In today’s day and age everyone can agree that businesses need to devote a portion of their budgets to advertising and marketing or they won’t be able to reach new customers. If you’re a successful business owner you already know this. As successful business owners it is often times difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers, however this is what separates the businesses that succeed in the Information Age with the ones that plunder.
Just for a second, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a prospective customer. I know this is difficult, but they say sometimes it gets more challenging before it can get better. How often does advertising pop up when you’re not looking for it? Do people get on Facebook with the intent to purchase a slick Mercedes Benz Sprinter Van? Or are they just playing Candy Crush and ignoring the mandatory ads they know they’ll see. Shoot, some establishments hang advertisements above the urinals in the men’s room. As consumers we can’t really get away from it all, and the more advertising we see the more it just blends together.
We’re gonna get back into the shoes of a business executive real soon I promise! I just have one quick question for you. How would your customers find you, if they didn’t actually know who you are?
All across the world people go to Google and search 1.2 Trillion times per year. That is 3.5 Billion searches per day, and 40,000 searches per second. I know we’re not selling these vans across the world, yet, but let’s hone in our statistics.
If we averaged it out over the last year, people in the United States search for the term “Mercedes Benz” 550,000 times each month (over 6.5 million times last year!). Google users searched “sprinter van” over 27,000 times a month this past year (just over 325k searches last year).
I know we’re smack dab in the middle of the United States, but in Iowa alone, over 100 of those searches for “sprinter vans” are coming from the Hawkeye State (If you ask me it’s a Cyclone State, but I’m fine playing the underdog!). Not to mention 1,300 searches come in for “Mercedes Benz.” Or even hyper-locally at the Des Moines Sprinter Vans level.
When you search “sprinter van” does your website show up on the first page? Only about 10% of Google searchers ever go to the second page, so it’s important that your customers are able to easily find you! You wouldn’t build your dealership miles off of the main road without adequate signage and lighting, so why is your website any different?
It’s been brought to my attention that there is a Mercedes Benz dealership in Ohio that is having tremendous success with their inbound marketing for Mercedes Benz Sprinter vans. They give their marketing company a list of keywords they want to focus on, and open their pocketbook to run Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Adword campaigns. They have great success from this, however for your website to show on those searches you have to keep throwing money in each month or your ads won’t run! How many times do you make a Google search just to skip over the ads and go to the first “non-ad” result?
We at Be Always Marketing firmly believe in building up organic SEO rankings. Go ahead and pull up Google and type in “Des Moines seo specialist.” Now we could use a Pay Per Click campaign and show up with the yellow “Ad” button next to us, but take a look at the top 2 search results. Both will bring you to bealwaysmarketing.com. That traffic doesn’t cost money for us each time someone clicks it, and over the long haul we believe that is much more cost effective than turning on the Google Adwords money hose.
Take a peek at this video as we use our marketing analysis tool to break down the difference between Pay Per Click Campaigns versus ranking from our SEO Campaign:
Live Spreadsheet Below.
As you know, when making a decision it’s important to utilize all available resources to do your due diligence. SEMrush.com is a reliable tool we utilize to view search engine rankings for any website out there. Tapping into the resources of this website we can see the estimated monthly budget that companies are spending on Pay Per Click campaigns and where they are ranking organically. SEMrush also has a nifty little tool that looks at the amount of traffic your website is generating by just your organic keywords alone. Just for reference, the term “organic keywords” refer to the keywords you rank for on Google without running ads/PPC campaigns. SEMrush estimates that if a PPC campaign were executed and generated the same amount of traffic as the organic keywords bring in for a central Iowa dealership, it would cost $5,315 per month to bring the same targeted leads to the website. For reference, here’s their estimates on some other Mercedes Benz dealers in surrounding major cities and the monthly value of their organic keyword rankings:
Chicago – $43,037/month
Bloomington, MN – $10,386/month
Kansas City – $7,795/month
Omaha – $8,641/month
Just like when driving a sleek new Mercedes, it’s important for us to read the gauges on the dashboard. We need to keep track of the mileage for maintenance reasons and watch the fuel gauge so we don’t get stranded. Owning a website is no different! What’s the point in sending people to your website if you can’t track who’s going there, how they got there, how long they’re staying, and what else they’re looking up on your online sales copy? We also provide a convenient dashboard for your website – it gives you LIVE up to date SEO rankings, and all the website analytics you can shake a stick at! We believe it’s just as important to know and understand who visits your website as it is to market your website.
Now if we sell one sprinter van, that’s great! But isn’t the goal to sell a whole fleet of them!? Sometimes you have to start with selling one sprinter van to get your foot in the door, but if you can effectively nurture that customer relationship they will be coming back to you in no time! Sometimes it’s just a matter of making that initial sale and the rest is history! Our team at Be Always Marketing has great experience in all phases of helping customers grow their business online and would love to help you succeed!