SEO: Critical to your Digital Marketing?

As many professionals there are practicing marketing today, so too are there at least that many different digital marketing strategies and techniques. CMO's and marketing leaders know that winning in demand generation game takes many tactics, all orchestrated to work together seamlessly. Top performers know that using PR, content, SEO, SMM, SMO, and SEM - in harmony - is your best bet for a demand creation engine that does not stop. Today's demand generation is about knowing your target audience, and using the full marketing mix to get through to them - multiple times. Remember the old marketing axiom, 'show them seven different times in seven different ways'. And, don't underestimate organic search as one of your most powerful high quality allies.

Setting the SEO Strategy

As the head of marketing for a small international organization my team and I worked tirelessly at driving up our search engine rankings by refining our search engine optimization techniques. We invested heavily in creative research that helped the market understand it's own dynamics. It gave us a wealth of blog worthy material. It made link building easy. Quality backlinks came from the various bylines we wrote, quotes in the business and vertical media, and doing well in search engine results pages - which drew content publishers to us. Writing about what users were seeking online, and about the user experience worked wonders. Naturally, this also came from with on-page SEO in mind. Putting an extra punch on it by propagating our messages through social media (Social Media Optimization - SMO) - also helped.

Why the Effort?

In this particular case, when first starting at the firm, marketing was a disaster. Despite having a CMO, VP Marketing and two marketing directors - there was much activity, yet no results tracking. There were a few odd digital marketing efforts, but a comprehensive digital marketing strategy was entirely missing. In fact, in the early stages the head of sales told me the previous marketers were always in the field running events. They hardly ever saw the marketing team, being in the field so much. Asked about how well these events converted, the SVP of sales simply told me that not a single sale had closed as a result of two years of such efforts or any others; despite countless dollars spent.

After some initial work we started tracking leads and conversions. Working with a tight budget (think bootstrap startup), search engine optimization was an ideal place to start. Within a few months, records showed that SEO generated leads (inbound) were far more powerful than outbound SDR (sales development representative) cold calling leads.

In fact, 1 hour of SDR follow up on inbound (SEO generated) leads was equivalent to 11.8 hours of follow up on outbound leads.

Quickly, we honed in on a highly impactful lead generating methodology that produced leads that converted into opportunities. As such, we set our mission. Within the year our objective was to generate 80%-100% of our high converting leads from inbound methods. Given the SDR (sales development representative) team's delight, their experience was that inbound SEO leads produced connections leading to more fruitful conversations.

Search Engine lead Turnaround

With plenty of hard work, persistent monitoring, course corrections on the digital marketing front, and taking the SEO strategy seriously; we completely turned around the business. From a web-traffic decline of 78% annually from the former marketing team, we reached steady growth of 25%-50% annually - with a high focus on demand generation. At one point the SVP of Sales even thanked the marketing team declaring that one hundred percent of the deals were thanks to this new direction with the search engine initiatives. Ultimately, this turnaround lead to the business being bought by a much bigger player in a tangential business.

SEO was one of the key elements to giving the small company a much bigger presence online, both nationally and internationally.

Key SEO Lesson

Key lessons garnered from this true tale include:

• SEO is a critical part of any demand generation engine.
• Remember the quality backlinking. Difficult, and slow but very effective.
• Inbound is much easier and more impactful than Outbound demand generation.
• Monitor everything you can with digital analytics. Keep doing what works. Stop what does not work.

Albeit rhetorical - to answer the initial question about whether SEO is critical to your digital marketing, company, and personal success as a modern marketer - the answer is yes.