her SherpaBlog post, How to Ride Out the Storm: “In bad times, the branches raise themselves up. Landing new customers is harder – more expensive – just at the time when your CEO holds that ‘How can we cut marketing costs?’ discussion with your department.”
Anne’s worthwhile piece goes on to discuss tactics for (more…)
July 10th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
A joint survey by BtoB and the Association of National Advertisers last year revealed a gap we’ve gotten used to seeing: whereas only 10% of B2B marketers surveyed viewed social networking as effective, 36% of B2C marketers saw it as effective. The B2B respondents said they used social networks, blogs and virtual spaces such as Second Life primarily for brand-building, rather than generating new leads.
While B2B marketers grapple with how best to utilize social media – and we passed along some pointers on the topic in a recent blogpost – their companies are charging ahead with implementing other uses beyond marketing. So reports Rebekah Tsadik in her worthy BtoBonline piece, “Social networks starting to click”.
Much of this activity is aimed at setting up intra-company, unbranded or “white label” social networks, which have the potential (more…)
July 3rd, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
It’s a fairly common narrative: our client XYZ Co. starts up a PPC program while waiting for their search engine optimization (SEO) to kick in …typically following a website redo. Once they see their results-page ranking move up to acceptable levels, we can expect to get the plaintive question: “Can’t we stop spending on PPC now?” (Sometimes the thought has been planted by a certain segment of SEO houses, who trumpet those savings as much of the payback that justifies their fees.)
As professional Web marketing consultants, we would advise “no”, in most cases. So does Kevin Lee, in his thoughtful ClickZ piece, “Is organic search enough?”; in fact, he says that “pulling PPC ads after achieving high organic position may, in fact, be a very bad idea.”
There are a number of reasons for this. For one thing, (more…)
June 27th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
We’ve relayed a number of forecasts showing a continued rise in online ad spending for this year, despite the economic uncertainties. One of the latest comes from researcher eMarketer, showing online ad spending reaching $27.5 billion, up 28.5% over 2007. No surprise, this spending will be driven largely by paid search engine advertising, which is expected to total $15.5B this year, up 31.9% over last year.
Within the huge online spend number, there’s a new kid on the block – video …and its kissing cousin, social networks (which feast on video and facilitate viral marketing). Spending on online video advertising is projected to reach $1.4 billion this year (up 74%), and advertising on social networks is projected to reach $1.6 billion this year (up 70%), according to eMarketer. We found these data points – and much of what follows here – in Kate Maddox’s worthwhile B2Bonline piece, “Video in play as ad vehicle”.
“There will be a lot more use of online video ads by B-to-B marketers,” said Lisa Phillips, senior analyst at eMarketer. “Video is becoming a way for people to find out (more…)
June 23rd, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
The first thing journalism majors are taught in college is how to write an obituary. It’s true! Writing an obituary involves thinking about the highlights of the subject’s life from beginning to end, and writing about it in an extremely concise manner. This exercise disciplines the writer to focus on what’s most important, and to trim away the fat.
The same could be said for writing Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads in Google and Yahoo. When writing your ads, it’s vital to stay focused on the highlights of your product or service that are most appealing to your target Web audience …the meat and potatoes, if you will.
Too many times, we see in-house folks who manage their company’s PPC campaigns using branded product names and internal “lingo” in their writing, thinking that their ads have universal appeal and will make sense to everyone. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, ads need to be constantly honed and perfected in order to achieve (more…)
June 17th, 2008
Posted by: Jonathan Eilberg
If your website is like that of most B2Bs, your “News” or “Press” section is somewhat of an afterthought. It’s like, “OK, finally we got all the important (product/service) content done; now what can we throw in under ‘News’ so we can get this puppy launched?” Too often, that ends up being simply an archive of moldy press releases and clippings.
But in his excellent RainToday article, David Meerman Scott argues that your “News” area can – and should – be so much more. As for the “should”… marketers need only remind themselves that journalists are a relatively trusted voice reaching large numbers of your prospects; so anything you can do to make it easier and more enticing for them to write about your firm is clearly worthwhile.
Build an online media room, and they will come …and stay.
How to do this? David discusses 10 best practices (more…)
June 11th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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