The Power of Search Marketing
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010By Scott Neslund, CEO
When you look across the media landscape you see many significant changes. DVR household penetration has topped 40% giving more consumers the ability to shift television viewing to a time of their choice and skip commercial advertising. Sites like Hulu give consumers even more control over when and where to watch video content. The print industry is in massive transformation as many local newspapers went bankrupt last year and the New York Times put a stake in the ground by deciding to charge consumers for their digital content. E-readers are moving from one of kind with the Kindle to a sea of choices including Apple’s perceived Holy Grail with the iPad.
Social networking has taken the communications industry by storm as Facebook visitors grew to over 300 million and the crowd on Twitter seems to be topping out around 60 million at the moment. And probably one of the most telling statistics indicating how much consumers have embraced the digital environment is that holiday shopping online increased 5% to over $27 billion in sales last year while brick and mortar sales saw declines. Even struggling retailers like Sears have discovered that their best hope for revenue growth is online and launched an aggressive plan to save the company by building an e-tailing effort that captures 40 million visitors each month.
All of these sweeping changes in consumer media behavior and technological advances emphasize the importance of search in advertising. With expanding choices at their fingertips consumers will continue to exercise more and more control over their information and entertainment options. Any business that hopes to grow in the next decade will need to know to capitalize on search behavior in order to have a winning business plan.
“Serving 23 Billion Each Month and Growing”: ComScore announced that U.S. consumers conducted 23 billion searches in December, a 22% increase over the same month last year. Worldwide the number of conducted searches was 131 billion, a 46% increase. Media behavior like this can’t be ignored and it shows how routine search behavior has become among consumers.
For advertisers to thrive in this new world order where consumers are in control and search for what they want or need versus simply reacting to messages that are placed in front of them, they will need to know how to do the following:
· Understand how their total media investment drives consumer search behavior. SEO and PPC are not the only ways to drive search online. Television, print, OOH and all media including WOM influence how consumers search.
· Optimize based on insights and analytics: Each web traffic report has the potential to show advertisers better ways to improve search results and add value to the business. Advertisers must have the right tools, processes and people to take advantage of this data.
· Engage consumers with creativity and relevance. Simply driving consumers to a specific site is not enough. The information needs to be relevant, interesting and in many cases creative so that consumers want to interact with the advertising.
The power of search marketing delivers all of this for advertisers and gives them a significant opportunity to build their business at a time when the media landscape is changing racially. Agencies for the future realize this and agencies that don’t will find themselves managing decline for the next decade.













Since its introduction in 1996, Flash has become one of the most widely-used platforms on the Internet for web animations, web design, and website development. Though its use is not search engine friendly (with only the recent ability from Google to index links within Flash), the benefits of Flash have propelled its use around the globe. However, there is a dark side of Flash that you should know about: Flash can potentially run third-party scripts that gather your website’s information without your knowledge.