When with serious and anxious problems are coupled the international finance and business society, companies are looking for in a fiercy way to utilize their opportunity to rise the level of sales. The role of the Marketing is appreciating. At present, when almost the total numbers of firms and companies are presented on Internet - by the form of advertisings - the online marketing experten taken a leap and trying to fork out some useable methode to reach higher return on investments.
Nonprofit Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) surveyed over 867 search engine advertisers and SEM agencies to get a picture of the state of the search engine marketing industry. The 2007 SEMPO State of the Market Survey shows that contrary to worries about the economy, search engine marketing budgets have risen even higher than projected.
That’s the findings SEMPO is releasing today at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in New York. They found that things look rosy for the search engine marketing industry. The North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007. That’s more than earlier projections of $11.5 billion in 2007. Forecasts for this year was that the industry would reach $25.2 billion by 2011. Again, the projection is up significantly - last year the projection was $18.6 billion.
Spending on search engine marketing in North American is now projected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011, up significantly (over 6 billion) from the forecast a year ago which was $18.6 billion. As the story repeats - marketers are shifting their advertising from offline advertising to spending more on paid search.
This should be especially good news for Google (and Google shareholders), since it’s the only search engine in the top four to get a bigger share of the market. 97% of the marketers survey use Google AdWords. 70% utilize Yahoo Sponsored Search and less marketers use MSN and Ask.com than last year.
“Search marketing spending is increasing at the expense of print magazine advertising,website development and other marketing functions, as marketers essentially shift the portions of their spending pie, following consumers as they increasingly rely on search engines to conduct pre-purchase research.”
Some of the reasons for the growth is that more small and midsize business are going online and using paid search. Plus the cost of advertising is going up because of more competition. Right now 87.4% of advertisers in the survey use paid search. The part that most surprises me is that SEO accounts for just 10.5% of their total marketing spend.
Planing online marketing campaign for the future
1. Outline expected results To be cleared for all of You
- Drive incremental sales. Show how your online marketing plan will directly impact sales. Your outcomes are pretty straightforward if your marketing directly generates sales. Tactics may include Paid Search, search engine optimization, online media buying, and email marketing.
- Drive leads into the sales pipeline. Show how you will engage your online audience and generate interest and demand that results in generating a lead. Tactics may include Paid Search, search engine optimization, online media buying, and email marketing.
- Engage and convert more visitors.Show how you will engage more visitors and get them to respond to your offer. Small lift in conversion rates can easily multiply sales. Tactics may include web effectiveness and multivariate testing.
- Interact with your audience.Show how you will engage your audience where they spend time online today. Buzz and referrals can be powerful and result in customer evaluation and adoption. Tactics may include web analytics, multivariate testing, and social media.
- Building your brand. Show how exposing your brand will result in greater recognition and adoption resulting in greater engagement and ultimately sales. Granted, this is a longer term approach that requires more buy-in. Tactics may include paid search, online media buying, and social media.
2. Preparing and educating Executives for Core strategy
It is important to reinforce with the decision makers the following:
- Integrated plan with critical mass. Show how complementary tactics yield even better results. For example, how search marketing and online media combined yields higher returns when integrated successfully.
- Marketing needs to be supported through the entire funnel. If there are other dependencies to driving sales, ensure that those parts of the funnel are held accountable to their target conversion rates.
- Budgeting for analytics is critical to measuring and delivering expected outcomes. Without a unified measurement tool, showing expected outcomes will be challenging. Ensure you have an analytics platform that captures leading KPIs along with bottom-line conversions. For example, your web analytics platform should be able to tell you how a opt-in email marketing campaign directly impacts sales on the website.
- A testing budget that allows for new champions to surface. We recommend setting aside around 10% of your budget if possible to test new hypothesis and in some cases emerging tactics.
3. Build executive confidence in your online strategy with clear financial expectations and outcomes.
With an integrated, well thought-through strategy, and the measurement of analytics to determine the financial outcomes, you will build confidence in your executives and gain support to approve and execute your online marketing plan.
