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Changes are coming to the search market. Several innovations are not only the horizon but are coming into play, and they have the power to reshape the search engine marketing space. Look for the de-emphasis of search engine optimization (SEO), as other forms of content — and thus other forms of search — gain prevalence.

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Do you spend a lot of time knee-deep in Google Analytics, looking at the rise and fall of pageviews, unique visitors and referred traffic? While it pays to know your audience, focusing too much on the numbers isn’t the best use of your time. To gain more value from your marketing blog, think less about organic traffic growth and more about the impact of your blog on your pipeline.

A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.

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There’s only one marketing metric you really need to care about: “cost per income.” Everything else you measure really rolls up to this one number, which tells you how much you have to spend in order to reach a particular profit. This all might seem a tad obvious, but few are managing to this approach.

Instead, IT solution providers often look only at the cost of marketing, eschewing the overall result in favor of near-term expense management. Even holding on to your cash comes at a cost … which is equivalent to future returns. Think in terms of what it costs you to make money, and your marketing efforts will become more targeted, more powerful and more substantial.

Piecemeal marketing doesn’t work — and that’s what you get when you look strictly at cost. Change your perspective: measure by cost of income, and you’ll be committed to generating ROI.

Pushing for top placement in search results is as old as marketing itself, and it continues to be a priority. Internet marketers continue to recognize the importance of search in driving the end user’s internet browsing experience and understand that the odds of attracting a visitor (and the opportunity to convert) improve significantly with search engine placement.

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Linking out to other blogs may be the best way to increase traffic to your own. Odds are you won’t really lose any pageviews, as readers naturally hit an exhaustion point anyway, especially on a corporate blog. And, if you line up the right partners, you’ll benefit from their overflow. The result, of course, is a net increase in readership across your entire “network” of partnered blogs.

Sound interesting? Check out our guest post on SocialTimes to learn more.

Marketing campaigns don’t add up to a strategy. Sometimes it may look that way, but that’s just a bit of luck at work. It’s far more effective to go the other way — start with a strategy and use that to drive your campaigns.

IT solution provider marketers tend to focus on the campaign, a perspective resulting largely from demand generation considerations. The best way to bring in leads, however, is to use a coordinated approach that maximizes the value and potency of your marketing efforts. One-off campaigns just don’t have the same effect.

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