Nathan Sikes
What Promotional Strategy Should You Be Using?
According to Larry Page the mission for Google Search is to design the perfect search engine which “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” Whether it’s a website, image, video, or even an android app, Google Search is primarily used as a catalyst to obtain the best possible resources quickly. In fact, close to 500 billion NEW unique queries have been inserted and tracked in Google’s search engine since 2003. All of which have been used to refine their search engine and bring a more seamless and less cluttered experience to the web.
When Google Trends and Google Insights merged in 2012 it provided an inside perspective on search terms and search volume for every region and category within Google’s reach. Using this data, anyone with a computer and an internet connection can research promotional strategy, topics, people and keywords that are in demand on the world’s most popular search engine. Online marketers can leverage this information further by investigating their own niches and product offerings to better understand their customer needs and markets. Our team did just this, and set out to analyze the best promotional strategy for online marketing in 2015 . Our goal was to use Google Trends to identify the most effective and modern digital trends, and find where b2b businesses should be investing their time, money, and resources. Here’s what we found:
The Search Results Don’t Lie
Most people would expect social media marketing to have the highest interest out of all the online promotional strategies, but it was actually email marketing that was the most searched online marketing method in the “all categories” field for 2015. And although we’ve seen a huge increase in interest for social media and native advertising recently, the query “email marketing software” has more relevance than any other term in the category. However, when we change the field to “Business & Industrial”, “Arts & Entertainment”, “Computer & Electronics”, “Finance”, and even “Shopping”, we see a completely different story where email is on the decline and content remains KING. Content marketing has become the crown jewel for b2b promotional strategies because of it’s ability to increase engagement, improve lead generation, boost sales, and establish the creator as a legitimate resource for future dealings.
Although this research can be done in many different ways, our focus was to find the query with the highest demand in each of the main online promotional strategies: PPC Marketing(red), Social Media Marketing(yellow), Content Marketing(green), and Email Marketing(blue). Every category was tested along with multiple variations of the keyword so a true comparison could be made. Here are the results below
All Categories
Link: http://goo.gl/vwYmTo
For “Business & Industrial”
Link: http://goo.gl/xtiRBu
For “Advertising & Marketing” – Compared To Industry
Link: http://goo.gl/7uWSCW
What About SEO?
As someone who has been working in search engine optimization for the past 7 years, I commonly receive the question “is SEO dead?”. Although this question may be answered differently depending on who you ask, Google Trends tells us that search engine optimization is very much alive, but has evolved into something new. There will always be search engines, and there will always be a way to optimize them, but “gaming” Google’s algorithm has becoming increasingly more difficult because Google has become so much better at what they do. In fact, if we look at industry trends for Pay Per Click, Social Networks, Content Management, and Search Engine Optimization, we see that SEO has continued to remain consistent even in 2015.
“All Categories” – 2015
Conclusion
Trying to take advantage of all of these verticals can be expensive and time consuming for companies without the necessary expertise. If there are only a few channels that your team can really optimize, email, social media, and content marketing have the highest interest and most impact on b2b than any other digital marketing strategy. Not only this, but using these will provide the maximum amount of return on dollars spent and potential customers reached.
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