Scrap the Course Catalogue – Search Engine Marketing is the future

A survey by findcourses.co.uk confirms what past trends indicate. Search Marketing is on the rise. Only 20% of the respondents of the findcourses.co.uk survey stated that they would ‘go online and book a course’ after seeing it in a catalogue / brochure. Almost as many automatically ‘throw catalogues in the recycle bin’. Most claim they ‘quickly glance through’ course catalogues they receive by email or post, but do not act in any way.

The biggest indicator of this trend is that only 5% of those surveyed said they had booked a course after finding it in a catalogue / brochure. Whereas findcourses.co.uk’s search engine had more than 120,000 visitors during the first quarter of 2011 - users who were actively looking for professional development training and courses online and requesting information about  booking courses.

- The message is clear. “Scrap the course catalogue / brochure, avoid it being dumped in the recycle bin, and reduce waste" says Fredrik Andersson, CIO at findcourses.co.uk.

Many global catalogue distributors are reducing or stopping entirely the production of their print catalogues. For a number of years catalogue distributors have seen the majority of sales being made via their websites. In the UK the figure is over 90% of all sales transacted via the web in some sectors.

So stopping distributing the catalogue, which adds large expenses to a business, seems an inevitable move for companies in the UK. The sooner businesses realise this and act on developing their online presence in search engines the sooner they will capture the increasingly online market.

Online advertising spend set to increase in 2011

The overall trend in advertising is moving away from catalogues / brochures for promoting services, and towards online marketing through search engines. The Internet is firmly placed as the advertising medium of choice in the United Kingdom, and reports show that in 2011, companies expect that most of their investments will go to increasing their online presence, including search engine marketing, banner advertising and social media.

Purchasing advertising through Google Adwords can be expensive, with costs ranging from a few pence to several hundreds of pounds per click. Companies try to out bid each other with bought keywords to appear in the Google Ads for popular search terms, which have questionable results.

- “At findcourses.co.uk we work mostly with organic traffic", says Fredrik Andersson. Most people fail to click on sponsored links, and instead choose relevant links that the search results give. To appear high up in search results, a company needs to have optimised their own site. At findcourses.co.uk we are continuously working to develop our site with high quality content, and keywords to optimise our sites to ensure we meet visitors search requests.

The Professional Development training market particularly benefits from search engine marketing sites such as findcourses.co.uk which allows people to find, compare and book courses more easily.  This type of marketing is more interactive, easier to access information and results in faster closing, i.e. more bookings.

Press contact:
Kate Butterworth, Site Manager
kate.butterworth@findcourses.co.uk
+44 (0)203 318 6283