Search Marketing...

The wins for Search Marketing

Ability to target

The ability to segment, target and zoom in on the right audience is the key to success for any marketing campaign.

Marketers are increasingly excited by ways which they could target their audience and techniques like programmatic targeting and re-marketing provide additional firepower for marketers.

Measure, tweak and adjust almost instantly

In the past, it took a long time to even gather results and some results are often aggregate results based on extrapolation and/or approximation (e.g. AC Nielsen TV ratings, circulation audits of publications etc.). The time lag between measurement, understanding the numbers and follow-up marketing actions allowed for very little flexibility for marketers.

Never has there been a time when marketers could monitor almost real-time results, make necessary tweaks to their marketing campaigns and adjust their tactics/plan almost instantly. Marketers can look at keywords used, monitor web traffic and make any adjustments they want and opens up many possibilities to test/optimise different creatives, messages, offers with their target audience.

Draw-backs or pitfalls...

Complexity and Effort

Search marketing is getting or already complicated. Understanding how to optimise sites and/or wanting to improve SEM and persistently wanting to do it well is becoming extremely complex.

Trying to improve one’s ranking for natural search at any point in time is already complex enough. It does not help that internet is really a big battlefield where everyone is trying to game the rules and search engines are also constant changing the rules to ensure fair play and marketers can get caught out. Keeping up requires understanding of these complexities and when the goal posts are shifting.

Wanna find out more about complexities of optimising? Check out how "animals" like Penguin or Panda could possibly penalise you rightly (or wrongly). Even big brands get it wrong amid the confusion and even Google themselves get penalised... (what irony)

Costs

If your marketing budgets are small, it will be bare register a ripple in the water (see Mistake no.9). It’s unlikely that marketers are able to carry out all the optimisation themselves for search marketing themselves without hiring consultants/agencies. Being successful requires high level of persistence and it’s not a one-time effort for any marketer.

The website experience, your product or service still matters

Yes, search marketing isn’t the silver bullet that will end the war, while marketers can do excellent work in search marketing and bring people to your site. Having a bad website that gives a bad experience, poor content will put all the work into waste.

It’s also important for marketers to remember that the product/service still matters, the end goal is still to convert traffic into leads/sales!