Whitepaper on Search Marketing in 2014

 

Video Transcription

Kevin: Hello and welcome to this episode of iProspect TV. Today I am here with Bartley Sharkey who is head of our PPC department and we are going to talk about a piece of work a colleague of ours in the US did. So a guy called Jeremy Hull created a white paper and it's basically where he sees the search trends going in 2014 and Bartley has had a really good look at this, he's gone through with a fine-tooth comb and he's going to share his thoughts on this white paper and were we see search going in 2014. Bartley: I think this white paper, it's in a large way it’s kind of a response to what a lot of people are seeing as maybe the decline of paid search. Basically with the rise of social and the likes of LinkedIN for example, real time biding and display. So it's really a response to show to say how important search remains and the fact that it actually acts as a bit of glue for all the different media. So one of the main points I guess that he makesin it is that search is one of first and the last touch points of any consumer’s journey in the purchase cycle. It's how they initiate interaction, like active interaction as opposed to passive interaction through other media whether that's through seeing a billboard or through seeing a display ad or even going in store where they're browsing. But when they actually use search it's showing their intent and really what he's saying is that model hasn't changed. That basically search by now is is a mature medium compared with a lot of the other digital mediums and really what that means is that advertisers still need to use it and make use of it as one of the principal strategies within their entire digital marketing portfolio. The only thing is that right now we see it has matured a lot and what that means is that there's a lot of competition, things have really kind of settled and what we're moving into now is more of predictive search and we're looking at ways to you anticipate user behaviour as opposed to simply working off the intent in the moment. So instead of being real time intent based advertising wit Google's release of Humming Bird and Google Now. What we're moving toward is I guess predictive ads, so really what the white paper goes into is how advertisers need to be ahead of the curve, how they need to basically take advantage and put all the different data points that we now have available to us all in one place to then better serve search which still acts as the main point of conversion for many advertisers. Kevin: So good stuff. So I guess the main point then is even though we've got all these new sexy different types of media like real time biding, search is still got to definitely be a key and useful strategy because that's where people are going to go when they see a billboard or when they see a display ad and they go "what’s this all about?" they're going to search for it. Bartley: Yeah so one of the main points as well is the digital touch points; they don't make up separate entities in people's minds. People now regard all the digital universe as one place. So search being an integral part of that, even though they see ads for differentbrands in different touch points. So really it's basically essential that you’re in search and that you continue to do so and you take advantage of the more ways of targeting and predicting what users will want and what they're going to convert on. Kevin: Awesome. So guys we will include a link to that white paper, somewhere around the video. We want to give a shout out to Jeremy Hull obviously for creating that video and hopefully he doesn't mind us sharing it in this video. Again thanks to Bart for joining us and giving his thoughts on that and until next time take care and bye bye.