July 28th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
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.
July 19th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
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.
May 31st, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
The growth in users sustained by major social media platforms means that some of the marketing tactics that have been pushed over the past few years are becoming less effective. Especially if you’re operating in a large market (such as virtualization or IP networking), the development of targeted audiences and communities may become quite difficult. Instead of trying to personalize the social media experience, therefore, it may make sense to do something that sounds strange — treat social media platforms like the internet as a whole.
The tactics that you used on the pre-social media web, such as search engine optimization (SEO) and direct marketing against large lists, are more useful now than ever before ii particularly if you use them within a social media platform. Check out enter:marketing’s recent guest post on SocialTimes, one of the top social media blogs, to learn more about how you can use the marketing tactics you know well in the social media space.
[Source: SocialTimes]
April 27th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
Let’s not mess around with the thinking, here’s the data: companies with between 100 and 500 followers on Twitter generated 146 percent more median monthly leads than those with 21 to 100 followers. So, whip out your Blackberry and pump out those 140-character insights!
Well, it’s not as simple as that, as I’m sure you know. But, the link between Twitter and lead generation is certainly worth a closer look.
The latest research from eMarketer reports that developing a rich Twitter following – in conjunction with a “regularly updated stream of content on a blog” – helps trigger engagement, leads to search engine optimization advantages and ultimately brings more opportunities in the door.
April 26th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
If you have budget to burn on search engine marketing (SEM), analyzing site log files for highly converting keywords is the most popular approach to research. It’s also favored by companies with thinner budgets. Sifting through the same log files for frequent keywords is a favorite, as well.
The latest research from MarketingSherpa shows that 85 percent of companies with SEM budgets of above $25,000 a year look for highly converting keywords in their log files, with 54 percent of companies with SEM budgets of $10,000 and down using the same method. Fifty-four percent of both the big and small companies looked for frequent keywords in log files, and both chose internal site search analysis (46 percent and 30 percent, respectively) as the #3 technique.
Competitor site analysis and competitive tools were considerably less popular, particularly with companies that didn’t have large SEM budgets. And, social semantic mining is still in its infancy.
How do you do keyword research? Leave a comment, and let us know!
[Source: MarketingSherpa]
April 7th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
Whether search engine marketing is an important part of your online arsenal is beyond question. Google alone, with around two-thirds of the U.S. search market, warrants specific consideration. For IT manufacturers and solution providers, search engine marketing can be particularly challenging because competition is fierce for fairly specific search terms — both for products and vendors and for the IT issues that you seek to resolve for your clients. The latest research from MarketingSherpa reveals the priorities of search engine marketers.
February 24th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by tim
Okay, maybe it’s not that easy. There are some serious benefits to paid search advertising with search engines, such as predictability and control. And, it’s easier to measure your paid search marketing ROI. But, the quality of the leads that come to you this way aren’t nearly as high as those that come via search engine optimization (SEO).
According to the latest study by MarketingSherpa, SEO was responsible for both the highest quality and quantity of search engine-driven leads, with shares of 30 percent and 37 percent, respectively. Paid search on Google did post a noticeable 32 percent of leads by quantity, but it was only good for 16 percent by quality. Meanwhile, paid search on the other major search engines resulted in only 6 percent of leads by quality, compared to a similarly meager 9 percent of high-quantity leads.
Commit to a solid SEO strategy (which can be helped along considerably by blogging), and you’ll earn stronger leads in greater quantity.
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[Source: MarketingSherpa]
February 23rd, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
There’s more to online marketing than banner and text ads. The latest study from MarketingSherpa estimates that paid search is good for 21 percent of online marketing spending and is topped only by the company budget, which picks up 27 percent on average. Social media is clearly no longer the object of dabbling, securing 11 percent of the online marketing budget: beating out search engine optimization (SEO) at 10 percent, online display advertising at 6 percent and other online marketing at 6 percent. But, social media marketing still hasn’t caught up with e-mail marketing, which claims 19 percent of the marketing budget.
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[Source: MarketingSherpa]
December 14th, 2009 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
Using a blog to market your IT VAR business can be incredibly powerful. You can get in front of your prospects and clients as often as you want, put your thoughts into the market quickly and take the space to explain ideas that just won’t fit on a one-pager. And, you gain access to new leads … which take the trouble to find you (e.g., via Google) and take an interest in your content.
Since this form of marketing is still new, many companies are still feeling their way … and are making plenty of mistakes. If you’re thinking about launching a blog – or have one already – here are five common missteps. Just by knowing them, you’ll be able to enter the blogosphere informed and ready to demonstrate your company’s capabilities.
November 1st, 2009 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by tim
One of the top concerns we’ve heard about blog-based marketing is scope. Most IT manufacturers and VARs do everything they can to build targeted lists and zero in on exactly the audiences they want. Blogs, it seems, go in exactly the opposite direction, giving you the entire web, even if your needs are limited to a company of a certain size, industry or region. A marketing blog can deliver on this, though it might not seem intuitive. The difference comes in how people use the web and find sites.
The fact that the web is worldwide doesn’t mean that everyone in the world is looking for your company or your blog. In fact, depending on how you write your blog content, the visitors who find it can be rather specific.
There are basically three ways to find a blog (or any website): direct access, online referral and search. The first, direct, means that the visitor either knows about the blog already or has learned about it offline (e.g., by word of mouth) and has decided to take a look. A referral occurs when a visitor hits your blog by clicking a link to it, either from an e-mail message or another website. Finally, there’s search. You top a few words into Google, Yahoo! or another search engine to find information or a particular website.
Let’s take a look at what this means for the people who come to your blog:
