ATILUS - Web Design | Internet Marketing

2008 Internet Marketing Webinar Take-Aways

I just had the opportunity of taking about an hour and attending the MarketingSherpa hosted, New Search Marketing Research for 2008: Tactics & Takeaways webinar. It was an hour well spent. The webinar, which essentially included a summary or preview of the complete 2008 marketing research document they have for sale on their website had a lot of great information. I found 4 things incredibly important and worth noting:

B2B house email newsletter most effective Internet marketing vehicle - Year after year enewsletters, one of the least expensive Internet marketing vehicles continue to dominate in terms of effectiveness. What was particularly useful, according to the webinar was the fact that email newsletter marketing seems particularly successful at assisting business-to-business sales teams.

Measurable brand effects of seo & PPC - A study conducted through marketing sherpa revealed that there are residual brand effects when companies participate in both search engine marketing (pay per click) as well as search engine optimization practices. For example, there is a 92% increase in clicks, 45% increase in action, 45% increase in order, 43% increase in page views, 41% increase in visitors, 39% increase in time, when a site appears both in the organic and paid search results for a given term.

Phrase matching very important in landing page results - from 5% - 20% more effective. This is one we have been preaching for a very long time and continue to setup for all of our pay per click accounts. If the search term your visitors type in also appears on the landing page you send them to the effectiveness of that particular page, the likelihood of the user contacting information or making a purchase increases from 5 - 20%.

Of most interesting not to me was the following: removing navigation from landing pages increases effectiveness 10 - 50%. I have a few problems with this particular fact, but the research (as well as common sense) seems to support that the more direct you are, the harder you make it for your targeted visitor to do anything except what you want, the more likely they actually will. I don’t know if I completely agree, but I will definitely be testing this out!