When PPC and SEO Doesn’t Work

For many marketers the arrival of Pay Per Click advertising and Search Engine Optimization opened up new opportunities to increase reach and reduce costs. It’s a lot cheaper than magazine pages or TV slots. It’s targeted, and costs are directly related to performance.

For special niches where there’s not much competition and margins are high it’s a real enabler.

But for those of us in highly competitive markets these techniques probably don’t work very well. There’s just too many big guys with big budgets competing for the attention of our target customer.

As the Business Internet evolves new possibilities for marketing are opening up – mostly for Inbound Marketing.

Inbound Marketing basically operates in two dimensions:

• Content  - if we give Google articles it can use to answer search queries it will reward us with high rank in search results.
• Engagement – with Social Media, such as Facebook, we can meet, get to know and start conversations with people, based on what our customers are looking for, and what we can provide.

There’s a lot of discussion between marketing experts now about which is the more appropriate – content or engagement.

To understand the different perspectives you might want to hang out with Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, John Jantsch or Gary Vaynerchuck, amongst many others.

You’ll probably reach the same conclusion as us.

Both publishing content and engaging with people offer opportunities but best results probably come from a combination of the two, with weighting toward one in particular dictated by the type of business.

What do you think?  Have you tried either?  Which business are you in?  Which works best for you?

You can find out some of the things we’ve learned about this subject in the articles you’ll find in our Social Media Marketing category.

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Tagged as: Chris Brogan, Internet marketing, Pay per click, Search Engine Optimization, Seth Godin