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Online Branding for Manufacturing Companies
March 29, 2008 |
AS I MENTIONED a post or two ago, I tend to look outside of the Online Marketing industry to see what is happening elsewhere in regards to Search. One publication of interest to me that does a great job of writing Online Marketing articles is Industry Week magazine whose focus is on the manufacturing industry. Brad Kenney who writes most, if not all, of the Information Technology articles for Industry Week writes at a high level and covers the basics when it comes to SEO & SEM in a way any C-level subscriber should be able to comprehend.
In his March 2008 article titled “How Strong is Your Brand Online?” Kenney discusses the widening opportunities for manufacturing companies to take advantage of their websites to generate business, build customer loyalty, create brand awareness and gather market intelligence. The article is comprised of three steps to building an effective online marketing campaign with advice given by Andy Komack of Komarketing Associates.
The steps include using SEO (or losing it), stressing the importance of content and the benefits of pay-per-click advertising on Google, Yahoo! & MSN. Although brief, all points are informative and worth the read.
The PPC advice was especially interesting to me since managing PPC has been my life for the past several years. The only thing that I disagree with is Komack’s comment ” if you don’t have a consumer focus, you should keep away from Yahoo! and MSN until your Google AdWords is fully optimized.” I agree that we typically begin with Google to see what work and what does not, but in most cases whether we are targeting Revenue or Traffic in support of SEO, Yahoo! tends to have a cheaper cost-per-click and the volume to support implementing pay-per-click advertising on Yahoo! sooner rather than later. The other thing I disagree with, and this is 100% being nit-picky, but in thinking about this from a lean perspective, pay-per-click campaigns can never be fully optimized.
Kudos overall to Brad Kenney and the team at Komarketing for bringing awareness to Online Marketing SEO/SEM issues into the world of Manufacturing.
Related article: SEO at John Deere - the Case Study
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Comments
1 Comment so far
Hi Matt - thanks for the mention in this post.
I hear what you are saying about layering in Yahoo! Sponsored Search a bit earlier in the process. You’re probably right that it’s not imperative to wait too long to bring that into the mix. It’s just that we find in B2B PPC campaigns that the budgets for click charges can be pretty small, so we usually work on AdWords a bit first.
And I totally agree that you can never fully optimize a PPC campaign!! That was probably something I said very quickly that needed more thought.
Thanks again for reviewing that article.
Andy