There are a lot of people online talking about how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the best way to get traffic to your website, bar none. Well, there are a lot of PPC (Pay Per Click) companies that disagree. The numbers that the SEO companies use to point out the benefits of SEO look powerful on paper: 80% of all search marketing money is spent on PPC, but only 20% of all search traffic is generated by PPC.
Makes it sound like PPC is ridiculously inefficient compared to SEO, but the numbers paint an incomplete picture. The fact is that of the 80% of the search traffic that isn’t generated by PPC, there’s no way to know how much of it was actually influenced by SEO companies. It’s certainly not 100%. Furthermore, a HUGE portion of that traffic isn’t commercial traffic. It’s people going to Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook. PPC traffic, on the other hand, is 100% commercial traffic — it’s literally ad-driven.
The big difference between PPC and SEO isn’t cost-efficiency, no matter what the SEO companies want to tell you. The difference is in when you pay for the traffic. SEO, you pay up front for months, and then the traffic comes. PPC, you pay after the visitor comes to your site. In other words, you have a chance to make money off of the visit before you ever pay for it. It’s a huge benefit to cashflow.
The best Pay Per Click management companies can turn a few hundred bucks of your advertising budget into a few hundred visits to your website — and if your web designer and copywriter have done their jobs, 3-5% of those visits will turn into purchases. All you have to do is make sure that each of those purchases is large enough to make more than you spend on PPC — which isn’t difficult — and you’re in the black. No waiting around for a long-term SEO investment to kick in, no finding out too late that a keyword isn’t working out for you: you get your traffic, you earn for it, and then you pay for it. It’s the best way to get traffic to your website, bar none.*
(*SEO companies may disagree.)
Lots of companies call reputation management groups because they had a disaster — an employee said something racist on the company Facebook account or your #ourcompanystories hashtag turned into a place for customers to tell horror stories about how one of their cousins found a bird’s foot in your boxed soup. But that’s kind of like looking for insurance just after you were diagnosed with cancer — a foolish use of a powerful tool.
The best time to seek out and hire the best reputation management company you can afford is when things are going well, not when they’re going south. What does a reputation management company do when you don’t have a disaster on your hands? Why, they prevent disasters, of course.
Sure, no one can keep your employees from stupidly misusing the Facebook account — but things like the #ourcompanystories debacle can be easily prevented by an alert reputation manager. Companies that look out for your reputation are experts at spotting not just active PR disasters, but potential PR disasters — the kind no amount of social media expertise can correct once they go public.
Reputation management companies come in a few different types. The lowest level types are the ones that specialize in knocking bad stories off of the news and making sure the SERPs don’t link to many pages disrespecting you or your company. These folks are nothing more than experts in ‘negative SEO’ — the art of tanking someone else’s rankings with black hat strategies. That’s not what you need; it’s reactive and it’s actively unethical.
What you want is a reputation company that will lead your company into the upcoming quarters and years by building a plan to cement your position in the marketplace and your public image. A company that will help you figure out who you appeal to and who you don’t, and work to improve your appeal to the second group. A company, in short, that will manage your reputation — not manage your reputation crises. Those are the best reputation management companies, and your company deserves one.
There are a lot of autoresponder companies out there — groups offering a SaaS (software as a service) model of business. You hook up with them, write your emails, and set them up. The software sends those emails out on a regular basis, and some percentage of the people you sent them to opens them up. Then some percentage of them read them and get the marketing message you buried in there, and they buy something, and you either are the seller or you’re an affiliate and you get a percentage of the sale.
Those are not the email marketing campaign companies. Those are the autoresponder companies; some of them are also email marketing campaign companies, but not all (or even most.) The email marketing campaign companies are the ones that actually organize a plan behind the emails, write them, track the results, and make adjustments to your campaign as results come in. Some of them even supplement your email campaign with aggressive website marketing through other routes as well.
They’re a much more in-depth service than the hands-off SaaS autoresponder folks. They’re like any other marketing agency: they want to see you succeed because they profit from your profit. That’s exactly why the best email marketing campaign companies have an incredibly strict no-spam policy. Many of them will drop you as a client if they get a third complaint about spam — and we’re talking about email here, where people will report you as spam just because you’re not already on their whitelist.
Why the hatred of spam? Simple: first, sending spam makes your business look bad, and these folks have enough potential clients that they don’t want to waste time on a client that is willing to make themselves look bad. Second, autoresponder companies have even stricter anti-spam policies than the email marketing campaign firms, and if your autoresponder gets canned, your email campaign is essentially over. Finally, people can and do research these email marketing companies, and they don’t want even a whiff of spam attached to their reputations.
So, no: the best email marketing campaign companies don’t allow spam, end of story.
Sponsored Placement | Kyle Johnson April 26, 2013 | 
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