For over a century the principles of marketing have actually remained largely the same. Sure, new media choices have come & gone; and certainly the way that we produce ads has become hugely efficient compared to days gone by; but the basic principles have remained the same. Take a product or service. Decide on what the unique selling proposition is. Identify who the best target customers for that proposition might be, and then attempt to develop messaging that you think might best appeal to those consumers. Then, the media planners have recommended outlets where ‘these type of consumers’ tend to gather, and hope that the message happens to hit a certain percentage of them that actually have a need at that time. This has led to placing car ads in car magazines and websites, in the hopes that people looking for a new car will read a car mag, ignoring the other 80% of readers who you are still paying for (on a CPM basis) which are just gearheads and love reading about cars.

There are now two key challenges which are rapidly destroying that model: First, people generally don’t want to be ‘sold to’ and today’s ‘empowered consumer’ is generally ignoring many of the 2,000 brand messages that they are exposed to every day. We see this through the rise of pop-up blockers, and the fact that almost 90% of consumers who have TiVo type devices which can skip ads, do. The second part is that with the massively fragmented media environment that we live in today, it is becoming extremely expensive and inefficient to have to buy sufficient coverage on all the relevant media options in order to gather the critical mass of consumers who have the need for your product at that time AND are receptive to your advertising message. This is even further complicated through the trends of time-shifting and place-shifting where today’s consumers have the ability to decide where, when and how they want to consume their favourite content. They are no longer tied in to watching their show (and your ad) at the scheduled time on channel 5. In fact in last month’s top rated Grey’s Anatomy season premiere, Nielsen’s reported that more than 4 million viewers - 17% of the audience - watched the program on a DVR upto 7 days after broadcast. (and stats show that 90% probably skipped the ads)

All of the above changes have contributed to the meteoric rise in search marketing over the past 5 years. Total consumer search volume has increased by 39% in 2006 alone, indicating that consumers are taking control of the situation and are now PULLING the marketing messages that they are interested at that moment, rather than sitting idly on their sofa while our random messages passively wash over them. This is training today’s marketers to stop “looking for consumers”, and instead providing “ways for the relevant consumers to find you. However, if you are interested enough to read this article then I’m guessing that none of that should come as news to you. What is new, and forms the fundamental change that I mentioned at the beginning is the role which search is now playing in integrated marketers plans.

The typical campaign flow goes something like this:

However, the marketing process has historically started at the right hand side with the product and the sale, and then worked towards the left: developing the point-of-sale (online or offline), then the ad, then the media plan... and possibly as an afterthought a bit of budget left over for SEM & SEO activities.
We have seen three recent examples within DEMAND that show the benefits of reversing that mindset 180’.

Our Singapore team manage the Search Engine Optimisation efforts for Singapore Airlines globally. Typically, SEO is done as an afterthought on existing corporate sites with mixed results. In the SIA case though, we worked with the client to custom develop individual landing pages relevant to each country and longtail keyword combinations. The results: a 50% increase in online transactions within 4 months from the SEO managed sources – without spending a penny on media.

One of the beautiful things about measured search marketing is that it seems to work just as well in a B2B environment as it does for B2C. As an example of this, our team in China manage the online lead generation efforts for SAP. In a recent controlled experiment they developed a new campaign with dynamic landing pages which each had a completely different look & messaging based on which search keywords or Linkstorm ad the customer came from. Instead of being dropped at the front door, the customer now had a consistently relevant experience from search to sale. The results were staggering with leads generated up by 18% over the generic version.

Lastly, eBay has to be held up as one of the best examples of companies who allow their search activities to drive the broader marketing strategies. When we launched eBay in the South East Asian markets we were managing a longtail of nearly ½ million keyword combinations. In fact a recent iProspect study showed that 84% of surveyed consumers were likely to refine their searches with additional keywords moving down the longtail when faced with irrelevant results to their initial search. eBay knows the true cost & value of throwing up a lot of tentacles and seeing what sticks. In this way when a consumer is searching for an obscure collectible item, they will be exposed to eBay’s highly relevant messaging with almost no competition. Each of these millions of consumer interactions are then tracked and converted into meaningful insights which drive the site’s design and promotional activities.

Three different marketers, in three different industries. Each one now benefiting though from the value that comes when you fundamentally reverse the briefing process and allow the campaign long tail to wag the dog.