The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
July 2007, Volume 6, Issue 7

Why Search Marketing Demands Your Input

by Jason Damas, Algorithmic Search Analyst, iProspect

If you work in marketing for a big established brand, you’ve probably grown pretty comfortable with the myriad ways you can build visibility for your products and services. From newspaper ads to TV commercials to road-side billboards, chances are that you’ve dabbled in a few of the “set it and forget it” marketing methods that let you sit back and watch the money roll in.

The Gig is Up

Granted, it was fun while it lasted, but the days of auto-pilot marketing are gone. Sure, you can still obtain brand impressions the old-fashioned way, but to fully participate in today’s marketplace, you need to have an online strategy that includes search marketing. And while many marketers might think this can be overcome by just hiring a search marketing vendor to do the job, it’s not that simple. If you want to do it right, there’s more involved. A lot more.

With search marketing, you can’t just pick a search engine and write an advertisement, and then go paint your office. It takes knowledge, expertise, time—and most importantly—marketer involvement. In short, search marketing is not a one-sided endeavor. Unless you become an active participant in the process, your success will be limited.

Below are a few ways you’ll need to dig in with your vendor:

Build Content. Search engines look for, index, and then return pages that contain textual content. Not only will you need fresh content—and lots of it—you’ll also need good content that seeks to inform or entertain in order to achieve natural search visibility, and you’ll need top-notch marketing copy for paid search landing pages. After all, would you opt-in to a boring advertisement on the Web? I doubt it. If people are coming to your website, then they are interested and have questions. Answer them.

Get Buy-In From Your Web Development Team. It never fails to amaze me that marketers engage with a search marketing vendor without first talking to their Web development team. Especially since chances are that you’ll need to make at least a few labor-intensive technical modifications to optimize for organic search, such as renaming URLs or redirecting pages differently. You’ll also need to properly track your PPC URLs, and make sure you aren’t accidentally buying traffic for dead pages. These are necessary moves that take coordination. Before you begin, make sure your Web development team has the resources to make on-the-page changes that may arise.

Learn to Let Go. It can be a bit of an eye-opener for marketers when they realize that people are all over the Web using “social media” to have conversations about, and interactions with, their brand. The loss of control can hit marketers hard, and not surprisingly, many of them react by sticking their head in the sand. The best way to approach this fundamental change is by accepting the fact that the days of one-way branding messages are over. Instead, get ready to make an impression with users by showing how you’ll interact with them. Re-think the role of your website and your brand’s place in the competitive landscape, and you won’t be left out of the discussion.

Don’t Set Yourself Up for Failure

The way you market your brand online today is not the same way you would’ve marketed your brand via traditional channels in the past, but these adjustments are happening regardless of whether you’ve already jumped in to participate. You should be ready—and excited even—to make these changes. Go in prepared and with the right mindset, and you’ll be on track to build visibility (and most importantly, consumer relationships) in the most vital online channels.

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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: July 2007, Volume 6, Issue 7

Why Search Marketing Demands Your Input

The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
July 2007, Volume 6, Issue 7