SEO and other online channels: different parts of the buying process

SEO Marketing and sales expectations

 

Google has created a map of the buying process that positions each type of online channel in relation to a purchase:

SEO and the buying process graphic
Google shows where the influence of various channels is closest to the sale in the buying process.

You can click on the graphic to adjust the display to show how this relationship varies from industry to industry.

This quantifies the delay in time between marketing and sales. The effects of SEO take months to realize but its value is seen by its proximity to an actual sale in the chart. The only channel that is closer is a direct click which means the prospect can go to the URL of the item of interest directly.

We have seen a lot of consternation about the direct effect one can expect from social media marketing.  The chart proposes that it and display advertising are at the far end of assisting interaction whereas successful SEO and its benefit to organic results are closest to the last interaction or sale.

How important is SEO in lead generation?

 

The Samurai Business Group is one of the finest sales management training companies around. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to take their Black Belt Sales Training course and it gave me a string of epiphanies about the buying process and how marketing and sales fit into that process.

I have the pleasure of talking with both of the founders, Bob Lambert and Dan Kreutzer, on a regular basis. We frequently touch on various problems of interest to most people in business. I consider both of them to be trusted advisors.

Samurai has this to say about prospecting for leads:

5 Active Activities on Prospecting include: 
1. Quality Introductions (QIs)
2. Referrals
3. Alliances
4. Networking
5. Targeted Direct Mail/Phone

This is ordered to represent the most likely activity to result in a sale (QIs) to least likely. It is a good thing that numbers 4 and 5 can be helped by SEO because large numbers of interactions are necessary to achieve a lead, let alone a sale. Networking in particular must be seen to include not only search engine results but the entire ecosystem of online interactions. A business can begin to analyse metrics that include how many visits to the company website result in a lead or a sale.

What the list doesn’t suggest is how important validation has become in both the development of leads and getting a sale. Almost every buyer consults a range of online resources before making a buying decisions in nearly every type of transaction according to the research funded by Google in the pamphlet “Zero Moment of Truth”.

If we look at the process for achieving success with quality introductions, referrals and alliances we see that the validation process that is now so common in the buying process would be incorporated here as well. Wouldn’t you Google a potential alliance partner or referral?

SEO increases the number of qualified visits to your website. The specific number of visits necessary to reach your goals will vary but, in the case of website visits, more is always better. These visits are better yet when properly qualified to how people look for what you offer which is the point of SEO by sem[c].

This report shows the relative effectiveness of SEO against social media and pay per click:

2012 State of Digital Marketing Report - SEO company, Webmarketing123