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
We’ve spilled a lot of ink recently over the desirability of cranking up your online marketing aggressiveness during uncertain or shrinking economic times (see for example our blog posts, “How a Website Makeover Can Help “Recession-Proof” Your Company” and “Recession, Reshmession… Don’t Let the Headlines Scare Your Company into its Own Private Downturn”). Such aggressiveness helps offset the greater difficulty of finding and closing prospects, who can be expected to be more cautious in these times; and it will protect your market share …and maybe increase it, if at least some of your competitors are too timid to match your aggressiveness.
Of course, it’s not a time to simply throw money at the problem; it’s much better to first ensure that every dollar is working as hard as possible for your B2B. And with PPC, that means… (more…)
June 5th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
You can’t turn on the TV or read the newspaper (and never mind the blogosphere!) these days without someone berating you for being insufficiently green or having too big an environmental footprint. It’s as though Al Gore and Kermit had suddenly been crowned kings of all media.
The result of all the hype – so far – has been to make greenness yet another metric being increasingly applied to individuals and businesses …including your B2B. It’s no longer enough to be merely compliant with the Clean Air and Rivers & Streams Acts (which is a snap for most tech companies, anyway); now you’ve got to be on the bleeding edge of lowering CO2 emissions, reducing power consumption, recycling heat, and a host of other items that weren’t even on the radar screen 10 years ago. (It’s almost like winning the Nobel Prize really does focus people’s attention …who knew?) And you’ve got to do some chest-thumping about it too, or your silence could create an unjustified presumption of guilt in the court of buyer opinion.
Obviously there’s a lot your B2B can do company-wide to earn green points, but what can you as a lone marketer do? (more…)
May 29th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
Suddenly, there’s no end of buzz around social media… companies are scratching their (metaphoric) heads and saying things like, “Surely there must be some effective way to leverage these vehicles like Facebook and MySpace…”
We all kinda knew this day would come, for the simple reason that buyers are people, too. In fact, they’re people first, and consumers and/or employees later. If you don’t think the day has arrived, take a look around LinkedIn; there will almost certainly be some content about your company there, and most likely it wasn’t generated by your current HR or marketing folks.
It’s become a predictable pattern with Web marketing that (more…)
May 23rd, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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