A few months ago, Gord Hotchkiss wrote an article about how “Search Marketing is
Crossing the Chasm”; parlaying how, as an industry, Search Marketing has evolved
into more mainstream markets – crossing that chasm or hitting that tipping point
from where it goes from an early adopter innovation into a common corporate
budgetary line item.
He is entirely right.
I don’t argue that Search Marketing has reached the mainstream, or that its pace
of adoption has increased momentum – these are industry accepted mores that make
it such an interesting time to be involved in the work. I mean Google has
emerged as the X-generations Warren Buffet (not the Margaritaville guy), almost
completely replacing the toddler NASDAQ index as a baseline for the
marketing/tech sectors economic well-being. Fortune-500 companies are looking
for outside expertise as the value in Search is becoming more and more apparent.
What seems particularly interesting to me, is not necessarily the timeline or
growth of Search, but the “whys” and the “what’s in store.” I think that as
Search becomes more and more readily adopted, the role of user/customer
relationships and Search will become more and more prevalent.
Whys
Fortune-500 companies were not the innovators that developed the Internet.
Garage based mentality created the Web – people without the financial backbone
to be restricted by unproven mediums and having to mitigate risk for
stockholders; people that were not afraid to be bold and build a Website to
market traditional products in new ways.
Some people made money, some people lost their shirts – some did both.
But it took the bigger of the brick-and-mortar operations a little longer to
develop a Web presence, and when they did, it was a rush job, a band-aid
solution built on a “good enough” strategy pushed by an unprecedented priority.
Why?...
CEOs were losing their jobs because upstarts that were not even on the
competitive horizon a few years earlier were biting off bigger and bigger pieces
of all but owned profit margins. This happened because the same guys creating
Websites hung out with the guys creating Search Engines, (or at the very least
they had a mutually beneficial relationship like barnacles and a blue whale - oh
how the roles have changed over the last five years as the barnacle became the
whale and vice versa). And people/consumers adopted Search because computers
became affordable (it’s no stretch that the two have a correlation) and Search
was easier than actually going out and window shopping or having to create
requests for tender and reference check the “heck out of ‘em.”
Basically, Search is being adopted because it works.
Google alone gets
61.84% of the total global Search volume (Hitwise data –
December 15th-2006) – translate that into a hard number and the financial pie
looks pretty appetizing to every and any company in the world. Plus, the
Fortune-500 haven’t been able to get their assumed “just share” of the Search
pie because realistically, it isn’t enough just to have a Website you really
need to optimize that Website; and band-aid mentality doesn’t allow you to do
that.
So what is happening now, Fortune-500s are scrambling to redesign their Websites
because it has a proven ROI – only, now they want to do it right, because Search
has a proven ROI. This creates two problems:
1.) maintaining your SERP presence and visibility through the transition,
and 2.) building that SERP presence and visibility out through the transition.
At its root, it’s been consistently viewed as an issue of traffic – maintaining
and building traffic at the expense of competitors and not yourself – but using
this as your impetus is tragically flawed.
A lot of firms are very good at this, and for a lot of firms this is all that
they do. After all, it is accepted that this is what Search is, and this is how
Search will “cross the chasm.” But Search should be so much more…
What’s in Store?
Financial Analysts always say that there are two ways to make more money: get a
raise or spend less. Spending less will always make you more money, forever and
ever – it is sustainable; however, when you ask for a raise, you inevitable
celebrate your cubicle victory with a fancy dinner and a gift. You never notice
the new tax bracket until too late.
What am I getting at?
Search needs to focus on retaining traffic and its role in relationship
management to give companies real value. You see, it’s not about getting more
traffic; it’s about doing more with your traffic.
The Search Engines are already laying the groundwork for this. This is why
Landing Page quality is becoming so much more important in determining
cost/clicks.
If you think of the entire customer relationship as a straight line – the Search
engines know they have a toe hold on the point of online purchase phase. They
even have a pretty good toe hold on first contact and other touch points through
organic listings, but they don’t own the consideration with offline purchase
section or the maintaining customer relations section.
Having a successful customer relationship means really connecting with a user
throughout brand building and awareness phases (PPC can be effective here, even
though that is not a common practice, through ad messaging targeted to a
research intent), coaching the consideration and sale, but also maintaining and
sustaining that relationship post-sale. Search can have an active role
throughout this entire process – through social media, multimedia, sponsorship
of blogs, forums, and newsletters – Search does not have to operate in half
integrated silos, nor should it.
As companies begin to “cross the chasm” and transition their Websites, this
relation management perspective needs to be the overarching goal for all
activity. But in addition, this needs to be the only absolute success metric. If
you want Search to work for you, you absolutely need to start from the
perspective that you are building, nurturing, and rewarding a relationship with
your customers – otherwise, all you are really doing is mathematics and meta
tags.
If you want to know more about how relationship management works with Search,
and innovative techniques to making all the elements of Search work for your
website – I strongly suggest the following Blogs:
• Usetube
•
Web Analytics World
•
SEOSpace
•
SponsoredB2B
•
SearchTank
Each blog is customer centric in its focus – and understands how relationship
management will be what defines Search in the near future. |
SEO
Rick
Tobin