First there was SEO.
Then came PPC.
Now the latest TLA (three-letter-acronym) in search engine marketing is SMO.
It stands for “Social Media Optimization”. Basically it’s about reaching your target market using Web 2.0/social media channels, such as blogs, YouTube, tagging, etc.
Frankly I’m not a big fan of Web 2.0 for business, for the simple reason that from my experience most Australian businesses are yet to successfully implement Web 0.7.
I believe marketing resources are better spent on the low-hanging fruit of online marketing, such as creating compelling content, SEO and PPC, rather than dabbling in a corporate blog.
However, Marketing Experiments recent exposé on SMO really caught my attention. They pitted a $10/hour blogger against a PPC (Google Adwords) campaign to see which would produce the better ROI.
The Adwords campaign generated 2,057 visitors for a cost of $1,250 (or 61c per visitor).
The blogger generated 93,207 visitors for a cost of $3,600 (or 4c per visitor).
Bottom line: SMO yielded a 1,427% greater ROI than PPC!
Read more about this experiment
BTW: the Marketing Experiments e-newsletter is a fascinating source of information on what strategies and tactics actually work in online marketing.
About the author: Charles Cuninghame is an expert copywriter and marketing trouble shooter who helps business owners and marketing managers attract more clients.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Very interesting experiment – it’s important to realize the SMO portion of the campaign went for 12 months, so it is not a quick fix.
We do some of this at Freshview for our software, and we do see ongoing traffic from it. Occasionally you get a ‘perfect storm’ situation with a blog post or comment in the right place at the right time. (See Zeldman’s post for more)
Good point Matthew.
If you want quick results PPC is the way to go. For the most cost-effective results in the long term I think you need to integrate PPC with SEO and utilise SMO, if it’s appropriate and if you have the resources.
(That’s two big “if’s”!)