I must get 20 e-mails a week from firms extolling the benefits of their SEO capabilities. They are clearly sent without any appreciation at all of the implicit irony of a marketing firm telling you to make a technique that clearly doesn’t work for them a cornerstone of your marketing strategy. If SEO is so great, why don’t they use that, not e-mails?
Now think about the marketing (not just SEO) that you buy in. What was the sales approach to you? Is it the same as the sales technique they are suggesting you use? If what they are suggesting you do isn’t what they do themselves, how likely do you think it is that it will be effective for you (and how likely is it that they are truly expert at it)?
One of the things that has always struck me as ironic in this market is that the larger players in SEO provision mainly use other (networking, brand building plus telesales) techniques to sell their services to you.
What does that say to you?
For the avoidance of doubt, we use e-mail, content sharing, co-branding and social networking as our marketing methods. We don’t use SEO and never attend conferences or events unless invited to speak (and we never pay).
It is a significantly cost-effective approach, and (no coincidence) the approach our products (based on the www.myinfonet.co.uk platform) make easy for our clients to use.