Search Marketing Sage

Hi, I’m Tad, and I’m a credit card rewards Junkie.  I have a history of paying for everything I possibly can with my rewards cards just to maximize my cash back rewards.  The credit card companies write paragraphs in their Terms and Conditions to limit the maximum amount of money or rewards they have to pay out to to people like me each year.  I’ve been known to hit these yearly reward caps as early as October.  So I know a thing or two about playing the rewards game.

Last week as I called American Express to clear up an unauthorized charge on one of my cards I drew a customer service representative who almost seemed obsessed with the idea of up-selling me to upgrade my business credit card, and he almost had me convinced, based on one feature of the card he was trying to sell me on.  I had never heard of a business credit card that gives rewards points specifically for advertising expenses.

American Express Business Rewards Gold

But, sure enough, the American Express Business Gold Rewards Card gives 2 credit card rewards points for every dollar spent for up to $100,000 of purchases:

2 points for advertising purchases in the U.S. to promote your business in the following media channels: online, TV and radio

As the curtain closes on another year at Search Mojo, we like to take one last look back at what made our year interesting – and our blog posts here on Search Marketing Sage are an excellent reflection of that. We write about the new things we as search marketers are learning about each day so we can pass that knowledge on to you, our awesome readers. And because of you, 2012 was the most successful year yet for the Search Marketing Sage!

We’ve compiled a list of our top 30 blog posts on search marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing and content marketing for 2012. These were the most popular posts of the year, judged by your visits and feedback. We hope you enjoy these (and even learn something you didn’t know before), and here’s to a successful 2013 for all of us!

Confession:    I’ve been writing this blog post since April, 2012.  I’ve truly hesitated to publicly say these words.  I lost my biggest client, that I had for 6 years this year.  I made this client wildly successful to the tune of many millions of dollars a year in revenues attributable from natural and paid search.  I lost that client because they got fed up with dealing with multiple agencies for Branding, Print, TV, Display, Web Design, Digital Creative, Web Development, E-mail, SEO and PPC.  I’ve also lost another client that is a major national brand to the Digital Agency of Record model in the last week.  2012 has been the year of getting our butt kicked by the Bundled Services Agency of Record model for big brand clients. In both situations the direct contacts we worked with were completely against our elimination from their accounts, but their superiors forced them to let us go. I’m not a sour-grapes kind of guy and I wanted to make sure my emotions weren’t clouding my judgement if I put this out for the world to see.  Time and sore feelings are put aside and this is how I see the situation.

One Throat To Choke

The “One Throat to Choke” philosophy seems to be born (at least from what I can see online) from debate in the IT industry.  The philosophy suggests that you get all your technology and vendor support from or through a single vendor so that you have one vendor to appeal to when you have issues.   When something goes wrong you supposedly have “one throat to choke” to resolve the problem.

With the advent of the digital age, there are apparently 3 models mostly being employed by marketers with their agencies:

The first model is one in which a client selects one lead entity — at either the holding company or agency level — and grants it the power to oversee all marketing efforts and partners. The second model is one in which the client itself assumes that leadership role. And the third model is one in which a client hires a slew of agencies and tells them to go collaborate.

Business to Business (B2B) search marketing can be tricky.  It’s hard to dispute the value of getting into the consideration set of potential undecided customers that search on non-branded keyword phrases, but visibility isn’t necessarily always going to translate into a lead that a sales force can follow up on and turn into a sale, especially if your product or service has a big price tag or requires a major commitment.

The art of generating B2B leads online doesn’t get the credit that it deserves, especially on those big-ticket, high commitment, complicated sales.  Typically these leads have very high costs per acquisition and very low conversion rates.  The pool of ideal customers for these kind of products is relatively small, especially compared to consumer products or services.

Keyword Demographics?

When it comes to search marketing, both natural and paid, keyword selection can be tricky for B2B niches.  What your ideal customer demographic may search for isn’t always abundantly clear.  Say your company offers services to battery manufacturers to do testing on the batteries they make.  The keyword “battery testing” has approximately 320 searches per month according to Google.  But “battery testing” can mean different things to different people.  For consumers it’s mostly an informational search query about how to test your car’s battery.  A smaller niche of both consumers and businesses might be interested in figuring out how to test laptop computer batteries. And, an even smaller niche might be battery manufacturers (your ideal customers).  Battery testing has “horizontal relevance” in that it means different things to different people.

Keywords mean different things to different people

The hard part about horizontal relevance is that search engines like Google favor what the majority are looking for in top ten natural search results, in other words if it’s mostly an informational search query and mostly searched by consumers the results will likely favor those type of pages.

There are so many tools out there for managing different marketing activities – email, social media, search marketing, landing pages, the list goes on and on. We jump back and forth between tools all day, pulling information from one and importing it into another. Marketing automation software, however, is designed to make these marketing activities and any lead generation and lead management efforts more efficient and effective for B2B marketers. Not only will it streamline your work, marketing automation can also improve your lead generation from activities like search marketing. Who wouldn’t want that?