Changes are coming to the search market. Several innovations are not only the horizon but are coming into play, and they have the power to reshape the search engine marketing space. Look for the de-emphasis of search engine optimization (SEO), as other forms of content — and thus other forms of search — gain prevalence.

So, what should be on your mind? According to the latest data from MarketingSherpa, online marketers see personalized search and real-time search (think Facebook and Twitter content searched via Google) will have the greatest impact. Thirty-three percent of respondents see personalized search and real-time search as having a great impact on their businesses, with 57 percent saying personalized search will somewhat impact their businesses and 56 percent saying the same for real-time search. Video and mobile search come in with lower results that are still far from trivial.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]

A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.

Over time, you can use your blog to grow an audience that can translate to business opportunities, but that takes time, and it will take quite a while for you to realize any ROI on this approach. Instead, accelerate the process by using blog content as fodder for direct marketing and lead cultivation campaigns.

Turn the results of your long-term investment into a short-term gain, too, by engaging your target market directly and watching visitor behavior to gain sales intelligence. For example, you could use an e-mail newsletter to drive prospects from your house list to your corporate blog and watch the clicks that follow for insights you can use in direct marketing and telemarketing efforts.

What really matters isn’t your traffic (or your blog, for that matter) but what comes from it. If you have interested readers executing on calls to action and entering your sales cycle, you’re headed in the right direction. A marketing blog isn’t like a mass media blog. There’s only one purpose, and that’s to increase your top line.

Instead, IT solution providers often look only at the cost of marketing, eschewing the overall result in favor of near-term expense management. Even holding on to your cash comes at a cost … which is equivalent to future returns. Think in terms of what it costs you to make money, and your marketing efforts will become more targeted, more powerful and more substantial.

Piecemeal marketing doesn’t work — and that’s what you get when you look strictly at cost. Change your perspective: measure by cost of income, and you’ll be committed to generating ROI.

Pushing for top placement in search results is as old as marketing itself, and it continues to be a priority. Internet marketers continue to recognize the importance of search in driving the end user’s internet browsing experience and understand that the odds of attracting a visitor (and the opportunity to convert) improve significantly with search engine placement.

Search engine optimization (SEO), of course, is the discipline dedicated to this endeavor, and the relative maturity of the space has led to the better definition of marketing objectives compared to other areas, such as social media marketing.

According to the latest data from MarketingSherpa, most B2B marketers use SEO primarily to increase their web traffic (55 percent of respondents), with 38 percent using it to increase brand or product awareness, 32 percent for lead generation and 24 percent to improve brand or product reputation. PR comes in with 24 percent. Sales implications drew a lower response rate in the survey, with only 14 percent of B2B respondents using SEO to increase online sales and 15 percent for offline sales.

For IT solution providers, these results suggest that SEO is an effective tool for demand generation. Traffic to a website or blog is an early step in demand generation, especially if you have the hooks in place to draw a visitor into the sales cycle through a contact form or newsletter registration. This is supported by the brand and product awareness and lead generation objectives specified in the survey.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]

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IT solution provider marketers tend to focus on the campaign, a perspective resulting largely from demand generation considerations. The best way to bring in leads, however, is to use a coordinated approach that maximizes the value and potency of your marketing efforts. One-off campaigns just don’t have the same effect.

Think about investing in marketing the way you would about an investment in the stock market. If you invest for the long term, based on the amount of cash you have and risk you can handle, odds are the future will be much brighter than if you day trade, chasing returns and hoping you time the market properly. The latter approach is generally shunned by serious investors — and it should be treated the same way when applied to your marketing dollars and lead generation efforts.

Smart, disciplined marketing investments guided by clear objectives and a well-planned strategy — that’s where you’ll find the return on your marketing investment. Skip the one-hit wonder aspirations, and use a comprehensive marketing strategy to drive real, sustainable growth. The lead generation implications will be profound.

Resist the temptation to believe that big is beautiful, and refocus on marketing basics — you’ll get a greater return on your social media marketing investment.

Instead of accumulating eyeballs, remember the value of targeted marketing. Make it a priority to bring readers to your blog who are closely aligned with your marketing objectives. Specifically, you want IT decision-makers. A small group of readers who could become your clients is far superior to a large mixed bag. Rather than measure your success in pageviews and unique visitors, use contacts, appointments and sales. Eyeballs didn’t work in the late 1990s, and they don’t work today.

So, how do you attract the audience you want most? It starts with content. Engineering-heavy blog posts that delve into highly technical issues aren’t likely to resonate with an IT director or CIO. Focus on the business case. Write about how your solutions can help manage costs or bolster ROI. Address the concerns that IT leaders are likely to have, and you’ll realize better results faster.

We all know that B2B and B2C are totally different animals. What works for selling toilet paper doesn’t really translate to virtual desktop infrastructures. In e-mail marketing, content reigns supreme … which is why we expect corporate blogs to increase in influence through the end of the year and beyond.

According to recent research by MarketingSherpa, 67 percent of B2B marketing professionals use e-mail to deliver “content relevant to segment,” compared to only 61 percent of B2C e-mail marketers.

This makes perfect sense. They’re pushing for a small immediate sale that has an “approval process” within a household. On the B2B side, as we’ve seen in the IT solution provider segment, content is the tool used to get in the door and develop a refined, powerful value proposition that is sufficient to endure the watchful eyes of several executives before the CFO agrees to sign the check.

House list e-mail campaigns are also important in B2B, but only 49 percent of respondents selected this priority, relative to 60 percent for B2C respondents. Event-triggered autoresponder e-mails resonated with only 27 percent of B2B marketers, and the other options registered 10 percent or below.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]

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Of course, there are other reasons why leads are left dormant. Some sales professionals prefer to chase leads that have big tickets, not recognizing that a small client now can become a big one later. And, every rep has his or her favorite accounts, which provide a consistent flow of revenue with little opportunity for growth. In some cases, fear is involved: nobody wants to chase an opportunity and lose.

To counteract this tendency, the marketing team needs to take action. Start by looking for trends: identify the likely reasons why certain leads aren’t being pursued. Use the data to engage the sales team to understand why they aren’t following up on them. You may gain some interesting marketing intelligence along the way – particularly around lead quality, qualification and prospect time and budget constraints.

By opening a dialogue around why follow-up isn’t happening, consequently, benefits can be found for both the sales and marketing functions. You may learn ways to deliver better leads to the sales team, and the sales team may have to overcome certain internal barriers, or may be alerted to tendencies they didn’t realize existed. The outcome is an increase in marketing effectiveness coupled with improved sales results – a powerful combination in pushing revenue to new heights.

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