3 Modern Marketing Tactics: But Do They Work?
Posted by James Cooper on Tue, Sep 21, 2010
Unless you’ve been living in a bubble world or under a rock for the last few years it’s likely you’ve at least heard about, if not tried your hand at a wide range of modern marketing tactics. For some it’s fun and exciting, others confusing and daunting, and for some even a load of nonsense. With such a range of feedback and experiences in this area, this all begs the question; do modern marketing tactics actually work?
Let’s consider three such areas; Search Engines, Business Blogging & Social Media. I’ll cover Search Engines in this post and the other two areas/tactics in the next two posts. Subscribe by RSS or eMail (add your eMail address in the form on the right) and you’ll get the next articles in this series delivered to your reader or inbox, quick and easy no fuss.
Modern Marketing Tactic 1 - Search Engines
The term ‘Search Engines’, of course, isn’t really one marketing tactic. It is an area of modern Inbound Marketing that has many individual tactics. Nevertheless we shall dissect.
Is ‘Search’ even modern you may ask?
After all, I can remember searching on Yahoo and Excite in high school (and I didn’t just finish school last year either). Search is more modern than say, an ad in the newspaper. But the main point is; Search is currently still a very strong force.
Google’s country specific search engines still dominate the top 20 website traffic rankings. Any small business owner or marketer that ignores this area in favour of new and emerging tactics runs a huge risk of achieving a much lower return on effort and investment.
Why a huge risk?
This risk is because not everyone will be a social media superstar. Not everyone will have 1,000,000 followers (unless of course this does happen by everyone just following each other, then the relevance of 1 million followers is zero). This is because not everyone will do whatever it takes (invest the large amounts of resources (time, effort, skills and money)) to make social media work for them.
So What?
With limited resources, small business owners and marketers must consider their options, normally like this; Marketing Action Plan A vs Marketing Action Plan B vs Marketing Action Plan C
Plan A = 6 Tactics: Twitter $0, 30mins per day. LinkedIn $0, 30mins per day, Facebook $0, 30mins per day. Blogging $0, 4 hours per week. SEO, 4 hours per week. PPC budget $1000, 1 hour per week.
Plan B = 1 Tactic: PPC budget $1,000, 4 hours per week to manage personal time.
Plan C = ???
Are you best to do one tactic extremely well, or spread your resources (mainly time) thinly and do 6 things sort of ok. I think you’ll find it is better to nail one tactic first then automate it, scale it and then add another tactic.
Consider the following well known tactics;
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is simply the process of configuring a website to ensure that Google (and other search engines) understands what is on your site, so you hopefully will appear higher in relevant search enquiries. Is every page in your home base (website & blog) setup targeting a different set of keywords using SEO best practice? Or was the home page and 4 pages optimized ages ago and that is it?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Perhaps one of the easiest marketing methods in the world to measure return on investment (ROI) is pay per click (PPC) advertising using Google AdWords. If you haven’t at least tried it out, you could be missing out!
Yes, it is ideal to not require PPC and there for not pay for what is in effect advertising (be that relevant advertising that users often appreciate). However, to do this you must invest considerable effort in other methods for a sustained period to likely outperform.
But remember the example Action Plan A vs B above. In Action Plan A, 1 hour per week was invested in PPC campaign management, vs 4 hours in Action Plan B. Both spend the same amount of money, which will yield a better result? I would bet that Action Plan B would not only yield a better result for the PPC efforts, but perhaps all of the tactics that Action Plan employs.
Action Points
What are your efforts in the area of search engines? Have you forgotten about them? Have you diverted your attention elsewhere before this area of your business was humming nicely? Would it be possible that you could get a greater return on effort and investment using modern marketing tactics relating to search engines vs other methods (e.g. social media)? Is it possible you jumped from step 1 to step 5 without nailing step 2?
No answers, only more questions!
