These four non-search marketing situations are:

Situation #1: When you’re a manufacturer selling parts in large lots to other manufacturers.

As an example, when running a campaign for just such a client, Perry found that a Google Adwords campaign produced mostly consumers wanting to buy the part in single or very low quantities. Not surprisingly the campaign didn’t pay off.

Situation #2: When you’re selling high-end equipment, software or services to high level executives and low level people are a waste of time.

I’d like to add an emphasis on the last half of that sentence: and low level people are a waste of time.

Often said low-level people are assigned initial research duty and it pays to be visible to them to get your name on the long list. We advise clients to be sure this isn’t the case with their product or service before completely abandoning the idea of finding value in search marketing.

Situation #3: When you sell a product or service that solves a problem people don’t even realize they have.

This is bsolutely true. If people aren’t looking for you online, you’re going to have to generate awareness and demand for the overall solution first.

Situation #4: When your buyers are beyond the intro phase, know where they want to go online and are spending time on subject-specific websites instead of searching.

I think this is more of keyword issue than anything else. The more specific your keywords, the closer to purchase your buyers will be. At that point maybe they have left search behind and are more easily found on an industry website. This is where the Google content network – handled correctly – can pay off.

A little testing will answer that question for you.

Over the past half-decade of helping clients attract more leads and customers with search marketing, I’ve occasionally spoken to people for whom pay per click or search engine optimization just isn’t the best approach. The most important question to ask and answer is a fairly obvious one: are my prospects searching for my solution online?

If the answer is yes, go with it.

Technorati Tags: search, seo, search engine optimization, ppc, pay per click, email marketing

Competition hangs tough.

With a bad economy weighing heavily on everyone, b-to-b marketers seemed willing to tough it out. 25% planned to increase their budgets in 2009 and 41% said their budgets would stay the same. You could think of it this way: 66% of your competitors aren’t going anywhere. 

B-to-B looks online.

Almost one half of the marketers surveyed (47%) planned to increase spending on company websites and search marketing. This is a very good move and one that we recommend to our clients constantly – first get your website in shape and then get visible to the search engines. Interestingly, only 13% of these marketers said they thought company websites were an effective marketing tactic. I must assume this is because most b-to-b websites seriously underperform. (Read about the 7 critical components of a high performance website).

Beyond the website and search marketing, 42% of b-to-b marketers said they planned to increase spending on online videos, podcasts or rich media; 41% planned to spend more on webinars; 39% were going to spend more on email. And 36% were preparing to increase spending on discussion forums, social networks and communities.

Offline loses.

Not surprisingly, the tactics that most b-to-b marketers planned to cut were in the offline world – what we think of as “conventional” marketing. This is a trend that has been going on for a while. The percentage of marketers planning to make cuts in this area looked like this: print advertising (55%), TV advertising (51%), radio (48%), trade shows and conferences (43%) and sponsorships (40%). 

Some tactics were projected to maintain the same level of funding: blogs (58%) inside sales/telemarketing (54%) and public relations (53%).

What should you do?

I’ve given my 3 steps for accelerating marketing effectiveness in previous articles on this blog, and they’re worth repeating again. We know they work because we implement them for clients day in and day out with substantial and cost-effective results.

1. Fix your website. I have two things to say about this: 1) your website is a critical part of your marketing program – it’s either helping you or hurting you, and 2) unfortunately, chances are high it’s hurting you. 
   
   
2.  Get visible on the search engines. Prospects are actively looking for you. They’re going to find your competitors. Shouldn’t they find you too? As more and more of your competitors pour online, this may become more challenging but no less important.  
    
3. Nurture the leads that aren’t ready to buy yet. Nearly every company I talk with has a collection of forgotten prospects – those website visitors or inquiries that weren’t ready to talk to a sales person. Many will buy sooner or later. You already know who they are; now do your best to make sure they buy from you. While others spend money generating new traffic, you’ll be ahead of the game.

The steps I’ve outlined here are not only effective, they’re also measurable – meaning you can tell exactly what you’re getting for your money. If you want some help getting started or getting to the next level, check out the website development, pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization and lead nurturing programs from Tatum Marketing. Or just give me a call.

Technorati Tags: b-to-b, business-to-business, online marketing, websites, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, lead nurturing, lead development

Sometimes that leads to paralysis. Marketers and business owners just don’t know what to do next.

But some decisions are really no-brainers. Here are three. I’ve mentioned these all many times before. But judging by the questions I get from clients, they’re worth repeating.

1. Fix your website

I’m not going to bore you with stats that I’ve already posted on this subject. Suffice it to say that you’re never going to achieve a high level of quality lead or traffic generation if your website is lame.

That fact is pretty obvious if you sell online. A bad site repels buyers. It may be less obvious to those of you who don’t sell online, but it’s equally true.

If you don’t believe your prospects are looking at your website think about your own buying habits. When was the last time you bought a complex or expensive product or service without taking a look at the company’s website?

That just doesn’t happen much these days. Your website is often the first – and last -  impression.

2. Get visible online.

Unless you’re one of very few companies that have a truly unique solution to a problem no one has thought of yet, your prospects are looking for you online. They’ll find your competitors with or without you. Which would you rather it be?

Personal referrals still top the list of the best lead generation sources for business-to-business products and services, but buyers also search. If nothing else, they’ll look for solutions to compare the referred product or service to. More likely they’ll be compiling a list of vendors to consider.

This means you need to be visible on search engines and websites where your prospects hang out. Otherwise you’re missing your best prospects – the ones who are actively seeking a solution.

3. Start with Google.

Achieving visibility on Google may be harder and more expensive than becoming visible on other search engines, but let’s face it – Google delivers the bulk of the traffic. Last April, Hitwise found that Google’s marketshare in US searches was 67%. Yahoo (at 20%), MSN Search (at 5.25%) and Ask.com (at 4%) – although not insignificant – trail far behind. Google’s dominance is even greater among business searchers.

Even if you can’t afford the click costs on Google, it’s the best testing ground because the heavier traffic allows you to figure out what works best faster.

So there you have it. Three marketing decisions you can make and act on without a lot of agonizing over whether or not it’s the right thing to do.

Technorati Tags: websites, seo, search engine, visibility, google, lead generation, traffic

A Landing Page is a sub-page – not the Home Page – which is designed to target or focus on a specific topic. Think of them as additional doors to the website.  Most people come in the front door, but some people come in a side door or enter through a patio door.  They all lead to the same building, but each door is different.  Of course that’s not an exact analogy, so let me use a better example:

If you look within the website of a car manufacturer, you will find that in addition to their home page they make use of several different landing pages.  The home page is a general directory with information about the company, but then there are sub-pages for each car, that they make.  While you can get to these pages using the home page you could also find them in a search for the car name.  And following that link you would wind up at the landing page, rather than the home page, with no need to click-through to find what you are looking for.

Landing pages can even be more specific than just for a particular car model.  They can be temporary pages designed for a special edition of the car or for a coupon for an oil change or a special sale campaign.

To increase visibility in online searches these landing pages are focused on a particular subject with its own content, keyword headings, keyword text, and keyword links.  Unlike a home page which normally contains general keywords, landing pages are designed to be used for niche topics or specific products.

Generally, it’s much easier to develop content with great keywords for specific products or services than it is for general topics, and there tends to be much less competition for those specific keywords. So landing pages are a valuable tactic for search engine optimization.

Landing pages can also be used for great effect with direct links from a pay-per-click or email campaign. In these cases, an online ad or mass e-mail directs the viewer to the landing page though links. Viewers skip over the home page and go directly to the landing page.

You may be getting this type of sales pitch in your inbox on a regular basis.  Borders Books uses temporary landing pages for its email campaign sent to everyone who has signed up for one of their customer loyalty cards.

Another benefit of using these targeted landing pages is that visitors who come to them tend to be more satisfied because they find the exact information that they are looking for.  These visitors tend to stay longer, and have a lower bounce rate with more click-though to other pages.

How is it possible to know these things?  Because landing pages can be tracked thanks to Google Analytics and other tools. With tracking software it is possible to create several landing pages and track and compare the results of each set.   With pay-per-click or e-mail campaigns where people are directed to come straight to the landing page instead of the home page, the statistics will show the true results of the marketing campaign and SEO stratagem.

Many companies shy away from landing pages because they do represent a fair amount of work to target niche customers or run a limited time email campaign.  One can not deny there is more time and energy involved in creating these extra pages but the reward in reaching these prospects is more than worth it. Think about it this way, if you have already captured a person’s attention and enticed them to act and go to a landing page, then you have a real potential customer not just a lookie-loo.

Whether you hire a professional or do the work yourself, make sure that your landing pages are focused with specific content and SEO key wording.  Don’t forget to setup proper tracking to insure that you can see if all the effort on the landing pages is paying off, or if you need to adjust your site for better results.

Technorati Tags: seo, landing page, keywords, search engines

The concept is fairly simple. When people search online they tend to type in not a single word but a series of words. In this grouping of words there is a main simple word, which is the head, and behind that are a few more words which are the tail of the search.

An example of this is:  Software (head) Management Inventory (the tail)

When trying to optimize a website, companies tend to focus all their energy on the head words.  But under the Long Tail theory, the tail words are actually the more useful and powerful words to focus on.

Tail words do not generate the large search volume that head words do, however the people searching with tail words tend to much more focused and easier to convert from a website visitor into a true customer. Long Tail keywords also allow for more unique products and services to be found because the searcher is not focusing on a single word but a series of words which can better describe niche items.

For example, Google says people search for the single word “software” an average of 550,000 times a month while “inventory management software” gets less than one-tenth of that. But which is the better search term?

Let’s look more closely at the above example. When I typed in the word “software” into Google, it found 1,340,000,000 pages (heavy competition) and the word is not specific enough to get a good quality of visitor.  Even if you could get ranked high for “software” it would likely generate a very high bounce rate. Since there is a virtually unlimited combination of things the searcher could actually be looking for (different kinds of software, buying software, developing software, comparing software, etc) the majority of searchers are not going to be looking for any one specific thing.

However, when I added “management inventory” Google comes back with only 9,510,000.  While this is still a lot of websites it is only a fraction of those for the single word “software” and we’ve narrowed the potential search target significantly. We can continue adding words (creating a longer tail) and improving the likelihood that the searcher is looking for us.

With the smaller search volumes for the Long Tails, the Pay-Per-Click advertising costs can be much lower because the competition is smaller. For the price of advertising on a major search word it is possible to have several different Long Tail PPC ads running at the same time.

Like all other Keywords decisions, Long Tail choices should not be picked out of thin air.  Research should always be done to make sure that there is good traffic on these Long Tails.

Are Long Tails the right decision for your website?  Perhaps. Every website is different based on what service or production they are providing. But Long Tails are definitely something that all websites owners should investigate when looking for the best way to reach potential customers on the internet.

Technorati Tags: keywords, long tail, search, volume, ppc, seo, search engine optimization

One of the most important – and often overlooked – aspects of a keyword is its search volume. That is: how many people search for that keyword in an average month?

Software programs such as WordTracker as well as Google’s Keyword Tool (available to all with Adwords accounts) will give you a good idea of the search history of the words you are considering.

Using these tools you’re likely to discover that some of your keywords only average one or two searches per month.   This clearly means that it is not worth the effort, the space or the text to optimize for these keywords because they are not being used by enough people.

But do not jump to the conclusion that you should automatically go after the keywords with the highest search volumes.  Keep in mind that a high search volume generally means high competition.  It might also mean that that the keywords have more than one meaning or they are used in multiple industries, and much of the search volume may not be from your prospects.

If your company is considering a pay-per-click campaign, going for keywords with higher search volumes could cost a lot of extra money, again because there is so much competition on these word searches. Additionally, since many of those searches will be made by people who are not looking for your product or service, your click-through rate will be lower. This can have a negative effect on your quality score (which is too much to address in this article).

I am not saying that you should turn your back on all keywords with a high search volume, but often a company’s time and energy is better spent looking at the keywords that generate a more targeted search result. These are searches that may only have a few hundred to a few thousand searches per month, but because of the competition it can mean a better chance of being found – and you have a better chance of being more relevant.  This means that these keywords will have a lower bounce rate and will convert web traffic into real customers.

On something of a side note, if you have someone else handling your search engine optimization, pay special attention to search volumes. Sometimes less-than-ethical SEO firms or people will use low-volume keywords just to generate a number one ranking. This impresses prospects and unsuspecting clients. It’s easy to get a high ranking on little used keywords. If the words “limburger cheese socks” appears on a webpage, I can guarantee that they will be number one for this phrase, but it’s meaningless because it won’t result in any traffic.

It’s easy to become obsessed with trying to be number one in searches on Google. It makes us all feel good. But if there is no traffic for the word that you are number one for, what is the point?

Do not let an obsession to be Number One cloud your judgment in picking the best keywords possible for your site.  It is far better to be ranked number ten on a high-traffic word than to be number one with “limburger cheese socks”.

Technorati Tags: search engine optimization, Google, ranking, quality score, search volume

Here are 5 common ways to waste money on pay per click advertising:

1. Ignore your quality score.

Many pay-per-click advertisers think that ad position is based only on how much you’re willing to pay for a click – with the best positions going to the highest bidders. This isn’t true.

Google, in particular, puts a lot of weight on how relevant it thinks your campaign (including ad and landing page) is to the searcher. Google’s opinion about your relevance shows up as your “quality score”, and ad position is actually a factor of both your bid and your quality score.

If you have a low quality score, you will pay more per click for a good position than you need to.

2. Put unrelated keywords in the same Ad Group.

The person who searches for “purchasing management software” and the person who searches for “procurement management software” may actually be looking for the same thing, but because they are thinking of different words, they will respond best to different ads and landing pages. (All keywords in an ad group share the same ads and landing pages).

It’s important the keywords used by the searcher are repeated in the ads and landing pages. Since you don’t pay for people who don’t click on your ad, you may think this doesn’t hurt you. But it does. Google expects a good click-through rate. It also expects to see the keywords repeated in the ads and headlines. If they aren’t you get a lower quality score. (See #1).

3. Don’t bother to test ads and landing pages.

Seemingly minor changes in a pay per click ad or on a landing page can make a big difference in click-through and conversion rates. Google Adwords makes it easy to test ads against each other; and Google Website Optimizer makes it easy to test landing pages.

A good click-through rate on your ads generally equals a higher quality score which equals a lower cost per click. A good conversion rate on your landing pages means you get more leads and a lower cost per lead.

4. Send click-through traffic to your homepage.

Getting people to click on your ad is useless if you can’t convert them from mere visitors to prospects, leads or customers. To do this you need to get them to take action. An effective website homepage has multiple jobs to perform and it can’t be perfectly optimized to convert your pay per click traffic.

Instead of your homepage (or other existing website page), send PPC traffic to a specialized landing page – one that’s constantly tested and tweaked to produce the most conversions.

5. Set and forget.

Search advertising is constantly changing. Your competitors modify their approach; new competitors come and go; your prospects change their search and buying habits. Someone has to stay on top of this.

A good pay-per-click manager will monitor your campaign performance, constantly updating keyword lists and testing new ads and landing pages.

Pay-per-click advertising is one of the fastest and most efficient ways to generate new leads but there’s no doubt it’s time consuming – especially if you manage your own campaign. Lazy campaign management, on the other hand, almost always means money is being burned. Your money.

Technorati Tags: pay per click, ppc, search, paid search, save money on marketing

Click fraud occurs when someone or something (a person, automated script, or computer program) clicks on a PPC ad without any intention of buying the product or taking advantage of the offer.

Click fraud is usually done by either a) competitors trying to push you to your daily spend limit so your ad won’t appear anymore or b) publishers who make money every time an ad on their site gets clicked.

Either way, the advertiser gets charged.

This means on a $5000-a-month media budget, an average of $855 a month is being wasted.

Unless you catch it.

Trying to monitor your campaign manually would be a pain – unless you love to pour over click reports. You’d have to keep an eye out for clicks that happen in rapid succession, those that come from shared IP addresses, clicks that hit at the same time of day – all kinds of things that computers are better at catching than people are.

Then you’d have to organize and submit your claims and, in some cases, hound the search engine staff until you get a credit.

Fortunately, with click fraud on an upward trend, software solutions have appeared to help advertisers and their agencies control it.

I spoke with Wendy Zenshychyn of Enquisite which publishes an online application called PPC Assurance.

Wendy pointed out that click fraud is only a part of the larger issue of invalid clicks, which can cause some advertisers to spend more than 20% on bad clicks. Invalid clicks, she says, include clicks that come from outside the advertisers’ campaign parameters.

“For example, an advertiser who has set a campaign to run only in the United States finds they are getting clicks from Asia,” Wendy explained. “Or the advertiser gets clicks in the middle of the night when the campaign has been set to run only during business hours. The more geo-targeted a campaign – such as a pizza parlor in a specific area of New York City – the higher the chance for invalid clicks. Search engines are just not perfect at delivering the ads under all the right parameters.”

At 20%, now we’re talking about as much as $1000 a month being wasted from a $5000 media budget.

So pay attention.

To be fair, Google, Yahoo and other search engines do some of their own policing (see http://www.google.com/adwords/adtrafficquality/) but I’m cynical enough not to trust our clients’ invalid click protection solely to people who make money off the clicks.

Click fraud isn’t the only way to lose money with pay-per-click advertising. As with any type of investment, companies have lost plenty of money on PPC by not knowing what they’re doing, not seeing fit to work with someone who knows what they’re doing and/or by not paying attention.

We’ll look at some other ways to lose money in a future article.

Technorati Tags: click fraud, pay-per-click, ppc

All three of these popular search engines have designed in a couple of default settings that I recommend you change.

The first of these settings is an automatic opt-in to a content network. When you’re in a content network, your ad is served on non-search engine websites – presumably those whose content subject matter is a match for your ad. In other words, if you’re advertising software for legal firms your ad might appear on a webpage that contains an article about managing a legal firm.

While content network advertising has its place, it doesn’t belong automatically tied to your search campaign. For one thing, visitors are in two entirely different frames of mind when they’re searching for a keyword and when they’re reading an article. You’ll get far better results using different ads that are geared to each frame of mind.

The second default setting you’ll want to change has to do with how your ad variations are served. You are running multiple ads, right? (In a past article, Why Pay per Click Advertising Wastes Money and What to Do About It, we listed six ways to waste a lot of money on pay-per-click advertising. Running only one ad at a time was number three.)

By running multiple versions of an ad, you’re actually testing to find the most effective combination of headline and offer. It’s a great way to continuously improve results. But the search engines, in their default settings, figure out for you which ad produces the best click through rate and show that ad more often than they show the others. Sounds like a positive service, but it’s not good if you’re trying to run an accurate test.

So, check with whoever is managing your pay-per-click campaign and make sure they’ve changed these two settings. Even if you’re using an outside firm to manage your campaigns, don’t assume they’ve done this. (Unless, of course, Tatum Marketing is managing your PPC campaign. In which case you can rest assured that we’re taken care of it).

If you’re the do-it-yourself type and managing your own campaign, Search Engine Watch has a great step-by-step “how-to” article called Creating PPC Campaigns: the ‘Live or Die’ Settings. This will walk you through changing those settings on all three search engines.

Let us know how your online advertising efforts are going.

Let’s start by looking at what we mean by “search engine marketing” and why – as a technology marketer – you should care. If you’re already clued into these topics, then check back tomorrow when we’ll start looking at the secrets.

Search engine marketing – no surprise here – refers to efforts you take to make it easy for prospects to find you on their search engine of choice. It’s often called SEM and I’m going to use that term from here on out because I’m already tired of typing “search engine marketing”.  Get ready. This topic is full of acronyms.

Essentially, there are two types of SEM – paid and non-paid. Paid SEM includes advertising tactics such as pay-per-click (PPC) and pay-per-impression (CPM). With pay-per-click you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. With CPM (literally, “cost per thousand”) you pay to be exposed to a certain number of searchers regardless of whether they click or not.

The second type of SEM – non-paid – is generally called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To call it “non-paid” is a little misleading because truly effective SEO requires a lot of time – and usually money. The purpose of SEO is to get high natural rankings on search engines – primarily Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Why should you care about SEM?

Any growing business needs leads – most of you want MORE leads of higher quality. And you want them faster. If you’re selling a business technology product or service, the fastest path to growth is online visibility. Your future new customers are looking for you there – and they’re using search engines to do it.

What can be better than putting your message in front of qualified prospects at the exact moment they are looking for you?! That’s the beauty of search engine marketing.

What if you use your site for lead generation and not e-commerce?

It doesn’t matter. Your prospects are still using search engines to find and connect with you. Even the most sought after C-Level executives are searching for solutions online.

Be visible.

Be even more visible.

Tomorrow I’ll start looking at ways to do this.