With a deepening recession and a swine flu pandemic upon the Nation, perhaps 2009 has not gone as planned for many of us. Because of the uncertainty out there, we felt that now is probably as good a point as any to reflect on the year that’s gone by to see if and how these events (and others) have played out against online marketing plans. Below I will review a list of some top Internet Marketing strategies to see how they are still stacking up this year.
- Search engine optimization- Still the number one requested service we offer, SEO can offer an alternative to highly-priced pay per clicks. Predictably, economic conditions (and plethora of information out there regarding how to optimize) have turned many companies in wanna be SEO’s. Impact: Our customers are now competing with many more people for the same real estate (first 10 spots) and SEO has now become ultra competitive. For those websites that do not have large budgets for link building and content development, SEO is now becoming “out of reach”. For clients that cannot compete with the big budgets, we suggest going after long-tail keywords that may not have as much traffic but are less competitive and may produce better conversion rates.
- Pay per click marketing- Again, like with SEO, there are a larger number of customers competing for the same real estate and costs are now going through the roof for many keywords across many Industries. Impact: We see many customers reducing budgets here rather than staying the course. Best practices with pay per click such as landing page testing and conversion optimization take additional budgets but many times the conversion rate is not a matter of reducing your marketing spend but about being more effective with it.
- Social Media Marketing- Since there often can be little to no cost to launch a SMM campaign, we see a lot of our clients jumping into SMM head-first. Impact: While social media can be great for many brands, many people do not know why they need a Facebook page and/or why they are “twittering”, for examples. As a result, many clients are not finding the success they are wanting with social media marketing. We suggest “listening” first to what customers are saying about your brand before diving in with a half-hearted strategy.
There are, of course, many more strategies that have been impacted in 2009. However, the overall trend seems to be about trying “less expensive” tactics and strategies versus being more effective with current spends. The rest of the year should be an interesting one, whether the economy bounces back or not. Our advice to you is to simply stay the course..!
Tags: conversion optimization, cost per acqusition, Marketing, online marketing, pay per click, Search engine optimization, social media marketing
