Why is SEO and SEM important for your business?
As a marketing leader in a B2B company, understanding SEO vs SEM for B2B marketing budget planning is essential to building a strong digital presence. This guide explains how to allocate your budget effectively between these two strategies to strengthen your brand’s visibility and lead generation.
What is SEO and how can it benefit your company?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of enhancing your website’s visibility in organic search results. This involves a strategic approach to content creation, keyword optimization, and technical improvements. SEO is a long-term investment that builds authority and trust, which are crucial in the B2B sector, particularly in markets like Thailand where credibility is key to success.
What is SEM and why should you consider it?
On the other hand, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) includes paid search strategies that provide immediate visibility and targeted outreach. This approach is particularly advantageous for businesses aiming for quick lead generation and the ability to adjust marketing messages in real-time based on audience engagement and campaign performance. SEM can be a game-changer for manufacturers looking to penetrate the market swiftly.
Why choose SEO for your business?
– Great for companies with stable product offering,
– Protect keywords that are vital to your company: your brand keywords, your key solutions keywords,
– Slowly increase your reach with new connected keywords,
– Go for easy win first: produce content for keywords relatively easy to reach,
– Think keywords in local languages to achieve easy results too!
Why choose SEM for your business?
– Budget clarity: you pay for what you get. Adjust as you go.
– Scale traffic more quickly, get visibility fast! Great for seasonal or trending topics!
– Good in the context of lead generation campaigns,
– Good for experimenting with new content idea,
– Protect keywords that may not be achievable by SEO in the short time,
How to balance SEO vs SEM in your B2B marketing budget?
Finding the right balance between SEO and SEM is vital for your marketing strategy. While SEO fosters sustainable growth and aligns with content marketing initiatives, SEM allows for rapid audience engagement and market entry. The magic number depends on the stability of your product offering and the competitiveness of your niche.
A good way to balance the budget is to invest in SEO over a longer period of time, but on a regular basis (like a any good investment strategy!). For example, publishing X pieces of content per month, every month. A good way to make the money go further is to think about SEO as a multi-language effort too, with some content created easily translatable and adjustable to reach for local keywords.
At the opposite, SEM large investments often relate to marketing campaigns, which are shorter lived. This may be due to some upcoming event (tradeshow event, new product release) or seasonality (budget season in SaaS industry). You may also use SEM as a way to test SEO topics: SEM budget is great for experimenting, find recipes that work and then try to capture succesful keywords as part of your SEO strategy.
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