Search Marketing
When you ask business people today about search, they tend to answer in terms of Google AdWords or paid search in general (also known as "pay per click" or "PPC"). But search marketing today encompasses so much more than just one search engine or just their paid offerings.
Stepping back a few steps, Search Marketing involves BEING FOUND when a someone is looking for you (knowingly or not). It involves making sure your search presence is such that when a prospect inquires about your company, goods or services, they have a good chance of finding you.And it's mission critical to be found if you are planning to stay in business. 12 Billion searches were recorded in August of 2008 in the US alone, and that figure was up nearly 20% from August of 2007. Think about the scope of that number. There are about 300 million citizens in the US. It's as if every man, woman and child in the country went online and looked for "something" 40 times in one month.
To put this in perspective, consider the United States Postal Service. Currently the third-largest[8] employer in the United States, after the United States Department of Defense[9] and Wal-Mart, they operate the largest civilian vehicle fleet in the world...
with some 221,000 vehicles, and an annual fuel budget of over $2.7 billion (at $2.25/gallon as of March 2009). Over 650,000 "career employees" delivered 203 billion pieces of mail (2008) to more than 149 million residences, from 32,741 individual brick and mortar post offices. >>>> Google alone delivered search results to 48 Billion individuals in August, 2008 alone (worldwide), and did so with less than 6,000 employees worldwide (and no delivery trucks).
So naturally, our perspective is that this market is astronomically HUGE and full of opportunity for those that want to take advantage of it. And our approach is that you can and should take advantage of the "lowest hanging fruit" first. The methodolody we emply can be found below:
APPROACH
1. Get Found by Potential Customers [Grow the Top of the Funnel]
a. Search Engines
i. Natural Search - On-Page SEO
ii. Natural Search - Off-Page SEO
iii. Paid Search
b. Blogosphere
i. Template & Blog Configuration Options
ii. Identify Personas & Finding Your Voice
iii. Determine Content Creation Strategy
iv. Publish Initial Content
v. Launch & Promote Your Blog
c. Social Mediasphere
i. Basic Principles
ii. Business Applications: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, YouTube, SlideShare and others
2. Convert More Visitors into Customers [Fuel the Middle of the Funnel]
a. Convert More Visitors to Leads
i. Offers
ii. Calls to action
iii. Lead Tracking
iv. Integrated Forms
v. Landing Page Best Practices
b. Convert More Leads to Customers
i. Qualifying and Prioritizing Leads
ii. Speeding up the Sales Follow Up Process
iii. Leveraging Sales Intelligence
3. Ongoing Marketing [Continue Feeding the Entire Funnel]
a. Analysis (Traffic, Leads and Landing Page Conversion Rates)
b. Optimization (Keywords, Blog Entries, Sharing Tools)
c. Publishing (Quality, Creative Content; Promoting Content)
d. Socializing (Demonstrate Social Media Best Practices)
Sources:
http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/postalfacts.htm (USPS facts)
http://www.google.com/press/facts.html (Google facts)