What Web Marketing can do for you in 2017.

Web Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) accelerate business growth. 

That's what Web Marketing and SEO can do for you in 2017.

It's a new year with new marketing challenges; revenue growth, margin growth, market growth, resources, and more are high on the list for any professional B-to-B marketing and sales person.

One marketing need is crystal clear - - since good leads feed the business, marketers need to start FEEDING the BUSINESS.

Isn't this the same challenge as last year? And the year before?
Indeed it is.

So what are you going to do about it? 

Whatever else, don't forget these lead generation tools:

1. Web Marketing is a prime weapon in your arsenal for lead generation.
2. A prime component for effective Web Marketing must be Search Engine Marketing.
3. At the very heart of Web Marketing must be Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

I've been employing international Web Marketing and Search Engine Marketing strategies and tactics in my lead generation plans for over 13 years. Web leads have played a strategic, tactical and crucial role in helping grow multiple technical B-to-B business lines in both revenue and profit.

Our web marketing efforts have been producing quality lead generation volumes which have worked beyond anyone's wildest dreams way back in 2003. I'm accomplishing these results with only part of my work time devoted to web marketing... I still must deal with all the other marketing tasks which can easily fill up a day.

While I cannot divulge financial details, one of the business streams I supported received over 10,000 qualified web leads globally in one year alone. That business enjoyed superior revenue, profit, and profit-margin growth. Web leads are feeding that business. Just one person, myself, is managing the content, SEO, and campaigns which attracted and generated those 10,000+ leads, and on a part-time basis in terms of my total work time.

There is really no excuse to not work and engage with SEO on a regular and systemic basis. Web leads are by far the number one source of quality leads, from my experience.

Sanity Check: Web Leads are essential, but they're only part of an optimal mix of healthy lead generation. Outstanding leads are also generated from Referrals, Trade Shows, Advertising, Conferences, White Papers, and more. They must all be utilized. But Web Leads are the high volume and high quality lead generation source, if Search Engine Marketing principles are applied.

So what are you going to do about 2017 quality lead generation? 

My suggestion is: 

Get busy with Search Engine Marketing. Make it a priority.

How to increase your budget and invest in SEO and Content Marketing?

Budget sufficient resources to a proven lead generator: Search Engine Marketing.

A marketer recently posted an excellent question on a Linkedin marketing group, asking "How do we free up budget to invest in SEO/Content Marketing?". He was hearing clients complain that their companies were not investing sufficient resources into search engine marketing when compared to traditional media such as print advertising and trade shows. He posted this question to encourage input on how to resolve this budget and resource challenge.

Budgeting for SEO is an excellent question. My answer is below:

For B2B, my 12+ years of Search Engine Marketing experience show that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are, by far, the number one drivers of new leads. This happy reality can be shared and brought home to upper management by diligent tracking and reporting. Sharing lead statistics and educating management on the evolving nature of how leads are generated really help in creating support for SEO and SEM, and both organic and paid search.

Search Engine Marketing Dominates Lead Gen.

If managed properly, SEO and SEM can produce many, many, more leads than print, trade shows, etc, and cost much less per lead. Search Engine Marketing will not replace these other activities, you need them all to be most effective.

But with search engines producing almost 75% of all business leads, according to a recent survey, B2B marketers and companies must pay attention to SEO and SEM, or risk losing business opportunities (strategic & transactional) and market share.

This new Pardot lead gen survey is very educational, and one excellent graphic in the survey is well worth showing to people in order to assist growing your SEO and SEM budget. I've blogged about it and related B2B lead gen experiences at: "Want B2B Leads? Pay Close Attention to Google Search and Content"

Want B2B Leads? Pay Close Attention to Google Search and Content.

A recent study by Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Evangelist for Pardot, reinforces the key role of search engine marketing for lead generation. In his paper "The State of Demand Generation 2013", the results of a user survey clearly list the main effective ingredients needed to enjoy successful B2B lead generation:

1. Obtain Search Engine Marketing Success, especially Google Search Engine Success.

2. Employ Short Content on Webpages and White Papers.... Concise, Precise, and Relevant.

In summary, B2B Buyers use Google Search, and like Relevant and Short Content on Webpages and White Papers. Worth Repeating: "B2B Buyers use Google Search and like Relevant and Short Content."

The same study indicated that an impressive "72% of product research for a future business purchase begins on Google." Nearly 3 out of 4 B2B leads start on Google.

72% of B2B Leads Begin on Google Search, per Mathew Sweezey, Pardot.

No amount of creative branding content or social media chatter will mitigate this fact. If you're not focused on winning with search engine marketing, you're at risk of missing nearly 3 out of 4 potential leads!

From my own experience, this simple formula of efficient content and effective SEO has produced over 10 years of outstanding organic search engine marketing lead generation success for B2B niche markets. I've focused on what our potential customers need and are looking for, in order to provide solutions to their problems.

Like a good consultative selling sales pitch, my webpages provide features which bring benefits to meet the prospective customer's needs. This customer-centric approach works for Google SERPs as well, based upon the superior search ranking results I commonly enjoy.

To optimize your lead generation success, craft webpage content to be efficient and relevant, focused, and concise. Content should be as short as reasonably possible, to best provide key information easily to a hectic, busy, potential client. Quickly give them the facts they need in order to be educated and motivated to contact you as a quality business lead.

Potential clients will not waste their valuable time attempting to sift through wordy webpages or white papers full of flowery, self-important, lightweight "content". They want straight facts and answers, and they want them now.

Include and use appropriate technical terms, acronyms, and jargon, because that specialized vocabulary is a key component in the business language of the targeted niche clientele. It is also good practice to spell these abbreviations out at least once on the page, as appropriate, both for visitor comprehension and search engine optimization. Make content simple and relevant for the potential client.

B2B lead generation content is usually designed to reach and influence lucrative and small market niches, not a mass audiences. You want that "1%" of the global potential audience, so talk directly to them. Don't worry about the other "99%" who will not give you any business under any circumstances.

Avoid creating excessive content. Don't 'tell a story' and yammer on telling the world how wonderful and great your company is. Potential clients can see right through this self-centered hype and quickly move on to a competitor who is more focused on the client.

In short, for superior B2B lead generation, focus on search engine marketing combined with concise and precise webpages, white papers, and other content. Include a clear call-to-action. These best practices are true big B2B lead generation winners.

A special thanks is given to Ayaz Nanji, with MarketingProfs, for his post which alerted me to Mathew Sweezey's paper. Ayaz gives an excellent overview of the Pardot report at: B2B Buyers Prefer Short Content; Rely Heavily on Google Searches.

B-to-B Web Marketing Should Help Sales People Sell.

FEED Your Website. FEED IT.

Search Engine Marketing is Industrial Strength Lead Generation (Or Should Be)

Selling B-to-B Services and Products?

Use Search Engine Marketing to give your business "Industrial Strength" Lead Generation.

With nearly 11 years of successful and global search engine marketing lead generation success under my belt, it's easy to assume that everyone should by now understand that good b-to-b marketing and lead generation should include a high dosage of brilliant PPC (pay per click), SEM (search engine marketing), and SEO (search engine optimization) at all times.

But for many companies, search engine success is clearly not working. Many B-to-B companies ignore, discount, flounder, under-invest, follow foolish or bad advice, and badly under-perform when judged by the harsh light of search engine marketing results.

Companies burdened with poor Search Engine Marketing (SEM) capabilities are literally leaving high value quality business leads (money) on the table, just waiting for someone else to pick them up. Entire business streams worth millions of dollars are won or lost this way.

Industrial Strength Lead Generation.

I know, because I've been on the winning side of these search engine wars for a long time. I'm picking my competitor's pockets over and over and over again. Your competitors may not even be aware there is a "search engine battle" for leads going on! Guess what? They lost before the fight even started.

Intelligent search engine marketing, both organic and paid, works extremely well in generating quality leads. When managed properly, SEO, PPC, and SEM work so well they should be considered as strategic "industrial strength" lead generation machines.

How well does search engine marketing work? From my experience, obtaining 67% of all monthly visits to key B-to-B websites by search engines is not unusual. Organic search can often run at over 58% of total visits, while paid search visits produce around 9% of visitor traffic. My approach is to use paid search to produce an additional, smaller, flow of quality leads. Paid search is like adding cream and sugar to your coffee, where organic search is the coffee and paid search is the cream and sugar. Organic search should ideally carry the larger lead gen load.

The percentage of leads generated from search engine visitors via the web is very high. I can't imagine running any serious lead generation campaigns without search engine marketing being a top tactical and strategic component.

Search engine marketing  pulls in leads from unexpected, previously unknown, high-value contacts. Would you like to experience a successful trade show every day, churning out valuable leads for your business on a 24/7/365 basis? Then pay attention to search engine marketing. Success will come for the diligent, the patient, and the persistent.

Stick with the basics and success with SEM will happen. With technical B-to-B, it really helps to know and understand the markets and customers you are targeting. Build relevant, concise, and precise content, using thier terminology and jargon, not yours. Be customer focused. Use proven and sound SEO and PPC practices, and ignore bad, 'trendy', incompetent, or 'black-hat' advice.

When properly designed and applied, Search Engine Marketing is true "Industrial Strength" lead generation.

Give Your Sales Teams What They Crave This Valentine's Day - Good Leads

Updated February 2017.

Search Engine Marketing: A Look Behind the Curtain

Search Engine Marketing presentation at the Business Marketing Association in August 2013 luncheon, Houston Chapter:

What goes on with Search Engine Marketing?

There is a lot of depth and detail to Search Engine Marketing. Despite the complexity, success with Search Engine Marketing can be achieved if basic core principles are followed.

In Houston on August 15,2013, I was invited to present a 40 minute overview of search engine marketing to over 100 fellow professional Houston area B2B marketers at the Houston Business Marketing Association's Luncheon for a "Look Behind the Curtain on Search Engine Marketing" (SEM), at the Courtyard-on-St. James Place in Houston.

During the luncheon I shared my 10+ years of success and experience with SEM and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and provided a look into how I and others have developed and exploited international search engine marketing strategies and tactics to drive significant, sustained, organic growth and strategic outsourcing and acquisition opportunities.

If you've wanted to learn more about Search Engine Marketing from an actual (fanatical) practitioner, this short, useful, and informative luncheon presentation can help motivate you to start using SEM, get better at SEM, inspire increased usage of SEM, and re-inspire you to improve and expand current SEM efforts.

Download the Search Engine Marketing presentation. (.pdf)

Learn more about the Houston BMA Search Engine Marketing luncheon.

Join the BMA Houston Chapter.

Search Engine Marketing: Behind the Curtain

Is Search Engine Marketing Tactical or Strategic?

Rhetorical Marketing Questions of the day:

Is search engine marketing a tactical or strategic marketing tool? Yes.
Is search engine marketing transactional or relationship (branding)? Yes.


OK, the best answer is "All of the above". 


B-to-B Search engine marketing is a fantastic way to generate leads for specific projects and business opportunities, and it acts as an ever-present branding tactic. SEM is both Tactical and Strategic... both goals can be applied to paid and organic search campaigns. 


In effect, SEM can target and pull in leads for every stage of the buying decision process... attraction, features, benefits, solutions. 


Webpages and Paid Search ads can target the potential customer across the entire buying process, including:


1. Getting their attention. Simple awareness. Uncovering a prospective client need. The prospect is thinking about thinking about buying.

"You have a problem" or "hey, we exist!", "We offer a product or service you are pondering or considering" etc.


2. Researching options. Competitive research. The Prospect is thinking about buying.  


"How our product or service, and features and benefits, meet your needs", "why our offerings are better for you than alternatives" etc.


3. First Contact. Getting the lead, or inducing a call-to-action. The prospect is going to buy from someone, it may as well be us. 


"Solve your problem now", "We have a solution to your problem", "We offer that niche specialized product or service you are looking for" etc.


Understanding the market I am targeting and the issues they face, for which my company can provide help and services is key to how I approach the use of webpages, search terms, campaigns and ad filters.


Since people search in a huge variety of ways, a particular search term used in a campaign may be attracting people who come from many or even all phases of lead generation development... from those just beginning to search and those about ready to make a decision to contact a business. 


To accommodate these different visitors who have different agendas, a landing page must be focused but also have a little something for everyone who visits the page.... appropriate content with links to 'learn more' related pages, a call-to-action, and a look and feel which invites the visitor to stay in the site and explore - - or better yet - - contact you, no matter what stage of the process they are in.


An intelligent and aggressive approach to organic and paid search engine marketing allows both tactical and strategic marketing. 


Thus, transactional marketing campaigns that target niche services, products, markets, fragmented markets and micro markets are very effective and profitable. 


For building reputation, awareness and branding, creating more branding focused campaigns to promote and support broad and key brand name related searches is helpful. Web analytics can help measure the quality and performance of such campaigns.


Targeting the customer awareness, research, competitive comparisons and call-to-action phases of the potential customer base will power greater lead generation to feed the B-to-B sales funnel. Webpages that "sell" in professional way help throughout the entire lead gen process. 


Just like a top performing sales representative, a B-toB website should be able to conduct consultative selling along every customer decision phase, in order to engage and keep the quality visitor, and encourage them to take the logical step of contacting your company to buy/investigate your goods and services. 


Best Regards;       Erik Holladay

Are You a (Marketing) Secret Weapon?

Be a Marketing Secret Weapon:

Be a Marketing Secret Weapon.

No matter what size your company, if you want to use web marketing to promote your business become a "Secret Weapon". 


I've been called a marketing and business development "Secret Weapon" many times by divisional senior and executive management. To be so described is an honor and a validation of the work I do. But what actions, exactly, am I taking which cause my activities to be associated with "secret" and "weapon"? 


The Secret of the Secret Weapon:
The real secret is using Search Engine Marketing effectively. Organic and Paid Search (Google, Bing) are my primary weapons of choice for lead generation and customer research, validation and 'mind-share'. Wielding this powerful marketing technique brings a tremendous combination of high-quality and high-volume lead generation to a B-to-B business, no matter how big the business is, no matter how small. 


When used with focused, pragmatic, expertise, attention to detail, and consistent follow-through, search engine marketing can literally transform your company or business unit's fortunes. Your main competition may never be aware, understand, nor appreciate how you did it, making your marketing success a stealthy "secret". 


The world is full of potential quality customers looking for solutions which your business offers. Those people go to Google or Bing to start researching. Write concise and precise content that is relevant to your target markets, with a goal to rank high in organic search. You need to be there when they start looking! 


In essence, this is the true "secret" of a marketing "Secret Weapon"... be there, at the right time, the right place, with the right message.


Targeting profitable service niches with organic and paid search, applying long-tail search principles, geo-targeting and language targeting is easy if you have search engine marketing expertise and tools. Do these things well, do them consistently, and you will likely see success. Depending upon the target market, a dependable tsunami of high-value leads can land at your door.... business enquiries that don't reach your competitors. You attracted the potential client's attention and made a positive impression, so they contacted you first.


There are other useful lead-gen marketing tactics, such as brochures, trade shows, advertising, email campaigns, physical mailers, and social media. But the superior business results, reach, and lower costs gained from search engine marketing dwarf all those other options, based upon my experience with technical B-to-B lead generation. If done right, search engine results keep coming, as search engine marketing works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, across industries, markets, nations, languages and cultures... always 'on-demand' for prospective customers and always certified 'spam-free'.


Every great Secret Weapon has a visionary who predicted its future. For search engine marketing, that visionary for me is Seth Godin. Seth's then radical but now classic book Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers became a prime inspiration for my priority focus on search engine marketing. History has proven me right, overcoming skeptics over and over again. And I thank my competitors who still don't get it... read my blog A Thank You Note to My Competitors .


Secret Weapons require quality craftsmanship and engineering to make them a success. Here is where your Webmaster comes in. Your webmaster is literally your Secret Weapon mechanic and right-hand man. To win at search engine marketing, your Website must be designed to be friendly for search engines, with an easy to use content management system. Follow best practices for web-design and navigation. The entire site should be extremely friendly and usable for prospective clients.

Search Engine Marketing is Industrial Strength Lead Generation (Or Should Be). 

Want Good Web Leads? Then SEO Matters.

Life without SEO would be Tough for B-to-B Marketers.

SEO Central, Mountain View.

Life without Search Engine Optimization would make attracting quality business enquiries a whole lot tougher. SEO is such an effective weapon for web-marketing lead generation that it is a very top priority for me, exploiting organic, long-tail and paid search options with success.

Thanks to SEO, we’ve been able to generate thousands and thousands of B-to-B enquiries and bring in millions of dollars in high margin revenue... all from having a laser-sharp focus on SEO. SEO has helped transform our business almost beyond recognition compared to when I started managing web marketing in 2003. Without SEO, I’d be handicapped. I can’t image not using SEO as my top lead-gen tool. 

Yes, the page content must be relevant to the actual human visitor, and must have an effective call-to-action. But if one doesn't also apply SEO principles to webpages, those pages most likely will not make page one on search engine results.

Page one Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is where your B-to-B services and products need to be ranked. There is too much competition for the limited space available... publishing a webpage without applying search optimization is like opening a fancy new retail store and failing to put signs on the building. Potential customers will have a hard time finding you or the products you sell.

Of what use is a lowly ranking webpage for search engine lead generation? 
Not much use at all. 

A poorly ranked webpage becomes invisible and may as will not exist for organic search engine marketing.

A great looking webpage, if one measures by ROI and productivity, is not the one that gets design kudos, recognitions or awards from hordes of marketing and advertising 'creatives' meeting at annual conferences. No, a great looking webpage is one that ranks in the top five organic search listings in Google for a key search phrase. This is SEO Bliss. When combined with relevant content and an effective call-to-action, such a SEO'd webpage is a profitable B-toB lead-generation work of high art.

FEED Your Website. FEED IT.