Today’s marketing strategies revolve around digital content, which is a sensible focus given how much time audiences of all demographic groups spend online.
Although traditional marketing is not as effective as it once was, enterprise brands and organizations must still recognize its importance.
One of the most important questions an enterprise company can ask is how digital and traditional marketing can work together to improve results.
We Live in a Multi-Device, Multi-Screen World
The way consumers interact with traditional media, such as television commercials or radio ads, provides the answer.
A majority of people who watch television also use a second screen, such as a phone or tablet, to look up information about the show they are watching.
There is a clear connection between the consumer, traditional media, and online marketing potential, especially when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO).
Billboards and television shows are one-sided marketing efforts because the audience can’t interact directly with them.
People can take the information they learned from an interaction and use it to look up more information online.
This is talking about how when you use traditional marketing techniques alongside SEO, it creates a cohesive customer experience that will lead them down the sales funnel.
Since enterprise organizations have to manage a lot of customers, they can use this journey to make their marketing efforts more efficient. This will help them improve their brand recognition, connect with their customers better, and ultimately drive more ROI.
Why Does Traditional Marketing Still Matter for Enterprise?
Digital platforms are now the dominant form of marketing, but traditional channels such as radio, TV, billboard, and print are still viable options.
Marketing channels that have been around for awhile can still be valuable, either on their own or when used with other marketing plans.
Here are a few reasons why:
Content Commands Attention
Few engagement opportunities cultivate undivided attention. Though traditional channels may not be the best at capturing attention, they do create an environment where the audience is less likely to be disregarded.
Today, a large percentage of adults regularly read one or two magazines, and a 120.6 million homes have TVs.
These formats, along with billboards and radio, command attention. You can change the channel by scrolling past a paid search result on social media or in Google search results.
Additionally, today’s marketing experts work to create ad spots that flow smoothly into radio, TV, or print content.
While an advertisement for a pasta brand in a cooking or home magazine may initially appear to be interesting content, it is actually an intrusive ad.
A radio ad may sound like an organic review from a trusted host.
There are two ways this could go, but either way, the traditional media efforts today can often hold the audience’s attention while giving the brand its undivided attention.
Traditional Marketing Leads to Familiarization
The success of any marketing effort is significantly influenced by brand awareness, and enterprise organizations can take advantage of traditional marketing to make direct and indirect impressions on a target audience.
Brand familiarity can take place at different speeds.
If a commercial is really memorable, it can create instant brand awareness. This might carry over into social media or video-sharing platforms.
When people are repeatedly exposed to an advertisement, they may become aware of the brand even if they’re not entirely focused on the ad.
Whether we realize it or not, the products and services we are most familiar with are often the ones we are most likely to purchase. This is because familiarity can have a strong impact on our buying decisions, both when we are first considering what to buy, and when we are making our final decision.
Staying Power
A lot of us spend a lot of time communicating online. Although we often use our phones for entertainment, there are times when we put them down and do something else.
Even though statistics can vary depending on who is being surveyed, many of us still spend time watching TV, listening to radio shows or podcasts, and reading newspapers or magazines.
Though traditional channels may not be used as often, they are not likely to become obsolete.
Traditional SEO Is Only One Part of a Comprehensive Enterprise SEO Strategy
An enterprise can be either a large business or organization.
Each enterprise scenario creates different marketing needs.
While basic SEO may help a small business grow, enterprise websites and organizations tend to have more complex needs that require different strategies.
Enterprise SEO employs a more comprehensive strategy than traditional SEO techniques, one that takes into account and influences decisions made across departments like sales, branding, digital marketing, print marketing, web development, and user experience.
There are few business strategies that always lead to success, and this is also true for SEO and marketing.
If you have a large company or business with a high-traffic website, you need a unique SEO approach that takes into account all the different factors at play.
SEO experts working within an enterprise company understand the challenges that enterprise companies face and can help them to either address these issues or, in some cases, avoid them entirely.
This is particularly true as it relates to the following concerns:
- Legacy issues: Complex legacy tech stacks, inconsistent platform alterations, CMS changes, URL restructuring, and poorly maintained content can decrease the effectiveness of new and existing SEO initiatives.
- Poor content quality: Gone are the days when any keyword-driven content would suffice. Outdated, thin, or duplicate content can cause ongoing site reputation damage in the eyes of site visitors as well as search engines.
- Crawlability and indexability: Search engines determine credibility and quality in several ways, including crawling and indexing. When a website has thousands of pages that aren’t optimized and aligned with marketing goals, new, valuable content can get lost, ranking can slip, and it can even increase business server costs.
- Conflicting corporate environments: Every enterprise company wants to make money, but not all departments and decision-makers agree on how to get there. Any marketing expert will tell you that SEO is frequently the backbone to success, but metrics aren’t always cut and dry. Without the support of Enterprise SEO, it can be challenging to create bring together various organizational arms to create a unified approach.
- Scalability: Smaller companies enjoy the freedom to make page-by-page updates, carry out testing, or tweak their SEO strategy as they see fit. That isn’t always the same for larger companies. Creating a scalable enterprise SEO strategy can make it easier to accommodate changing demands without causing irreparable damage.
Types of SEO Investments
SEO involves various tactics to make your website more visible and attractive to search engines. This, in turn, will help your website rank higher amongst competitors.
There are several key elements that are necessary for a successful and profitable SEO strategy. Without these key components, your SEO efforts will likely be unsuccessful.
Talent (People!)
SEO is a complex process that requires a variety of skills to make your company’s website easy to find on Google. You will need talent at the following positions:
- SEO Strategist – a person who can suss out the competition and find appropriate keyword and topic clusters to help create your executable SEO strategy.
- Content Writer(s) – You need unique, helpful and search optimized content that makes you a source of authoritative information.
- Link Builders – It can be quite difficult to rise above the noise with “natural backlinks” — or links from websites that find your content and link to it because it’s so darned good. Backlinks help goose that process. Backlinks to your website are especially critical for niche and/or B2B websites.
- Reporting Analyst – With so much information on hand (sales conversions, traffic, demographics, clicks, popular articles), you will need a professional to decipher it all and advise changes in your digital strategy when required.
- Web Developer – You need someone to manage your website, make it load quickly, handle tech issues, and remove dead content and links.
- Manager – when you have multiple people working towards a common goal, a manager acts as a bridge between the different functions.
Content
Making sure your content is effective is the best way to improve your SEO. There are many reasons why people might trip and fall at this stage, such as not having enough information, trying to save money, or hating to create content. Sometimes people just want to see results as soon as possible.
Search engines favor content that is unique, in-depth, well-researched, and most importantly, useful for searchers. It’s important to populate your website regularly with articles, but the quality of your content is more important.
One advantage of investing in a professional content writer is that they are aware of consumer behavior. There are three types of searches on Google. A content creator who is good at their job knows how to write copy that is appealing to each different type of customer.
- Informational – Individuals searching for information that can range from how to boil an egg to understanding the three laws of motion.
- Navigational – People looking for a specific product or website. Very often the term being searched is the brand name. These individuals are most likely to click one of the top results on Google Page 1.
- Transactional – Searchers who are looking to buy a product or service, and very often visit multiple websites before purchasing.
If you want to create content that is good, you need writers who feel strongly about your topic.
Tools
A SEO team needs to use various tools to be effective and show results. These tools are often paid for. This refers to things like laptops and software that you have to pay for every month in order to be able to search for keywords, see traffic trends, and get website analytics.
We use a variety of tools at Boomcycle, including Ahrefs for research, Elementor for website building, and more.
A quick guide to investing in SEO
You may be convinced that you need to invest in SEO at this point. There is no denying that SEO will add to your operational costs. It also takes time to show results.
SEO can have a big impact on your brand and how visible it is, no matter how large your company is. You can see your business grow if you plan for it from the start.
So what kinds of businesses can benefit from SEO?
If you’re a small business owner who is short on capital, you may not be able to do much in terms of SEO at first. Before you start, it is important to know your target audience. Focus on content and web development once you have increased your SEO budget. As the company grows, continue to increase your SEO budget. The sooner you start, the better.
Alternatively, you can look into hiring a digital agency which specializes in helping start-ups, small and mid-sized businesses prosper on the web.
Mid-sized businesses have more money to spend on SEO than small businesses do, which allows them to be more aggressive in their SEO strategies. The SEO team’s primary goal is to increase the visibility of the company’s brand and to compete with other companies in their industry. Working with a professional team that specializes in written and video content, backlinks, web management, and website updates will improve your website long-term.
In large businesses with large digital marketing budgets, SEO is used extensively and executed at a high level. Utilizing multiple SEO practices, either in-house or from an outside source, usually results in a high ROI. The company’s traditional marketing team works closely with digital promotions in such cases.
Calculating SEO Return on Investment (ROI)
What are some ways that we can measure the impact of SEO on sales revenue?
To understand the ROI of your SEO campaign, as well as the ROI of every one of your marketing channels, you can use a few different methods. Boomcycle’s SAS can give you marketing ROI information very quickly.
Other ways to gather heuristics that help prove the efficacy of SEO as a marketing channel include looking at how traffic from organic search results compares to other sources, and looking at how organic search results change after implementing SEO changes.
You will need several months to see a significant difference in revenue after implementing SEO, depending on your sales cycle and the type of business you are in.
The Not-So-Easy Way
Start with a baseline. How many sales can you attribute to the monthly organic search engine visitors to your website?
To calculate this value, you would need to decide whether to attribute sales to the first or last point of contact, and then know whether the buyer came from Google organic search. It’s possible that they first arrived from a Google organic search, and then later clicked on a Google ad that you were running when they returned to complete the sale.
First-touch attribution is when the buyer became aware of your product or solution. The last-touch attribution model is when the buyer finally clicks “Buy” or submits a sales inquiry form.
No matter how you attribute your revenue, take the average for the past three months and note that number. If you want to improve your website’s ranking on search engines, you should consider running SEO for at least 4 to 6 months. Keep track of your website’s revenue for the past 60 days to see how your efforts are paying off.
This will help you determine how effective your SEO strategy is and if you should keep doing it.
SEO Investment Payoffs
SEO can lead to increased brand visibility, sales, and revenue.
Moreover, SEO’s influence on branding and sales is well documented, as seen from the following facts:
- The first result on a Google page has a CTR (Clickthrough Rate) of 31.7%.
- 49% of marketers in a survey stated the best ROI comes from organic searches.
- CTR can increase by 30% when you move up one spot among the top 5 search results on Google Page 1.
- 70% of marketers said that SEO is better than PPC in generating sales.
Healthy and growing companies know that SEO is effective and requires investment. The investment reaps engagement and sales rewards.
The sooner you start thinking of SEO as an investment in your business, the more likely you are to be successful.
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