Your marketing budget is shrinking. Your sales cycle is getting longer. You have to squeeze every penny of profit out of your marketing efforts and track the return on each effort to boot.
What’s a frustrated seller to do?
One partner that should be singing “Lean On Me” is your search marketing agency. Doing the same old thing is no longer enough. While search marketing remains one of the most effective and efficient marketing tactics, like everything else, it needs to do more with less, help move prospects through the buying cycle, and be more measurable than ever.
Assuming your agency has already optimized their website for search engines and is successfully managing their pay-per-click campaign, what else should they be focusing on in today’s challenging environment?
1. Social networks. Let’s get this out of the way first. Yes, there has been a lot of fuss and you may even be tired of hearing it. But aside from the myriad marketing, customer service, and research benefits that social media offers businesses, there are also numerous search engine optimization benefits. Social networks provide (a) more online content, such as profiles, which can be optimized and take up space in search engine results, (b) ratings and tags from other participants that give search engines more information about your content and they are reliable. votes and (c) links to your corporate site, which can improve your ranking.
2. Reputation tracking. Let’s say a potential customer searches for your company brand or product and sees negative mentions in the search engine results. Perhaps a disgruntled former employee posted on a blog, or a disgruntled customer wrote a negative review online. Many businesses have seen their website traffic, leads, and sales drop due to an online reputation hit like this. Your search marketing company needs to keep an eye on the top search engine results for any negative mentions before your prospects (or investors) do. By using social media and other tactics, they may be able to remove negative content from the first page of results, where fewer people will see it.
3. Custom Pay Per Click Landing Pages. Where do searchers go after clicking on one of your paid listings? To your home page or to a deeper page on your site? Many businesses are able to double or even triple their conversion rates by creating custom landing pages for pay-per-click visitors. These landing pages relate directly to the keyword the searcher typed into the search box and have a lead form or purchase method directly on the page, eliminating the need for the potential customer to click multiple links. pages of your site (and possibly get lost). or lose interest) before converting.
4. Usability. Similarly, the entire site should be analyzed by a usability expert. Yes, search marketing focuses on bringing more people to your website. But what good is that if they don’t take the action you want them to take once they’re there? If you want to double the number of leads or customers your site generates, you can double your website traffic or double your conversion rate. It’s usually easier to do the latter (although, ideally, you’ll strive for both!). Adding more calls-to-action and credibility-building elements, reducing friction along the visitor’s journey, clearly and quickly communicating your value proposition to the visitor, etc. can make a significant difference.
5. Orientation to all phases of the purchase cycle. People don’t always convert the first time they visit a website, particularly for big-ticket items or business-to-business purchases. Your search marketing agency should keep this in mind when designing PPC campaigns and site content to target searchers at different stages of the buying cycle. Many search engines start out using broad terms to research (“widget information”), then narrow them down as they compare (“red widget reviews”), then get really specific once they know what they want to buy (“widget model”). red xyz widget”). Does your site rank high in search engine results for all kinds of terms, and does the content on those pages address different searcher needs at each stage?
6. Track phone call conversions. Some of your sales or leads will come through an online conversion: an eCommerce purchase or a web form that is filled out. But some people will call instead. There is now phone call tracking technology that allows marketers to trace callers back to how they found the website: did they click on a Google pay-per-click ad before coming to the site and calling, or on an organic yahoo list, or what? Needless to say, this is incredibly valuable data. We found that, on average, only a third of search engine-generated conversions happen online; a full two-thirds are done over the phone. So anyone who doesn’t track the sources of phone calls may be making important decisions based on only one-third of the data they might have at their fingertips.
7. Close the sales gap. Many sites, particularly for business-to-business companies, have a lead generation purpose. As stated, it’s easy to track conversions or leads back to their source, whether it’s a search engine or another online marketing campaign. But often when that lead flows into SalesForce, or whatever CRM system the seller uses, there is a gap and the source of the lead is lost. It used to be acceptable for search marketing agencies to only report on the number of leads they generated. Not anymore: Customers (rightly so) demand to know how many sales and how much revenue their search marketing partner has produced. Now, a new technique allows valuable data (such as the search engine and keyword the prospect used, as well as whether they clicked on an organic or paid listing) to remain attached to contact information directly in SalesForce. This allows companies to know the true ROI of their search marketing efforts.
As Isaac Asimov and others have pointed out, “The only constant is change.” Economies and markets change, and search engine marketing certainly never stops. Smart marketers will ensure that your search marketing agency continues to evolve and adapt to maximize budgets and returns.
