I’ve just been looking through some stats for the Vertical Leap website, looking at the interactions between visits, traffic, referral source (e.g. Twitter, StumbleUpon) and of course organic search traffic.
What was very obvious is that promotion pays off. Not for every blog post or news story, but consistently the additional promotion that we do beyond just posting a blog on our website creates more visitors, whether this is social media or promoting them in our email newsletter. This isn’t rocket science of course – using various methods to share your content is a popular way of getting more traffic. Here’s a great post from Mashable on 20 different ways to promote good content.
However this analysis also shows up the downside of social media for a business to business website – not much of this extra traffic converts to leads. So whilst our SEO and PPC efforts gain a measurable ROI, social media doesn’t cut it in terms of directly creating new business. Yes it increases the company profile and visibility online, but it is important to consider if this is an aim of your online marketing strategy.
Vertical Leap’s own experiences tally with those we have studied for our B2B clients, and is the main reason why our SEO services concentrate on increasing rankings in the major search engines. There needs to be a correspondence between the work we carry out and ultimately increased business for your company. The tactics we use are tried and tested for improving the authority of your website and thus search engine positions. Bucking the trend in the recession is something that every company wants to do at the moment, and something we very much want to help all our clients achieve.
So if you have a social media element in your online marketing mix, make sure that you evaluate this in terms of what your ultimate aims are.
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