– Roy Harry, Creative Director, Media II, Inc.
Looking to market to engineers? They are tough sells. Right brain, skeptical, performance-driven and cost conscious. But, they are prime buying influences.
CFE Media (publishers of Control Engineering, Consulting-Specifying Engineer, Oil & Gas Engineering, and Plant Engineering) and TREW Marketing partnered to survey CFE Media’s collective audience of 1,000 engineers about how they get their information.
This chart is instructive by showing the value of various marketing communications tactics from search engines to social media as it relates to engineers. You can use the chart as a guide to allocate marketing communications budgets based on return-in-investment.
In this, and future issues of B2B Marcom Insider, I will provide more information to optimize your communications based on CFE research and our decades of providing best B2B marcom practices. Let’s start the top of the list, Search Engines.
Get Found
Getting found on a Google and other search engines is imperative to reach engineers. Engineers use the Internet to search products and services and often make preliminary decisions for hardware, software and vendors. In fact, according to a Forrester Research report, 90% of purchasing decisions begin online.
Search engines want to do their jobs as best as possible by referring users to websites and content that is the most relevant to what the user is looking for. So how is relevancy determined? Search engine ranking factors are some of the most closely guarded secrets in online business. Google, Bing and other search engines don’t publish exactly how they rank webpages in search results, because that would lead to massive gaming of the system and produce non-useful results.
Organic Searches – These searches are when a website is configured to appeal to engines like Google, Bing, etc. These engines reach out to your website to see if the content is viable and ranks the content. They use hush-hush technology to determine keyword phrases within the code and text, site title tag, anchor text, global link popularity and more.
Raising your websites ranking in search results takes time, effort, research and patience. Using a tool such as Google Analytics, lets you see the performance of website keywords and page descriptions. Constantly monitoring and testing keywords, page descriptions and content can improve search engine performance.
Many website developers and Internet companies like Go Daddy, offers the knowledge and technology to make the process easier and effective. But, it takes time and money. Beware of low-cost providers. Make sure a provider understands your products/services, industry and buying influences.
Paid Search – You can shorten the time that your website shows up in searches with paid searches like Google Adwords. AdWords is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. Since advertisers have to pay for these clicks, this is how Google makes money from search.
Does Google AdWords work? Depending on the competitiveness of the keywords you’re bidding for and the relevancy of that keyword to real conversions for your company, AdWords may or may not work for your business. For the most part, we’ve found that Google AdWords is extremely effective for many kinds of businesses, as long as they don’t waste their money on the wrong keywords, or write weak, low CTR (Click Through Results) ads.
The actual position of your ad is determined by your ad rank (Maximum Bid times Quality Score). The highest ad rank gets the first ad position. Your actual CPC will be determined by the ad rank of the next highest ad below you divided by your Quality Score. The only exception of this rule is when you are the only bidder or the lowest bid in the AdWords auction; then you pay your maximum bid per click! AdWords bidding heavily penalizes advertisers who bid with low quality scores. Conversely, those with high Quality Scores get higher ad ranks and lower CPC.
Need more information on getting found on the Internet? Contact us.
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