Search Engine Marketing is being influenced by the recession, in a good way.
The 'economic meltdown' of Q4 2008 has lead a lot of companies to slash away employees, new ventures, and of course, marketing budgets. Already, traditional advertising methods (TV, Radio, Mail etc.) are seeing a decline in purchases overall and starting to feel the pain. But what does this mean for SEM?
There are a lot of predicitions that we will see Search Engine Marketing continue to increase as companies are cancelling old methods and needing to replace them with new ones. Marketers will face the daunting challenge of performing better than 2008 with less money and time for execution. This situation lends itself perfectly to SEM which can be implemented over a few weeks.
eMarketer.com has already posted their predictions for SEM in 2009, which attributes the growth to Video advertisements and the movement from TV waters to Video searchers. Take a look at their 5 year prediction:
Wonder why your site traffic has dipped? Not to worry, searching is a seasonal activity. Anyone would agree that searches for 'snow shoes' would be down during the summer months, but what about other generic searches? A lot of search activities in the market today can take a down turn during holidays, such as Christmas, because people are off work and staying away from anything that could remind them of work.
Take the Marketing Industry. This graph below shows the amount of searches that contained the word 'marketing' over the past 5 years. The statistics show a trend of this search bottoming out during December of each year. This could because of the holiday season, or that most companies have completed their advertising spend by this point and are not looking for anything new.
This should be kept in mind when tracking your Analytics and campaign affectiveness.
Cell phones can't bake muffins, but the way this market is going, wait 3 more months. In 2005, most companies talked about 'Electronic Convergence' when they identified that people had electronics that did similar things. It was common for a person to have a calculator, cell phone, palm pilot and music player. The average consumer was crying out for one company to remove the pain of the multi-device life, and we are now enjoying those fruits.
What does this mean to online advertisers? Everything.
Search Engine Marketing needs to encompass the mobile industry as surving is quickly moving to cell phones. Widgets, applications, games and SDK's are being consumed at a rapid rate, and any company that doesn't see mobile as an area they need to be in will quickly be thrown aside like an old tube-monitor.
Check out this funny video below about our wonderful cell phones
Google Adwords used to have search ads seen on your computer and what they called 'Mobile Ads'. Now they have the option for ANY search ads to be able to opt-into iPhone search results. This is made possible by tracking the browser information coming off of an iPhone.
For most businesses this is great news, but for experienced SEM advertisers, it is about time. Not being able to advertise on iPhone browsers before was a major roadblock in SEM, and cost companies a lot of money investing in mobile-only ads targeted to the iPhone.
You can check out the video on this new feature below:
There is too much data accessible today that we ignore, but we all know how important it is to our business.
Google Analytics, Omniture, Campaigner are all tools that measure your SEO results and have the ability to break it down by behavior, geographic region, unique visits, campaigns, products and the list goes on and on, and on… Installing Google Analytics on your website is a great first step in understanding your online traffic, but there two more steps to go!
Step two is to understand how it works, and although it has an intuitive interface, terms suchas 'Bounce Rate' are critical to know for your SEO long-term. CandyBox Marketing takes the time with our customers to walk them through important reports and show them trends / results that are important for ongoing business. Unless you understand the results, there will be no way to benchmark your success and marketing dollars at work.
CandyBox Marketing will work with your organization to compile a template for weekly / monthly reports that can be sent to key stakeholders that need to understand your successes and difficulties of Marketing Online. The best way to learn how to use these tools is hands on, not by watching 20 different home-made movies on YouTube.
Finally, step three is to take action on the results and monitize successful strategies, and more importantly drop ineffective campaigns. This is easier said then done in the real world, since we don't always have time to review / understand / implement, but we can help…
Online Advertising is commonly avoided by some because companies are going after a small target audience in a localized area. Marketers don't want to invest in a 'Shotgun Blast Campaign' to all of North America, when they are trying to find customers in two local neighborhoods. This is very common mistake.
What these Marketers don't know is that it IS POSSIBLE to hit your Target Market with online tools! With the help of different SEO strategies / tools, you are able to directly target specific campaigns on a map. You can even narrow Google Adwords campaigns within a few kilometers of your business.
Get rid of the old Direct Mail piece that costs you a fortune, and bring results to people searching in your neighborhood, or even two (see below).
