The 2009 Advertising Effectiveness Survey from Forbes revealed that a significant percentage of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) believe that SEO is an effective way to generate sales for their companies. A majority of the surveyed CMOs said that they use conversions or sales data as main metric to measure the success of their marketing campaigns. Almost half of the surveyed marketers believe that SEO has the potential to generate sales for their businesses.
On the other side, Ad networks could not keep up the faith of marketers and are going to be penalized with lowered allocation in digital-campaign budgets or even complete desertion by the marketers.
Conversions or sales – most important metric to measure a digital campaign
The survey report from Forbes says that 87% of the marketers measure their marketing success using sales data. Around 82% of the respondents said that they use sales and conversions data to measure the success of their digital campaign. This is followed by number of registrations with 55% of the marketers using it. Another 39% of marketers consider boost in search rank as an important metric. A successful marketing campaign, for majority of the marketers is the one which can generate maximum number of conversions or sales.
48% of marketers believe SEO is an effective tool for sales conversions
As a response to the survey on most effective tools for generating conversions, a significant 48% of the respondents said that they believe SEO as an effective tool to generate conversions. Other strategies, which marketers believed to be effective, are Email marketing with 46% and PPC with 32%. SEO wins the belief of a significant number of marketers as an effective marketing tool with the potential to generate conversions, the crucial metric to measure their digital campaign.
Increasing investments on SEO – the next plan of marketers
A majority of marketers have planned sensibly for the coming six months on their digital campaigns. Especially, Ad networks are going to be the biggest losers as 53% of the surveyed CMOs planning to cut back their investments on it. However, marketers are allocating a significant percentage of their digital campaigning budgets on Viral marketing (42%) and SEO (40%). A remarkable 50% of the marketers with above $1million budget are planning to increase their allocations on SEO.
SEO is an effective marketing strategy as it is affordable, measurable ROI, and as it allows businesses to leverage the organic search. As many marketers believe in the potential of SEO as an effective tool to generate conversions for them, relatively higher portion of their marketing budget may be allocated in the near future.
