Social Media B2B

The folks over at Marketing Sherpa have released some new research about leads generated from paid and organic search engine marketing. This data provides many valuable insights, but what does it mean to your B2B business?

Balancing Paid and Organic Search Engine Marketing For B2B
A quick look at the graph above and a person may quickly come to the conclusion that if they want quality leads from search then they need to invest in ranking better for organic search results. It makes sense that organic search and its focus on relevance would drive a better quality of leads and that paid search would drive more volume, but less quality. If these are the takeaways, then it is likely that decisions would be made to invest most or all of search marketing funds in search engine optimization, the process of ranking better for keywords in search results.

Focusing On Cost-Per-Lead As It Relates To Search Marketing
Take a step back with me. Let’s think about our initial conclusions from the Marketing Sherpa data. Now add in the idea of cost-per-lead. If the value of a quality lead generated through search is $10 and your business generates 200 leads per month using paid search, then you have generated $2000 of value in leads. If you spent $500 on search engine advertising in that month, your cost-per-quality-lead is $2.50. Meaning the net value minus the cost of advertising of leads generated through paid search is $7.50 per lead. This same process can be done with leads driven by organic search traffic by replacing the cost of advertising with the internal and external costs for search engine optimization.

By determining a cost per lead you can make informed choices about allocating investment between paid and organic search engine marketing. I am a believer in effectiveness of organic search engine marketing, but if you need to make a quick push for a new product or are just getting started in search engine marketing, it is likely you will need to supplement with paid search engine marketing because it drives more leads quickly, even though they are less qualified.

B2B search engine marketing is not just about quality vs. quantity. Instead it is about keeping a lead generation pipeline full and managing the cost-per-lead.

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