Key Points:

The article “What Is Involved in SEO? How to Carve Out Your Budget and Hire the Right Talent” from Iffel International provides insights into effective SEO strategies and budgeting. Key takeaways include:

1. Understanding SEO Components: Traditional SEO focuses on optimizing for search engines like Google and YouTube. However, with the rise of generative AI, it’s crucial to adopt “Search Everywhere Optimization,” ensuring visibility across platforms such as ChatGPT, CoPilot, and various social media channels.
2. Defining Key Metrics: It’s essential to distinguish between leads (prospective customer engagements), sales (transactions resulting in revenue), and profit (revenue minus costs). Clear definitions help in setting realistic marketing goals and measuring success accurately.
3. Strategic Leadership Roles: Incorporating roles like Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Chief Sales Officer (CSO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO), or a combined Chief Marketing and Technology Officer (CMTO) can provide strategic direction. Fractional executives offer expertise at a fraction of the cost of full-time hires, making them a viable option for many businesses.
4. Budget Allocation: Investing in a well-designed website is crucial, as it serves as your digital Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Allocating resources to ensure your website effectively represents your brand and facilitates customer engagement is a foundational step in your marketing strategy.
5. Holistic Approach with SEO2Sales™: Utilizing proprietary processes like SEO2Sales™ can bridge the gap between marketing and sales, ensuring that SEO efforts directly contribute to lead generation and revenue growth.

By integrating these strategies, businesses can develop a comprehensive SEO plan that aligns with their marketing objectives and budget constraints.

How to Carve Out Your Budget and Hire the Right Talent

As business owners map out their marketing budget, it can seem like there’s no upper limit on what you must spend, with every stakeholder in digital marketing telling you they can get you new business. Of course, nobody has unlimited resources, so how do you know which investments and strategies will have the most impact? While the exact details will vary for each company, our SEO2Sales^TM proprietary process can provide valuable insights that will help a business owner review budgets, processes, in-house hires, agency selection, and understand who to believe has your best interest at heart, from a 30,000-foot perspective.

Digital Marketing Definitions and Frameworks for Budgets & Talent

Before we dive into figuring out what is essential to have in your marketing plan and what is nice to have, let’s define the terminology we’re working with and what it means:

1. Traditional SEO: Search Engine Optimization with a 100% focus on Google. While Search Everywhere Optimization is on the rise (see item 2), Google and YouTube hold first and second place as major search engines at the time of this writing.
2. NEW! Search Everywhere Optimization: With the release of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) such as ChatGPT, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta have all updated their algorithms with this technology. This enables users to search anywhere, be it Google, ChatGPT, CoPilot, or Social Media to get their desired answers.
3. Leads: When a new prospect engages with your content, calls, or uses a web form to ask for more information.
4. Sales: When there is engagement and exchange of a contract that leads to monetary exchange.
5. Profit: Sell Price – Costs = Profit
6. CMO: Chief Marketing Officer. A Fractional CMO offers the required time to work on marketing strategies such as branding, messaging, and a comprehensive marketing mix that sets your competitive advantage at a much lower cost than a full-time in-house CMO.
7. CSO: Chief Sales Officer. A Fractional CSO offers the required time to work on sales strategies, with similar benefits as that offered by a Fractional CMO.
8. CTO: Chief Technology Officer. A CTO offers essential cybersecurity and IT support as marketing is tech-driven.
9. CMTO: Chief Marketing and Technology Officer. A Fractional CMTO offers technology analysis and outlines implementation requirements to meet the needs of AI in digital sales and marketing.
10. Website: Your digital Vice President of Sales and Marketing and sales force. A good web developer will work with the head of sales and marketing to turn websites into the company’s sales force and advocate for your brand and value proposition.
11. Website Data Structures and Schema: Data structured to educate algorithms on the types of problems you solve.
12. Content: Unique material that helps users and algorithms understand what problems you solve. This could be written, video, and/or podcast. The best content can articulate the problems users have better than they can.
13. Listing sites: External sites that list your company information, providing external backlinks that feed into websites and form a subset of SEO strategy. For example, law firms work with the likes of AVVO, FindLaw, and Super Lawyers. Other examples include Google My Business, Bing Maps, and Apple Maps, which can all be optimized to provide visibility with backlinks to your website and your sales force.
14. Digital Advertising: Paid ads can include Google ads, social media ads, and ad campaigns on listing sites. This method can form one facet of a strategy to get visible fast, depending on budget. Budgets need to be calculated based on the competitive environment and bidding strategies, as every click will vary in cost at any given time of the day.
15. Social Media Marketing: Building engagement with your marketplace on social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc. Content that grabs attention, articulating followers’ problems better than they can, results in traffic back to your website or even possible leads under the nuances of Search Everywhere Optimization.

Setting Up Your Digital Marketing Budget

If you are not trained in sales, marketing, or tech, you will need to hire the right talent. (To get an idea on costs for full-time senior-level hires in this arena, click HERE.) The seismic changes in SEO caused by AI technology makes it imperative for businesses to have expertise and talent in marketing that is sales-focused (not siloed) with a technology bias on their team or campaigns will fail. It is an era where technology makes data-driven decision-making possible with unprecedented speed. The trick is to get the right talent to apply that data to making sound decisions on digital marketing activities that lead to sales. 

Hiring in-house specialists will invariably exceed the expense of outsourcing. However, the key here is to find the right team externally to augment your in-house resources to reduce costs with fractional services.

What Is ESSENTIAL?

Dealing with a defined marketing budget—as everyone must—means watching your expenses carefully. It’s frankly nerve-wracking to even try to decide where to spend limited funds when you have no clue what is working, what is needed, and what isn’t needed. 

Here is our take on the items above:

Trying to wrap your head around these items can be dizzying for a business owner. Though there is so much more to this, at a 30,000-foot vantage point this gives you a sense of the scope of budgets, talent, and work involved in Search Everywhere Optimization. It is easy to waste effort on ineffective strategies without a clearly defined, sales-focused marketing plan, which is why Iffel International always starts with the essentials—what will bring our clients the leads and sales that drive growth and profit—to determine where to invest valuable funds. We can help you ensure that your marketing and sales strategies for 2025 include the critical pieces for success. For more information on how to navigate through any or all of these items, contact us HERE.