Search ad spending by tech, electronics companies slows is the headline to the B2B Magazine article last week by Chris Hosford. Chris was referring to a Paid Search spend study released recently by Covario.
The study indicated that search spend by technology companies had decreased. Now, it was not Chris’ story or the study by Covario that caught my attention but the comment from a reader named “Bill”. I had not yet read the story but a friend had sent me a note asking if that person who commented was “me” being sarcastic. The reader commented that the downturn in search spend was due to “general search may not be working” and that these companies were early adopters and as such are just now realizing search marketing does not work and are going back to “audiences” they know.
Clearly it was not “me” who wrote it since anyone who know me knows how passionate I am about search marketing and its effectiveness in B2B Technology.
The following is the response I posted to Bill’s comments.
Wow – I really was moved by the previous comment about “general search may not be working” as a reason for the downturn in paid search spend.
While I do a agree that “direct sales” in the Tech B2B space are not that frequent but that is more due to lengthy sales cycles than the medium of search.We have seen across many Tech B2B clients over the past 5 years that search marketing (paid and organic) drives significantly more qualified visitors and leads than any other form of marketing.
Those who effectively leverage key Buy Cycle keywords matched to relevant landing pages and Click to Chat technology continue to capture 10x to 20x the number of qualified leads than they do over other marketing tactics even email.
Now, those who dare to combine search generated leads with an effective email or direct sales nurturing program are reaping significant rewards.The reason Covario is seeing these budget reductions is due to the companies and agencies decreasing spend on “all” paid media with paid search being equally hit in the decrease in the marketing mix. Rather than spending more on what is working and decreasing what is not, they are trying to preserve these under performing sacred cows at the expense of immediate connections to the very marketing tactic that puts you directly in front of the people who still need or want your product in a poor performing economy.
So, to those who agree that search is not working and have cut your budgets I say thank you! This will lower CPC’s and those who are achieving success will have even more without the competition.
I only wish clients would let us comment on their success they have had in search especially with intent modeling and connecting the right people with optimized landing pages.
I also find it crazy that while search is blowing away other forms of marketing especially globally, companies are uniformly cutting budgets because it is part of “media” – we need to start to think of ways we can segment or media mix models so they don’t take uniform “hair cuts” when budgets are triupped but cut out the things which are not actually performing to standards.