MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Over this last week in San Jose, the Search Engine Strategies conference was going down. There were an abundance of awesome and terrifically clued-up speakers that spoke at the event.

When they got to the discussions on Advertising, a particular talk reviewed on the SEO Round Table website: Putting Search back into the Marketing Mix drew my attention.

Some of the points made were very valid and insightful in regarding the important part that Search plays in the overall Marketing world. Ultimately Search marketing should be considered as an essential part of any overall marketing campaign, online and off.

So, if marketing connects supply with demand, to effectively meet demand. How do we illustrate this clearly?

Search Frequency Research provides an insightful look into the minds of the consumer. This allows you to make informed, strategic decisions based on the trends indicated by the types of searches being performed and their volume.

It is therefore important to analyse what people are searching for, this helps to decide how to section and prioritize what you should be selling and what might stop selling by comparing what are more people searching for?

This will also help identify a need and demand in another products that you should consider selling or add to your product line.

Another factor mentioned was that if you have a brand name that gets misspell regularly, you can tackle this problem by bidding on the typos so that you don’t end up losing customers to your competitors.

Bill Hunter spoke about recent trends that are turning the world upside down. He claims that the customer is in control now, and technology innovation and broadband saturation has developed a demand for relevant, on demand information.

Marketers are being held down to new levels of accountability to Business ROI vs Media ROI and therefore there is a demand for more affectivity in strategies implemented.

Consumer shopping behaviors have also changed and budgets are shifting to be more aligned with the current media interaction, technology innovation trends.

Search has the ability to raise the awareness of a brand by aligning the campaign with all marketing messaging delivered across other media channels.

One of the interesting things Bill Mongovan spoke about was how their search and display teams are managed centrally, and when they see an increase in performance in display, they shift budget from search over to display and then vice versa, in almost a “stock trading floor” fashion.

SEO is directing valuable messages in front of people who clearly and openly express interest in your business with the use of keywords. Search is a critical marketing element both from a research standpoint as well as marketing. Thus it’s so important to integrate search into the marketing mix. With this complementary relationship; it can only benefit the client and your client relations.

At the end of the day it’s the Marketers in the Marketing departments that need to acknowledge the importance of Search in the Marketing mix. Once they have embraced this, the possibilities are endless and it will certainly be a win-win situation on all sides.