Patience Pays Off

When Ana DeAgostini went to work for the Center for Management and Organization Effectiveness (CMOE), she brought more than just her globalization experience. That's why it didn’t take long for Ana to see that CMOE could really benefit from the services of 10x Marketing, a company she had previously worked for. As pointed out by Chris Stowell, International Manager of CMOE, “When an employee is passionate and believes in the work of a former employer, you know it has to be good,” so CMOE acted on Ana’s suggestion and contacted 10x Marketing.

Prior to talking with 10x Marketing, CMOE had seen some marketing success through tradeshows but it wasn’t quite the success they were looking for. They’d experimented with Internet marketing once before through a small firm in Arizona, and although they didn’t get much out of the experience, CMOE didn’t lose faith in Internet marketing.

When asked what appealed to them most about Internet marketing, Stowell explains that the daily growth of the Internet and the amount of information available were both contributing factors, but what clinched their decision to employ 10x Marketing was that it presented a strategy completely opposite to what they’d been doing previously. “Before we were the ones seeking people out, making cold calls, etc. Internet marketing takes the pressure off of our sales team because it gives us a way to have people come to us.”

CMOE’s Internet marketing campaign began in October of last year and for the first several months, while CMOE’s keywords were spidered and ranked, progress was initially slow. After six months however, CMOE’s rankings were on the rise and Stowell liked what he was seeing. He comments, “We decided that we wanted to give it another six months to see where it went from there.”

The following chart shows the initial six month keyword rankings progression, as well as the following four months, which display even more significant results.

Improved results weren’t the only reason CMOE decided to 're-contract' with 10x Marketing. Stowell explains, “With our previous experience, the other Internet marketing company had given us a few pointers but then we didn’t hear from them again until six months later when it came time to renew the contract…10x Marketing has been right with us the whole way, always keeping us informed of how the campaign is progressing. We’re paying more than we did to the first company, but we’re also getting a lot more—and it’s worth it.”

One of the optimization efforts that was going on quietly behind the scenes was link development. Link development is one of the services 10x marketing provides as an integral part of the comprehensive Internet marketing process, because while the layout and content of a web page are both significant contributing factors to its ranking in search engine results, an equally significant factor is the number of backward links (define) to a site.

One way to increase the number of backward links to a site is through reciprocal linking. This approach involves searching for existing websites that share similar content to a client’s and encouraging those websites to link to the client’s website. The client in turn provides a link to that website. This technique is one 10x Marketing had been using for some time, but in late January 2005, they decided to introduce and test new ways of gaining incoming links to client websites.

It didn’t take long before 10x Marketing and CMOE discovered that the new methods of link development were more effective, providing faster and greater results than the traditional means of reciprocal linking. When CMOE first started with 10x Marketing, there were zero confirmed links to the CMOE website. That number had since soared to nearly 130. Those links are part of the reason CMOE now has over sixty top ten rankings. Stephanie Tuia, CMOE’s Client Account Specialist, reports that the keywords she focuses on almost always get ranked among the top ten.

As CMOE’s keyword rankings skyrocketed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, traffic to the CMOE site also improved dramatically. “Because of great search engine rankings, CMOE was now getting several hundred page views every day,” says Darryl Jacques, CMOE’s Internet Marketing Consultant. “Our next task was to convert those visitors into solid leads for the CMOE sales team.”

CMOE and 10x Marketing began modifying the CMOE website, adding creative ads like the one shown below and inducements for site visitors to leave contact information. “The multiple leads we receive everyday provide us with pre-qualified contact information and make the long term relationship building with these new contacts much easier,” Stowell reports.

CMOE has worked with 10x Marketing for close to a year now and is happy they stayed on. “When Darryl explained that their clients with the most success had been with them for at least a year, we hoped that by renewing our contract, we’d become one of those successful clients—and we have.”