Eggblogg

It's search, Jim, but not as we know it

For some time now I've been aware that I never pick up the Yellow Pages. I've never advertised my business in it and I certainly don't use it. I always search the web - and I've heard the same thing from many other people.

But I was surprised to read on Robin Hamman's CyberSoc blog that he never uses Google, or any kind of web search, preferring to ask his contacts via Twitter, Facebook and social bookmarking sites. Is this the next step? Will search ever become as defunct at the Yellow Pages? I can't imagine it happening any time soon, but then again I suppose it's possible, if the social networking phenonemon ever achieves a critical mass.

But what if your friends don't know the answer, nor where to find it? It could be the blind leading the blind. It reminds me of the idea that in the future there will be no 'mass media', that we'll all read our own 'bespoke' newspapers, full of content we've elected to receive and nothing else. Customised, personalised, targeted. Although that sounds good from a marketing standpoint, it leaves me feeling a bit depressed if that's the way  all communication is going. No more serendipitous discoveries of things we previously knew nothing about, nothing to challenge our prejudices or ignorance.

Personally I think search is inherent to the web - whether it's using a search engine, searching within a site, searching for likeminds on Twitter, whatever ... we still haven't found what we're looking for.

What does 'online marketing' mean to a small business?

"I'm in online marketing." It's a conversation stopper. Unless you're at a Wired Sussex networking event. It's true that most small businesses these days have a web presence of some sort, and they're aware they need to be doing well on Google. But sometimes that's as far as it goes, especially if they went to a web designer who added 'website promotion' to the service description for another hundred quid.

Fact is, getting the right visitors to your website and converting them into customers now involves a complex set of activities and real strategic thinking. Or, as Lee Odden's suggests in his recent post Recession Proof SEO Tips,  "effective SEO in any economic environment means getting more creative, not mundane." Sensibly, small biz clients don't really care about the details, and even less about the jargon that goes with it. They're more bothered with results. How to break that down? Well, you could start with the desired result and work backwards.

Let's say you have a website which sells your goods or services. That means people want what you're selling and are able to buy. That means you have a website that works and a product or service for which there's a demand. If people are even on the website that means they need to have typed in your URL or arrived there from somewhere else. That means they have either heard of your company and URL or they've seen a link to you on the web and followed it. That means you've either done some traditional marketing already or there are links to your site on the web, in places where those potentially interested people were browsing or searching.

Where should those links be? How do we get them? How many do we need? What should they say? How do we know our prospects will see them and follow them? What other forms of promotion do we need to be doing? We've got the visitors - why won't they buy? How can we do all this without spending a fortune? Um... you need the help of an online marketer!

It's quality, not quantity that counts with PPC

Here's a great case study from Marketing Sherpa which illustrates just how effective it can be to combine Google AdWords with a dedicated landing page and good 'old fashioned' email and phone follow-up.

In particular, I loved the insight that “Google users tend to type in exactly what they want. They don’t type in, ‘Christmas tree.’ They enter in, ‘I want an 8-foot-tall Christmas tree.’”

Sometimes I find clients reluctant to target niche key words and phrases, thinking it's far more important to be found, for example, for 'hotel' than for '4 star hotel in Brighton'. And yet for a 4* Brighton hotel the latter phrase delivers far better qualified leads. Plus, if you're paying for each click, the last thing you want is to waste your money on people who are looking for a hotel in Newcastle.

Is there such a thing as respectful, respectable marketing?

I think so ...

Apparently, the latest release of TV series Futurama paints a grim picture of direct marketers as aliens interested only in fleecing gullible people out of their personal details (I wonder if the bad guys have English accents?)

The public's perception of your average marketer does seem to lie some where between the estate agent and the politician. Even some of my oldest friends express wonder that I could enjoy such a, well, down and dirty profession. Especially if I say I'm in email marketing (ah! you're one of those people who know how to get past the spam filters) or search engine optimisation (ah! the black art of getting Google to place you at the top)

There are certainly times when I'm ashamed to be a marketer, but I stick to my belief that it doesn't have to be that way. If you can't respect your audience you can't expect their respect.

Pay per click vs SEO

I see that B2B Marketing is holding an event on December 11th entitled 'Is SEO eclipsing pay-per-click for lead generation?'

Yesterday I was at London Metropolitan University giving a workshop on online marketing to a group of women entrepreneurs-to-be, and the subject of SEO and pay per click fascinated them. When searching on Google, the majority claimed never to click on the right hand column, tending instead towards those on the left, even though they weren't all aware of the difference between which were paid for links and which were 'natural' search results.

The idea that your business could appear high up in searches without you having to pay for it was a revelation. If it's free, they wanted to know, why do people bother to pay - especially as more searchers seem to click on the left hand column anyway?

Although there's a stock answer to this, it's still a good question, and clearly one worthy of debate!