Knowledge Source Case Study

Accelerated Web traffic by 600 percent and boosted overall revenue by 50 percent within three months.

Since 1989, Knowledge Source (www.knowsource.com) has delivered healthcare business information and market reports to executives seeking a competitive edge.

Knowledge Source provides healthcare data, syntheses, analysis and presentation services through market research reports and custom research. The company's core market includes busy managers who seek pertinent market knowledge about clients, competitors, industries or markets in a world with an overwhelming abundance of data.

The Internet has fueled a fundamental shift in the way executives seek and purchase market data. Whereas they once relied on internal research departments for information, executives now discover and download data instantaneously. As a result, search engines have become the number one research tool for busy executives. Qualified buyers use specific search phrases to pinpoint desired information.

Knowledge Source sought a partner to help it profit from this paradigm shift and to anticipate future market changes. The company approached ECNext with several goals:

Employ search engine marketing to drive more traffic to its Web site

Increase Web-driven sales

Broaden its market base

Create a competitive advantage

Expand market share

Knowledge Source had traditionally sold comprehensive healthcare industry overviews and company-specific analyses to pharmaceutical sales executives. Existing market channels required a lengthy sales cycle to build relationships within each company.

Knowledge Source wanted to expand its market base and to shorten its sales cycles. By making its data visible to healthcare executives searching the Web for precise information about clients, competitors, and market trends, the company also hoped to significantly increase sales.

To content publishers like Knowledge Source, the Internet presents both opportunities and challenges. These companies amass highly sought-after information. Yet, their data drifts in a sea of more than 3 billion Web pages indexed by major search engines. Without an effective search-marketing platform, decision makers seeking critical business information cannot find the company's content.

Typical search engine services involve inserting meta-tags and keywords manually into each Web page. However, coding pages by hand is impractical for publishers offering an extensive catalog of information products. More importantly, maintaining hand-coded pages to keep up with changing search engine algorithms becomes difficult if not impossible.

ECNext's platform and accompanying tools automate construction and maintenance of product pages, creating a scalable method of driving Web traffic and profits.

Like many content providers, Knowledge Source lacked the expertise to capitalize on the power of the Internet to expand its market base. Generic search engine marketing delivered insufficient traffic. Only about 20 percent of sales came from the Web - and much of that volume came from existing customers.

To meet its goals, the company needed each granule of its critical business information to rise to the top of the search engine results for specific market intelligence keywords.