Rivers flow through the desert
Think of spending on AdWords like rain falling in a desert. When small amounts of rain fall it gets sucked up by the parched sand. If enough rain falls, the ground gets damp and suddenly the rain forms streams and a river flows through the desert. And as soon as it stops raining, everything dries up again.
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Many industrial B2B companies in South Africa allocate too little budget to digital marketing. It’s normally in the form of some paid for Google AdWords. Their Google AdWords rain is falling on parched sands in the Google desert. What makes the matter worse is that when they stop spending on AdWords, they stop getting traffic to their site as it was “all bought”. Using Google AdWords over the long term (in my opinion) creates a form of dependency.
Don’t get me wrong here- I use AdWords for many of my clients because AdWords delivers:
- Fast results in the short term
- Low entry cost
- Better than radio, print and outdoor (for Industrial B2B companies in South Africa.)
But the dependency needs to be solved so that the company can move out of a linear relationship between ad spend and results. Escaping this dependency is possible through the use of Inbound Marketing techniques. Annually inbound marketing costs between R600k and R1m per year. Which is similar to what many industrial B2B companies in South Africa are spending on AdWords.
An Inbound Marketing solution provides much more than AdWords. But that’s a discussion for a different blog post. The fundamental difference between AdWords and Inbound is that Inbound Marketing creates compounding results. Each month the results grow on the gains of the former month. Inbound Marketing results get bigger and bigger each month because of this. You spend the same amount of money every month on Inbound but your results grow every month. In contrast with AdWords your results stay the same every month, unless you keep spending more.
If your company has an annual turnover of around R40m then you can afford Inbound marketing.
If your company has an annual turnover of between R60m and R600m then you can definitely afford inbound marketing and should be considering it.
To help you restructure your budget we have created an Excel worksheet budget template which you can manipulate to achieve the recommended spend for digital marketing. Aim to budget 40% for buying digital marketing services in South Africa (B2B).
If your budget can afford an inbound marketing campaign, then a river of leads is indeed within reach.
