B2B Monday Myth: SEM and SEO Are the Same Thing
by MGB2B
The Myth: SEM and SEO Are the Same Thing
The Truth: These Two Different Methods of Increasing Search Engine Visibility Work Hand-in-Hand
So you’ve created a great website. And you’ve filled it with pages of relevant information about your company, clean graphics, and insightful industry blog posts. You’re proud of your work; the website looks smart, and it’s relevant to your customers. Naturally, you’re going to want some eyes on this content. So what do you do next? How can your company break through all the internet clutter?
You’ve likely heard both the terms, “search engine marketing” and “search engine optimization.” The two phrases are definitely related, since they both have the same goal in mind: increasing your visibility and bringing more users to your site. But there is a common misconception that these two terms are interchangeable, which is not true at all. They typically refer to two entirely different tactics. By identifying the differences between them, you’ll be able to properly employ these two methods to your website.
What Is Search Engine Marketing?
SEM was once used primarily as an overarching term for increasing website visibility. But when people use the phrase today, they are most often referring to the practice of Paid Search. Paid Search is when you use paid advertisements that appear on search engine result pages. Google AdWords is the most popular paid search platform. It allows you to pay only when a user clicks on an ad to visit your website.
How Exactly Does Paid Search Work?
When a user is searching on a platform like Google, there are certain keywords that they are going to enter if they are looking for a specific product or service. This gives you the opportunity to place your ads alongside the organic results that pop up when your prospects type in relevant keywords. Those attractive links that come up at the very top of your search results? Those are being paid for by the people who really want you to see them.
These ads are also known by the term pay-per-click ads. They are usually small, text-based ads that drive users to specific landing pages.
What Is the Benefit of Paid Search?
Search Engine Marketing is valuable because it is a great lead generator. It gives you the opportunity to put ads right in front of users who are further into the sales funnel. These people are often ready to make a purchase. Paid Search is also highly measurable. If more prospects are coming to your site via certain keywords and not through others, you can stop paying for the keywords that don’t work and put more money into the ones that do, building efficiency over time.
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
While the important word when talking about search engine marketing is paid, the best word to describe Search Engine Optimization is organic. Simply put, it’s the free and natural way to maximize the number of visitors that come to your site. It involves writing, formatting, and fine-tuning the content of your site in a way that makes it the most user-friendly and compatible with Google searches.
What Does SEO Encompass?
Search Engine Optimization requires adjusting different elements of your site, both on the technical and creative side to improve its presence in search results. This could be anything from the language used to the way your site is structured, including how strong your keywords are and how they’re ordered. The secret? Optimize so that both users and search engines can understand easily. SEO also takes into account the way other sites link to you on the internet and how relevant a search engine deems you to be based on these connections.
SEO can be broken down into two categories: on-page activities and off-page. On-page includes elements like:
- The incorporation of keywords
- Clean and optimized blog posts and page copy
- Page load speed
- The integration of social sharing
- Titles, headings and meta descriptions
Off-page SEO includes elements like:
- Having other relevant sites link to yours
- Indications that your content is being shared on social sites
While SEO is free, you’ll likely want to hire someone or pay an outside agency with SEO expertise to help you implement these changes properly.
Which Should I Use – SEM or SEO?
Taking into account the differences between SEM and SEO, you should consider how they might help drive traffic to your website. Note that while Paid Search is the more immediate, gratifying way to boost your visibility, optimizing your website organically can be beneficial in different ways. Both require monitoring and fine-tuning to see what’s working best with your prospects.
As for the debate on which tactic is “better,” the answer is: none. Your best bet is to use a combination of the two. Talk to an expert on both topics to help you out, as you launch a Paid Search campaign and incorporate new SEO techniques into your site. Whichever you lean on more, SEM or SEO, understanding the difference between the two is already a step in the right direction. Both will ultimately help you toward your overarching goal of boosting traffic, and eventually converting prospects into new customers.
Continue Reading5 Marketing Tips Manufacturers Can Take from Steve Jobs
by MGB2B
Whether you loved him or loathed him, Steve Jobs knew a whole lot about marketing. He wasn’t a brilliant engineer. That was his buddy, Woz. But Jobs knew how to sell the brilliance. How to package it, how to market it, and how to stay ahead of the competition in ways that the CEO of any manufacturing company would envy.
After all, isn’t that what keeps you up at night? That burning question: How can I keep up with – and surpass – my competitors? As I’m reading the Steve Jobs biography, it’s easy to see that Jobs was a master at this. Sure, he had his failures. But his successes were far greater.
Here Are 5 Marketing Tips for Manufacturers That We Can Gather from Jobs’s Time as the Face of Apple:
- Put Innovation Ahead of Money. While he was referring to his use of LSD when he said it, Steve Jobs famously declared, “It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money.” It seems elemental, but in the hot pursuit of the almighty dollar, creativity often gets lost. Don’t lose sight of what ultimately drives business – creatively solving the problems of your customers.
- Think Different. While this was a longstanding tagline for Apple products, it perfectly embodies the Jobs philosophy. You can read anywhere that he stole the idea of a Graphical User Interface (as opposed to green characters on a black screen) from Xerox. But that’s only half of the story. Jobs and his team thought differently than the folks at Xerox PARC. They took something that was designed for businesses and made it a seamless, friendly, intuitive experience for the consumer market. In doing so, Apple eventually attracted different kinds of businesses from what Xerox was pursuing. Design-focused companies like ad agencies and architecture firms were an easy match for the Mac’s simple yet graphically advanced platform.
- Get Inside the Heads of Your Customers. Like the design of products, the design of your ad campaigns, web content, and any brand communications should be created with your consumer in mind. You want them to know your features. They just want to know what they’ll gain. But they also want to trust your brand. They want to feel like you know what their day has been like. Like you can offer them something to make it better or easier in some way. Jobs knew this. And almost every decision he made – whether for marketing or product development – was driven by it. Today, there’s an easy way to use your customers’ desires and needs to drive your decisions. A core user study. Smart engineers do them. Smart marketers do them. And smart CEOs live and breathe by their results.
- Don’t Be Everything to Everyone. Apple is for dreamers. For creators. For people who want to make change. That’s how they positioned the brand in 1997. The legacy that Steve Jobs created stands true even today. And it applies to both products and advertising. Focus on what you’re best at instead of adding mediocrity into the mix. Keep your message on-point. Don’t sully it with unnecessary excess. Simplicity is the name of the game.
- Know Your Enemies. And your friends. Apple’s relationship with Microsoft was on-and-off over the years. And even when Microsoft succeeded, Jobs knew what Apple’s reaction would be and how their products would be different. As mentioned earlier, he kept an eye on what Xerox was doing, and used what he learned from them to create the interfaces we now use every day. Don’t copy your competitors. But know and understand what they are doing, so you can rise above them.
Steve Jobs had many flaws, for sure. But his product development and marketing instincts have changed the way we live today. Manufacturing companies would benefit from any one of these tips. Take them all together, and you might just find inspiration to revolutionize your industry. That sounds a whole lot better than simply “increasing the bottom line.”
Continue ReadingB2B Monday Myth: Sales and Marketing Teams Are Born Adversaries
by MGB2B
The Myth: Sales and Marketing Are Born Adversaries
The Truth: Sales and Marketing Collaboration Leads to Higher Revenue
The Problem
Within many B2B companies there is a both sales team and a marketing team. But what you will rarely find is sales and marketing in a healthy relationship that ensures mutual success.
Why is this?
From the marketer’s perspective, their number one priority is to generate leads. They are the professionals when it comes to creating a campaign. Leads only get handed over to sales once they enter the buying process.
On the other hand, salespeople sometimes think that marketers are too far removed from customers and the business. How could they understand what’s involved in closing a deal?
Assumptions and doubt from both teams don’t help anyone. Often, one group thinks they could do a better job than the other. Add in different tactics, different mindsets, and varying timeframes, and you’re in trouble. What results is a relationship characterized by tolerance at best, and sales and marketing collaboration is not a priority.
What should happen instead?
The responsibilities within the buying process are often presented as a “funnel.” The very top and widest part of the funnel is buyer awareness, and the narrowest part at the bottom is the actual purchase. A marketing team focuses on top half of the funnel, identifying customer segments. They develop the branding and outreach that will resonate with these customers. Then, they circulate materials across relevant channels to get this message across. Responsibility stays with marketing through the “interest” phase of a customer’s process. Once a customer moves into “consideration” or “intent,” they get handed off to sales. At this point, the salespeople are entirely in charge of making a transaction happen.
The line where marketing efforts end and sales begin varies from company to company and is sometimes a little blurry. It’s clear that both teams integrate simply by the nature of their work. They both work to convert a lead into a sale, and some level of collaboration is necessary to make this handoff seamless.
But the key is that not only does the integration of sales and marketing need to be acknowledged. It needs to be capitalized on. If sales and marketing efforts are completely aligned, your company can improve sales substantially. In fact, the Digital Marketing Institute reported that sales and marketing collaboration potentially generate 208% more marketing revenue for a company and 36% higher customer retention.
So how can this be accomplished?
There are several steps you can take to ensure your marketing and sales efforts are aligned.
- Bridge the communication gap: It sounds cliche, but in this case, communication really is key. If sales and marketing aren’t communicating frequently and efficiently, valuable leads can get lost in translation. On the other hand, constant contact will ensure that both teams are up-to-date on what the other is doing. No one is left in the dark. It can also help each side to hold the other accountable for producing and accomplishing what they should, and making sure they report it correctly.
- Collaborate and socialize: In order to eliminate some of the negative assumptions sales has about marketing, or vice versa, it helps if both teams get to know each other. This doesn’t mean everyone has to become good friends, but genuine face-to-face conversations can create more authentic relationships and a better understanding of what everyone’s role is.
- Create uniformity: There are few things more effective than a consistent message. If sales and marketing are able to synchronize, their combined efforts will be much more powerful than either would be on its own. This may actually mean that some things cross over between the two groups. For example, marketing can adopt some of the quantitative metrics used by sales, and sales in return can use some of the more qualitative marketing techniques when it comes to retaining customers.
Sales and Marketing Collaboration – Mutual Success is Possible
You ultimately may not be able to eliminate all of the tension between your sales and marketing teams. Any two groups within an organization who operate under different strategies and perspectives are naturally going to butt heads every once in a while. But following these tips can help you begin to bridge the gap between two teams who are executing very important work for your company’s main goal.
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