Is Google losing its grip on B2B marketing?

If you’re a founder or CEO of a growing business, you've probably been told that you have to focus your marketing around Google. Whether that’s ranking highly for a specific phrase or a set of keywords; or investing in ads to get more people to your website. Both of which can get expensive quickly!

And there's a good chance that all this effort has left you frustrated. The game has changed drastically over the last year or two - impacting the value of both SEO and Google Ads.

On this episode, we explore the changes in the landscape; look at how people's search habits have changed; and talk about the evolving role of Content Marketing to take advantage of the strategic shift.

Resources

Peter Caputa Linkedin Post - "Most companies should stop publishing educational content to their website for SEO purposes. It's like buying real estate in an undesirable neighborhood."

Rand Fishkin Video Post - "Clicks are dying. Attribution is dying. The way we've done digital marketing for 25yrs is dying."

Chris Walker Linkedin Post "Google paid search is often by far the largest expense across the entire Marketing budget and simultaneously the lowest performing investment."

Transcript

Intro

If you’re a founder or CEO of a growing business, I’m sure someone has told you in the past that you need to be on Google. Whether that’s ranking highly for a set of keywords, or spending money on ads to get people to your website. And if you’ve taken that advice, I’m going to guess you’re frustrated. That was pretty good advice a few years ago, but the game has changed. And on this episode, I’m going to explain why, and take a look at the role Google now plays in the B2B mix.

[Intro Music]

For several years, a lot of marketing has been based around Google search - and google ads. That’s where the money gets spent. It’s often the first stop for a small business trying to get attention. But the reality is, Google is becoming less and less of a sure thing.

Winning the SEO game is tough.Even if you can get to be one of the highest ranked articles to a search term, chances are someone will have to scroll through an AI overview, some ads, and possibly some image results, before they even get to the organic results. Add in the fact that everyone is publishing content, to try to get ranked. ANd we now get to the point where Google ranking isn’t the primary way to get noticed any more.

Would it be nice to get featured in the AI snippet? Yes. But it’s too early in the evolution - for SMBs at least - to know how to get that done. It’s not dissimilar to trying to outrank the wikipedia page back in the day - you know you want to do it, but it’s just not that easy

Peter Caputa, CEO at Databox

“Most companies should stop publishing educational content to their website for SEO purposes. It's like buying real estate in an undesirable neighborhood.

The gravy train is over...

➡️ The cost to manage & maintain educational content (in order to keep it ranked) has ballooned. Google expects everything to be freshly published (or updated) & competitors are constantly copycatting.

I’ll put a link in the notes to Peter’s full post. Beecuase he goes on to explain how content should be used now. And there’s a lot of interesting points in the 100+ comments below is post. Worth a read

So Content is still valuable. Maybe we can still say Content Is King, as has been said for years. But the way we do content. Or more to the point - the reason we do content marketing - has changed.

Content is a huge asset in the sales cycle. Give your sales teams a solid library of material to use in their objection handling and follow-ups

Content still drives interest and eyeballs. But those now come from the community - from social posts, discussion boards and  email. Which is, of course, harder to propagate, to track, and to measure, than Google results.

Whereas content has for many years been focused on attracting google juice, the focus now needs to be on building credibility one person at a time. By establishing yourself in the industry or community as someone who has something valuable to say, and who is constantly evolving or adding to that point of view - not just repeating a tagline or sound bite over and over. It can be driven by an individual - a founder or a CTO maybe. Or it can be based around the personality of a brand (which is harder to do). 

OIK, sounds good. But is this just a hunch, or is there data to back it up? 

Rand Fishkin published a video recently where he raised the issue that - although 70% of website referrals come from Google - we only spend 10% of our time on search engines. Habits have changed - instead of going to Google to research and issue and find the best result, we’re more likely to read about something that piques our interest in a social post, or on a news website, and then hop over to Google to search for it. Which means that to be featured in a Google search increasingly means that you have to be discovered elsewhere, so that someone will actually make that search.

Here’s another data point to back that up. Chris Walker produced internal data from his clients that showed that 70-80% of the ROI from google ad campaigns came from branded search termss. Which again suggests that people already know about you before they go to Google

I’ll link to Chris’s post in the show notes too,

So what does this tell us?

Well, a lot of the advice right now is that you need to be publishing everywhere. Be active on multiple social platforms; be a guest on podcasts; publish a series of videos and so on, and so on.

That’s great if you have a double digit team of marketers, a sizeable agency budget, and big dollars to spend on ads.

But what about the rest of us. THose who have to make stuff happen with limited resources.  I’m looking at this from the perspective of start-ups and growth companies who have small marketing teams and enough budget to hire some freelance help from time to time

For those of us who don’t have the funds to take a scattershot approach and see what works. Hope that some of it sticks and gives a positive ROI..

So what do you do. Well, the first thing I say is to pick the channel - maybe two channels - that you can have some impact on,  and really optimize those. Spend time understanding them. Focus your limited resoures on getting good results from them, rather than spreading your resources thinly across the whole marketing landscape. Getting traction on one social platform; or developing a strong set of ads (outside of Google); or building a community through podcasts. Whatever it is, get known there. And then, only then, can you start spreading outwards. After all, for many founders, that’s what they did with their product. Developed something that worked great for a narrow niche of users. Once they’ve established that, they can broaden out to a wider audience. But only once they’ve gotten really good at servicing that initial audience.

So if you only have $10k to spend, where do you spend it?

Of course, the answer is “it depends”. It depends on your industry, your geography, and even on where you feel comfortable. If you hate being on camera, then YouTube probably isn’t for you - unless you have a trusted someone in the company who could become that on-camera personality.

Here’s a few ideas though:

Align with an existing industry name or property - You probably don’t have much reach right now, Your email list is narrow, and you’re primarily talking to people already in the funnel, So one way to reach a broader, yet still targeted audience is to spend money - or offer value to -  an established player in your industry. Sponsor a newsletter; get invited on podcasts, write a guest post on  substack; Run a hosted webinar that’s backed by a know entity. Any and all of thes might take financial investment - but the pay off is likely to be higher than ads.

Stake a presence at an industry event. THese can get expensive quickly. But, particularly in the tech world, many conferences have a dedicated program for start-ups which give you a small booth area and some PR opportunities. That can be a great place to make a splash. I worked with a Danish start-up called Airtame. And one way they built significant momentum - and this was before my time with them - was winning the “Best Start-Up” award at CES (Consumer Electonics Show) in their first year, while they were still crowdfunding their product. It’s hard to beat coverage like that.

Plus, you’ll meet a lot of people - including press and potential investors as well as customers, in a short time.

Thought Leadership. Yes, this is an overused term. But I say it here, because you’ll get the gist. This is no longer about writing blog posts. Now it’s about building a credible presence on a specific platform (often LinkedIn) by talking meaningfully about a topic your potential customers care about; it’s getting invited on industry podcasts; speaking slots at conferences. You may have to pay for some of this exposure to get started, but it can become a bit of a snowball as momentum builds.

And then let’s come back to Ads. In general, unless you have a local focus, I think Google ads are a bad idea for smaller, growth business.

I talk to many founders who’s only foray into advertising has been Google Ads. Presumably because it’s well known, reasonably accessible, and has a low entry point. But in most cases they’re disappointed with the results. There’s a bunch of reasons for this, but at least some of it relates to the issues I’ve just described. ANd in general, it’s typically because they haven’t put the foundations in place - yes, largely content marketing - to drive the overall conversions.

It’s really tough to do any testing or get data under your belt with a small budget. And in terms of how I started the conversation, if you haven’t done the work to get people to search for you in the first place, you have limited chance to convert.

There may be an ad opportunity on some of the social platforms, but they can still be  a challenge. I do think Reddit has some possibilities particularly for tech companies, so long as you can navigate the challenge of being authentic while publishing ads. Reddit is - I think - one of the few social platforms that people still expect to get reliable information from.

A better approach to ads is to focus on ads in industry newsletters, where the audience is targeted and you can customize your messaging to that specific audience. And typically then use some piece of content that will be very relevant to that audience. It’s more like fishing with a line, than trawling with a net.

To wrap up here. Content Marketing is still a very valid marketing approach,. It’s just that it now has to be more thoughtful, and strategic. It’s no longer about cranking out blog posts so that google will find you and send your website out to the world. It’s much more about creating targeted information, and being thoughtful about how and where you publish it.

I’m not saying it’s easy, If it were easy, then it wouldn’t work because everyone would be doing it (which, let’s be honest, is one of the things that ruined blogging!). But if you really want more people to know about your company, it’s still an effective way to get the word out and build a solid reputation.

I’ll admit, I don’t have all the answers to this, and with the rate of change, it’s  tough to keep up with it. All I can say at this point is that Google is still a dominating presence in B2B marketing - we just have to be smart in how we build our strategies to take advantage of that. 

As always, I appreciate you taking some time to listen to The Marketing Mix podcast. If you’ve listened all the way through, perhaps you’d consider giving it a review on whatever platform you’re on. It all helps to get the word out there, and it’d be much appreciated.