I’ve been reading a lot of marketing statistics lately. Happy to report, these are some of the more impressive numbers.These days, companies need to think long and hard about where and when to spend their hard earned marketing dollars, and Return On Investment has never been more important. So a responsible marketing company needs to take that all into account when devising a marketing plan for/with that company. People want and deserve to see results and have little to no tolerance for a $2000 marketing or advertising mistake. Nor should they!

1) With SEO, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization, customers are searching for you, rather than you searching for customers. Marketing 101 tells us that as soon as someone starts to try and sell us something, we become defensive and back away as a natural instinct. But what if the search engine did the selling for us, and all we had to do was get our website ranked in the top few positions and just sit back and wait for customers to come to us? Sounds pretty simple right? Well once your website is ranked, it really is that simple. It’s not an overnight process, by any stretch, there is no marketing magic wand, but properly executed, it works.

2) Studies have shown that search engine marketing is 60% more cost effective than traditional marketing means. Let’s face it, small businesses don’t have huge marketing budgets like monopolies do, so every penny we spend onmarketing needs to be spent effectively. With other marketing, this simply isn’t the case. But with SEO, a good campaign truly is 60% more cost effective than traditional marketing because SEO is a long term investment–once a website ranks near the top of search results, it is relatively inexpensive to hold on to that ranking.

3) 40% of SEO campaigns deliver an ROI in excess of 300%. What in the world other projects can your small business take on that could deliver a return on investment greater than 300%? SEO can be such a powerful tool that not only will it pay for itself, but it will do so 5 times over!

4) SEO builds your reputation and builds trust in your company. If you search for Soda Pop on Google, you are likely to find Coke and Pepsi. But what if the third result is Bob’s Soda Company? The fact that Bob’s Soda Company can rank with billion dollar corporations says numbers about his company to people searching for Soda Pop, and it truly does help brand your company, build an image, and increase the public’s perception of your small business. Adversely, if you search mattresses on Google and 1-800-Mattress shows up on page 4, while Dial-A-Mattress shows up on page 1, where do you think most people will be buying their mattresses from? Unless you are name searching, 1-800-Mattress is not going to be your source for that new bed, because less than 15% of all consumers make it to page 4 of any search engine.

Do you?