The state of web marketing

Web marketing continues to evolve at a rapid pace. The underlying technology, the way search is conducted and the platforms and services that exist today all affect how we use and leverage the tools at our disposal for effective Web marketing.

Within our industry, there are those who are using the Web as an extraordinary marketing tool, and yet others are not obtaining the results they could. In this article, my goal is to help you see what is happening and show you areas you might consider in your own Web-related marketing.

While this article will not tell you “what to do” or even “how to do it,” it does offer information I believe will be helpful to you based on what I’ve learned as a consultant and advisor in this industry, as well the things my staff and I see and deal with every day at WebVitality, the Web services company I founded to support industry clients.

This article includes data from our own research conducted during the last few months as well as information we’ve collected over the last few years within the context of this industry. The data presented here have been compiled from our own internal data as well as from our review of 870 industry companies, their websites and related Web marketing activities that we follow.
 

Rapid evolution

We are all very aware of the changes in our industry over the last few years. But we are moving slowly compared with the changes that have transpired in the Web-marketing world. Google AdWords is said to have made more than 1,000 changes to its pay-per-click ad delivery system in 2013 alone. In the last 12 months, organic search algorithm shake-ups make the AdWords changes seem trivial. Social media continues to grow, and evidence suggests it’s become addictive. 2014 mobile phone searches are expected to increase by 23 percent over 2013, according to a forecast from eMarketer, New York.

While it’s easy to assume these changes don’t affect you and to think you can ignore them, doing so could be costly to you and your business. The Web continues to grow as a valuable mechanism for marketing—and you need to leverage it as best you can.
 

Mostly old school

Your website is the home base of any Web marketing initiative. It’s the place where people browse to see who you are and to determine if they’ll engage you to provide the services they need. Search engines index the information on your website to determine what your business is all about. The information they find is then presented to searchers. Knowing this, it goes without saying that your website matters. In addition, search engines are now assigning value—and therefore effective ranking—to websites based on things like how recently the content has been updated, inadequate content, outdated code, website speed and alignment with website design best practices.

Our research has shown that websites in our industry are not keeping pace with the current best practices. Fifty-two percent of industry websites we’ve reviewed were built more than three years ago and have limited content. Because of their age, these websites usually require a developer to add content or make changes, which is a stark contrast to more modern, user-friendly website content management systems like WordPress.

The value of current website content management system software is that it makes it easier to stay aligned with search engine requirements and to add and update content regularly. This type of software allows business owners or their employees to simply log in and add or change website content themselves instead of relying on third-party developers.
 

Not so mobile friendly

With the explosive rise of smartphone and tablet use, websites must now work with these mobile browsers. The Quarterly Mobile Web Traffic Report from Walker Sands Digital, with offices in Chicago and San Francisco, outlines the percentage of website traffic coming from mobile devices. In the first quarter of 2014, this report confirmed that 31.2 percent of all traffic to a wide variety of websites came via mobile browsers.

Our WebVitality statistics from July 2014 show that 13.5 percent of all traffic to industry websites comes from mobile devices, including smart phones and tablets. That represents explosive growth since 2012, when only 3.8 percent of traffic came from mobile devices. Sadly, though, only 21 percent of the industry websites we assessed were mobile friendly.

If your website is not mobile compatible, you are effectively rejecting 13.5 percent of your traffic. Increasingly, if your website does not ensure mobile device compatibility, Google likely will not even send search traffic from those mobile devices to your website.
 

Where is the action?

In Atlanta-based Pardot’s 2013 study of buyers of business-to-business (B2B) products or services, 72 percent began their pre-purchase research using Google. Bing and Yahoo combined only accounted for 8 percent, just 2.5 percent started with LinkedIn, and all remaining social networks combined accounted for only 2 percent.

Our own internal data and analytics reflect these statistics. Google is exponentially larger than all other search engines and social networks combined. Put bluntly, Google owns B2B search. This makes it crucial to focus a significant percentage of your Web marketing efforts on being effective on Google search.

To be effective on Google, you have to understand what your prospects want and need, then build and grow your website to support those types of queries. In a single Google search, it is estimated that approximately 200 factors are involved in the specific results generated by the search engine. A number of those factors are under your control.

One factor you might not be aware of, however, is the actual volume of searches specific to our industry’s services.

It is plainly evident that shredding-related searches are significantly outperforming all other services and continue to increase, according to a Google Trends (http://google.com/trends) search analysis conducted on the four major service areas in the industry—records storage, shredding, document scanning and off-site data protection. Records storage, document scanning and off-site data protection-related search terms are flat and have decreased over time, according to the Google Trends search analysis. This trend analysis is confirmed by our own research.

While this information shouldn’t form the entire foundation of your business strategy, these search trends are significant to your marketing strategy online and offline. Your ability to be present in the Google search results is more important than ever before as a member of this industry who is actively using the Web as a business marketing tool. Hope is not an effective Web marketing strategy anymore. If you want to show up when someone searches for what you offer, you must have a website that plays by the rules. If your website is old, outdated and not mobile friendly, the deck is stacked against you before you even begin. If you don’t employ enough Web pages to support the various but significant search terms that prospects use when looking for what you have to offer, the Google search machine will not send those prospects to your website.
 

If you buy them, will they come?

Given the trends outlined above, one way to bypass the complexity of search engine optimization and the content development required to rank in the organic search results is to simply buy the right traffic to your website using pay-per-click services. While this is true in theory, it’s a little more complicated than that.

One major issue is the actual cost of a click. On paid search platforms, you buy the click, not the ad or even the display of your ad. You pay for each click that happens when your ad shows up in a search result specific to the keywords you are bidding on. Over the last few years, the costs of those clicks has grown significantly—in part because fewer and fewer clicks are happening in most of the service areas but also because of increased competition.

In a sampling of current click costs within the commercial records and information management industry drawn from Google AdWords data, here are the actual cost per click ranges for a “top three” paid ad position using major keywords related to the specific industry services:

• records storage, $15 to $20 per click;
• shredding/shredding companies, $6 to $20 per click;
• document scanning, $7 to $21 per click;
• off-site data storage, $20 to $50 per click; and
• hard drive destruction services, $8 to $15 per click.

Not only is the actual cost of a click quite high, but Google also has built a complex algorithm that adjusts the cost of a click based on the quality of the user experience and the actual correlation between the keyword you bid on, the ad served and the page that it points to as well as to the percentage of clicks received compared with the number of times your ad shows.

For example, an $18 bid might be required to reach the top ad location for a “paper shredding” or other industry-related term. If you have effective quality factors in place and your click-through rate is optimized, you might only pay $8 for that click, while the second-place ad might be paying $16 per click. Costs of clicks also are dependent on a combination of other factors, including your location, the total number of competitors, when your ad displays and more.
 

Follow them around

The other notable paid alternative that has taken the Web by storm in the last few years is remarketing or retargeting. This is the ability to deliver your banner ad on numerous other websites triggered by the fact that someone has visited your website. Simple tracking code is placed on visitors’ browsers when they visit your website, enabling your ad to follow them wherever they go online. These ads are a fraction of the cost of a paid search click.

While seemingly a great way to keep reminding people you exist, we’ve found that while remarketing generates some clicks, it is not very effective at actually generating conversions. Our industry tends to suffer the curse of only being interesting when people need our service and are actively searching for it. Before and after that, they’d rather have nothing to do with it. While remarketing ads or display ads might feed our ego, they perform quite poorly in the delivery of actual leads.

New opportunities exist for paid advertising in social media channels. These allow highly targeted advertising to specific types of people. The goal is to show up in these prospects’ news feeds. Once again, the dilemma we face in our industry is to create a compelling reason for them to click the ad and show themselves as a lead when they are not in an active buying process.
 

Let's get social

Social media is now ubiquitous in Web marketing. It stands to reason that our industry would try to follow suit and fully embrace the promise of social media as a part of its Web marketing toolkit.

According to a 2014 study conducted by Cleveland-based Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 87 percent of B2B marketers use social media to distribute content. The average B2B company uses six social media channels. Ninety-one percent use LinkedIn, 85 percent use Twitter, 81 percent use Facebook, 73 percent use YouTube and 55 percent use Google+.

Our WebVitality data, however, suggest our industry is in a different place with social media. Adoption of social media as a tactic is significantly less than the B2B norms outlined above. Only 45 percent of industry companies have a Facebook fan page; just 29 percent have a company Twitter account. LinkedIn has a high volume of individual users in the industry, but statistics show LinkedIn company page usage at just 25 percent. Google+ company pages are few and far between, but with the integration of Google+ local pages into the Google+ environment, the data are hard to define now. Our last analysis in 2013, before the Google+ local integration, showed that only 6 percent of the industry had a Google+ company page. While a number of industry companies show YouTube videos on their websites, less than 1 percent have a link on their website to a company YouTube channel.

The bigger factor in social media metrics is the actual number of people who follow you. While it is easy to assume you are investing in social media marketing, the positive effect of social media is directly linked to the number of followers you have and how much those followers see and share your activity and posts.

While the large publicly traded companies in our industry have developed large follower numbers and skew the average significantly upward, our own data suggest that the average industry company Facebook fan page follower count is fewer than 500. The average Twitter follower count is fewer than 400. LinkedIn engagement is much lower at around 150 average followers on company pages. With Google+, the average is closer to 45 followers. In the last year, followers across accounts have grown 25 percent.

A report by Gallup, Washington, in June 2014 revealed that 63 percent of consumers are not influenced by social media regarding their buying choices. Thus, to spend excess energy, money and time on social media seems ineffective.

If companies have a well-rounded and comprehensive marketing plan in place, then social media is a solid add-on tactic. But, without an effective online search strategy as well as a consistent offline marketing presence, social media is weak at best and should not be used as a primary marketing tool.
 

The real goal

The culmination of effective Web marketing is not just to have an online presence—first and foremost, it is meant to generate leads and opportunities for your business. Your website and its value is directly correlated to the number and quality of prospects that come to you via your website or associated Web marketing activities.

Therefore, the most important question you can and should be asking of your Web marketing is: Did it and does it continue to create lead generation?

If not, it’s time to do something about it.
 

Measure, measure, measure

To determine your effectiveness, you absolutely must measure the actual productivity of your Web marketing initiatives. The following are critical metrics to track:

1. the number of opportunities you obtain by phone or form submission as a direct result of your Web marketing on a monthly basis (These are the prospects who call or fill in a form with the goal of obtaining a proposal or quote from you. While form submissions are easy to track, enhanced technology in call tracking allows you to know how many calls come to your business from your Web marketing initiatives.);
2. the number of nonopportunity leads you obtain on a monthly basis (This might include those who follow you on social media or sign up for information you provide, such as a newsletter, but are not as yet seeking a proposal of pricing from you.);
3. the volume of traffic to your website in total and by source (This is particularly useful in measuring the usefulness of a Web-marketing channel.); and
4. the average cost to obtain a Web-based lead or opportunity. (This can be measured before and after the cost of Web marketing support services are included.)

Our research and data suggest that lead and opportunity flow is extremely varied based on the geographical area you service, your ability to track the origin of your phone calls, the diversity of your Web marketing and the amount you pay for advertising. What matters is that you consistently measure it to have a baseline to work from.

As our industry evolves, and as the Web marketing environment continues to change more rapidly, it is important that you do your best to leverage this medium for business results. Having had an intimate, front-row seat to the industry and the Web, I can confirm without hesitation that as a whole Web marketing works for those who know how to use it and are willing to embrace it as an important part of their business.

It is important to review and question which tactics you engage within your Web marketing strategy. It’s also important to note that as Web marketing continues to evolve and mature, being good at it will be a requirement of success. As many have learned in the area of direct mail, you can’t afford to be bad at it for long.

Web marketing can and will provide you with business opportunities. The question is, will you be present when your prospect comes looking?

Tom Adams is an executive coach and advisor. He is founder and president of WebVitality, http://webvitality.net, a boutique Web marketing and website development agency.