Driving solid demand generation is crucial to staying competitive. Building demand generation requires you to proactively adjust your pay-per-click ad campaign and search-engine optimization (SEO) using feedback you gather from each activity.
It's also important to ensure that your demand generation activities maintain a consistent voice, tied to your customer personas. Keep in mind that your positioning and messaging should be involved in every conversation with your customers.
The majority of hosting providers use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for demand generation without using search-engine optimization (SEO) and other analytical tools to drive leads through more effective and less costly means.
SEO is more effective for driving demand than PPC, and is generally less expensive. SEO is not about fancy tricks as much as it's about key basics like site architecture, page design and page content, and monitoring your search rankings with vigilance.
In a consumer search for hotels in Zurich, Expedia was losing the conversion battle to Trip Advisor, as shown in the following table. Though Expedia spent more PPC ad dollars to bring customers to its site, many of those customers were lost.
Trip Advisor is using their PPC data to inform their SEO strategy, leading directly to more effective, less expensive lead generation campaigns.
The most effective demand generation campaigns include both SEO to build search ranking and PPC elements. These campaigns use the PPC data to inform the SEO strategy.
