Now is the time companies can benefit most from search engine optimization and pay per click marketing
Thursday, December 18th, 2008George Orwell once said, “Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”
While most advertisers would turn up their nose, let’s be honest, often times he is right. How often does a radio ad, television ad, or a billboard offer you something you need? For us cynical types, it’s just random noise that muddles up our day. As Orwell mentioned, it’s just drawing attention to what is essentially unnecessary for us.
I have a graduate degree in marketing and I LOATHE traditional advertising and am completely desensitized to it. But this is the beauty of search engine marketing and pay per click advertising. Rather than rattling the stick, you simply set the swill in front of your customers when they decide they want swill. Voila! Customers love you again!
Businesses, despite their brave stances and declarations to dedicate resources to marketing, rarely do so when times get tight. Which is where we’re at now. As I said in my (surprisingly popular) blog back in June titled “When sourcing web services makes sense”, search can be an extremely cost effective marketing vehicle, particularly if you have a product or service with a solid gross margin.
As companies cut their PPC spending it provides opportunity to grab market share and gain new, loyal customers at lower cost per click, at that. Further, PPC will let you target new markets - something particularly important for companies in struggling local economies like Michigan. Often times companies have failed to truly push their web presence because they’ve been able to rely on their local market and local sales team. Without paying to build the infrastructure to support a new sales team or having to find a qualified sales person in Kansas City (as an example), the company can push their products through their PPC campaign by ramping up an aggressive PPC campaign geo-targeted to that market, and even build appropriate landing pages for that market. PPC provides an avenue for short term growth by geographic diversification, and better leveraging web assets.
Search engine optimization is a bit of a harder sell, as many struggling companies need results yesterday. But, with that in mind, unless executives are jumping in life rafts and posting their resumes on careerbuilder, it makes all the sense in the world to budget some funding for SEO. Again, remember that everyone else is cutting back, and that gaining top rankings is a never ending race. While your competitors cut back or even stop their SEO efforts, they’re essentially taking indefinite water breaks. If you keep running, you can gain a lot of ground on your short sighted competitors, and potentially put them in the rear view by continuing aggressive SEO efforts. And gaining and maintaining top rankings in Google is the gift that keeps on giving! So while PPC has its own benefits in terms of targeting, search engine optimization provides immense long term benefits in this time of tightened purse strings.
So while I agree with Orwell, I don’t think he’d apply that statement to the world of search. This is a whole new animal…like a liger.
