Category: SEO

The roles of inbound and outbound marketing

Post author By Feng
Post date March 8, 2011
No Comments on The roles of inbound and outbound marketing

Inbound marketing techniques are winning over managers who are shifting away from outbound marketing tactics and pumping in more money on inbound strategies, especially SEO and social media.

According to eMarketer, companies in North America spend 41% of their 2011 lead generation budgets on inbound channels and another 24% on outbound marketing, with the rest unclassified.

Also, a report by HubSpot indicated that businesses dominated by inbound marketing have a 62% lower cost per lead than firms that do mostly outbound marketing.

It seems that with the advent of social networking and growing importance of SEO, inbound marketing is fast dominating the everyday marketing programmes managers use. Still, I feel that there should be a fair balance between outbound and inbound marketing tactics to craft a well-rounded marketing programme. SEO and creating good web content certainly gets customers to ‘subscribe’ to the brand, but I think pushing out professionally crafted messages the traditional way really helps to reinforce the messages that marketers want to get across. Besides, some customers, even if they are interested in the brand, may not be motivated to check out the brand’s inbound marketing content. Instead, they still rely on the information and content sent out through traditional outbound marketing tactics. Instead of replacing outbound marketing, I guess inbound marketing could actually serve as a good complement to a company’s existing outbound marketing strategies.

SEO

SEO Redefined

Google had recently announced a change in its search algorithm, which drops low-quality websites in results while elevating high-quality websites with original content such as research, in-depth reports and thoughtful analyses. This change is expected to affect over 11% of all search queries. (Article: Google clamps down on “content farms”)

This was done as a response against “content farms” which are low quality websites that figured out how to play the search engine optimization (SEO) game by repeating content that favours its search ranking instead of writing for quality.

Consumers of content, like you and I, would probably be happy with how we’re able to get better search results on Google. But this move is likely to have more implications on online marketers who are learning to play the SEO game. Certain SEO approaches, especially the quick and unorthodox ones that worked well before may be totally trashed and the new playing field would now require online marketers to work more on their quality of content in order to improve their search rankings. In addition to compelling content, what works is the originality of it. One possible way could be to add social engagement to the site.

Asia Culture SEO

Search marketing across boundaries

Post author By Feng
Post date January 14, 2011
No Comments on Search marketing across boundaries

As online platforms become a rising need for marketers, I guess many companies would depend on deliberate research to craft out SEO strategies most suitable for their business model.

What’s more, online platforms, as opposed to traditional brick and mortar, allow companies to transcend geographical boundaries to increase their customer base. However, this poses added challenges to SEO strategies. As the article ‘How Search Behaviours Impact Our Search Strategy’ aptly suggests, “If marketers are to succeed in selling their product or service to Asian consumers, they must take heed of the local culture and consumer behaviours. There’s no difference when it comes to search advertising.” The point is, search marketing has to be tailored down to the target market, and even though sites like Google Trends do help a lot, I think crafting out a strategic SEO plan is far more complex.

I found this thought provoking as I wonder if most companies expanding to Asia do consider the vast differences in terms of search habits. If Asians in general, perhaps due to culture, tend to search more general terms instead of long-tail terms, do these companies actually take the additional costs to buy more general key words into due consideration?