Russ Mann of Covario is now talking about Fortune 500 CFO’s starting to demand more accountability on the marketing spend. Search engine marketers need to help their clients prove the value of the marketing spend because it’s one of the first things to get chopped.
Jon Miller: I think you’re going to be less spending on the branding side of marketing.
Andrew Beckman: Marketing budgets are getting scrutinized and we are trying to move clients to SEO as the price of PPC goes up but most clients don’t get it.
Here’s what I think is going on in my little neck of the woods. The SEO business is cranking because investors, shareholders, etc are getting impatient with companies blowing all of their $ on ppc as the price of keywords go up and everyone gets nervous about the “non-recession recession” (Jon Miller’s term).
In this environment where do you put your first dollar?
Beckman: Do basic SEO first and analyze clickstream metrics
Dave Davies: Girl. You really got me going…Sorry wasn’t paying attention.
Russ Mann: The first dollar should go to customer research/strategy
Jon Miller: You may want to consider shifting budget to customer retention v. acquisition
Russ Mann: Search is in the second inning of a game that’s going to go into overtime
Jon Miller: We’re seeing increased spending on “offer development” (offers to attract customers), particularly offers designed to appeal to later stage buyers (e.g. buying guides).
Andrew Beckman: As long as you can show analytics that show how SEO drives conversion at a lower cost than PPC it will sell, but it takes time to educate the customer. (Note to potential customers: If you are reading this please take my word for it. Things will move a lot faster. 🙂 )
AndrewBeckman: You have more control over PPC but you can tweak your titles and metadescriptions easily to improve your SEO.
Russ Mann: Search can be used for customer retention and improving lifetime value of the customer.
Andrew Beckman: Multivariate landing page tools are the most important part of your conversion strategy. Using these tools is the only way to figure out how to improve conversions.
Dave Davies: I met her in a bar down in old Soho where they drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola…Sorry wasn’t paying attention.
Russ Mann: There are now more active Internet users in China than in the US. Go East young man.
6 Response Comments
Well – I’m guessing you didn’t care for my part of the session.
No problem but if you could email me and let me know what you feel I could have done better I’d like to see if there are areas I can improve on in presenting.
Or maybe you just really like the Kinks and were sorely disappointed when I entered the room. 😉
DAVE!
No disrespect at all to you Dave – although I would’ve appreciated a riff or two. In general I thought a lot of your session was kind of weak – it had nothing to do with you at all and I apologize for making it appear like it was all you in this post. It’s hard to resist juvenile attempts at humor at a conference. So to all my readers let it be known that Dave Davies is a smart guy – he is not a bad presenter at conferences and he was dealt a bad hand by having to participate in a session that I personally found uninteresting and by being an unintentional victim of my own conference panel ADD.
I forgot to mention that you really got me Dave. You got me so I don’t know what I’m doing.
LOL. If you had any advice (or if you still do) by all means – let me know. I like presenting and if there’s areas you think I personally could do better in – I’m happy to hear it.
I am sorry though that you didn’t care for the session itself.
Cheers and many thanks.
Looking back, it might have been a good idea if we all did presentations, as more thought would have gone into strategies and tactics used during these more difficult times.
No offense to you Andrew either but I just felt the whole thing seemed like a CNBC segment when all I care about is ranking well in Google 🙂