How people underestimate the search marketing industry
Friday, May 26, 2006
Gord Hotchkiss has a wonderfully inciteful article over at MediaPost Publications today. It's probably one of the best that I've read in terms of insight into how people underestimate the search marketing industry.
A few quotes:
Perhaps the problem is that most users' touch point with search seems so simple. I type in words, I see words come back--and not a lot of them, either. Most messages are 15 to 20 words at most. How hard can it be? It's this prevailing attitude that has made search the bastard child of the online ad space. We get no respect. From the outside, it seems like anyone with an IQ topping 60 could market this way. So agencies launch search divisions. Large companies find people that seem to have no pressing items on their to-do lists and make them the new director of search marketing. Everyone throws their hat in the ever increasing search marketing ring.
Search is advancing on all fronts at once...You've got new ways of using search, for broadband, on mobile devices and for finding local advertisers. And on top of that, we're just starting to understand how, when and why consumers use search. I remember once in high school chemistry a classmate spilled a bunch of mercury on a workbench top. A hundred little globs of quicksilver scattered everywhere, proving impossible to round up and contain. That's what search is like, multiplied by a factor of 100.
It's a good read, especially for a small business that's thinking about taking their search marketing on internally. While it's totally doable, it's important to have realistic expecations about exactly what quality search engine marketing entails. It's not simply something that can be delegated to the person with the most free time, it's a complex marketing challenge that should be given to someone that has a grasp of how these things work
A few quotes:
Perhaps the problem is that most users' touch point with search seems so simple. I type in words, I see words come back--and not a lot of them, either. Most messages are 15 to 20 words at most. How hard can it be? It's this prevailing attitude that has made search the bastard child of the online ad space. We get no respect. From the outside, it seems like anyone with an IQ topping 60 could market this way. So agencies launch search divisions. Large companies find people that seem to have no pressing items on their to-do lists and make them the new director of search marketing. Everyone throws their hat in the ever increasing search marketing ring.
Search is advancing on all fronts at once...You've got new ways of using search, for broadband, on mobile devices and for finding local advertisers. And on top of that, we're just starting to understand how, when and why consumers use search. I remember once in high school chemistry a classmate spilled a bunch of mercury on a workbench top. A hundred little globs of quicksilver scattered everywhere, proving impossible to round up and contain. That's what search is like, multiplied by a factor of 100.
It's a good read, especially for a small business that's thinking about taking their search marketing on internally. While it's totally doable, it's important to have realistic expecations about exactly what quality search engine marketing entails. It's not simply something that can be delegated to the person with the most free time, it's a complex marketing challenge that should be given to someone that has a grasp of how these things work
