“Selling to people who want to hear from you is more
effective than interrupting strangers who don’t.” So says Seth Godin, the
post-modern marketer who announced the death of mass marketing and the rise of
micro-marketing. But what is micro-marketing? Is it not just a fancy new term
that only serves to dress up the traditional marketing process of segmenting,
targeting and positioning (STP) brands? To answer this, let’s briefly consider
how traditional STP works. You identify groups of individuals who are all
similar in some way. It might be based on demographics, lifestyle, behaviour,
or whatever. You target this ‘homogenous’ group with a marketing program and
you aim to position your brand on some point-of-difference. However, as the
global proliferation and adoption of all things digital has shown us, this
process is fundamentally flawed. Why? Because no matter how ‘homogenous’ the
segment is, it is inherently ‘heterogeneous’. Although the people within the
group might share a similarity, they are all individuals, with individual
needs, preferences, behaviours, values, and lifestyles. Marketing is about
meeting customer needs profitably, not pigeon-holing people and adopting a
one-size-fits-all solution. Marketing has become personal. Really personal.
One such manifestation of the highly personal nature of
marketing in the web 2.0 era is search marketing. Search marketing involves
making sure your message is put in front of those who want to hear from you (as
opposed to interrupting strangers who don’t through mass marketing). We now
spend as much time online as we do consuming any other media. In fact, if you
are a generation Y consumer (someone born between roughly 1978 and early
2000’s), you most likely spend more time online than you do watching
television, listening to the radio or reading newspapers/magazines. This time
spent online has affected how consumers
search for brands. The fact is, when people want to find out about a product, a
service, a brand, they don’t rely on mass media; they rely on micro-media. They
trust a search engine. They “Google-it”. They search for what they are looking
for and Google returns results that best fit their search. Whether the goal is
to achieve a click-through (to achieve sales) or just to achieve an impression
(for brand building), your brand simply must feature. Why? Because if it
doesn’t, not only are you not considered, but you don’t exist.
In today’s highly connected world, where people demand immediacy
in having the information they want at their fingertips at any given time, day
or night, brands simply must be found online or they will die. And they must be
found easily. 73% of search engine users never look beyond the first page.
Marketers must invest their time in search marketing and ensure that their
brand is showing up in both paid and organic results above the fold (visible at
the top of the first page). Having a nice website that cannot be found is about as useful as designing and printing a nice brochure and hiding it in a cupboard. It starts with making sure
your website content is keyword rich. And not words you consider key, but words
the people carrying out the search consider key. Marketers must track these
keywords to make sure they are still relevant. Ask yourself, what words do my
customers and prospects use when searching for my product? Although nobody
outside of Google fully understands the ‘secret sauce’ that is the algorithm,
which is made up of over 200 spiders or bots of weighted data used to evaluate
how relevant your website is with respect to the user’s search, we do know that
certain things help. Like updating your website content regularly and updating
it with highly relevant and compelling content. Using, not just keywords, but
meta-tags (keywords written into the code of your website). Having links to
your website from other trusted third-party websites helps too. It’s all about
building relevance, authority and trustworthiness.
And with all this technology, marketers need to be careful
not to forget what the whole thing is about. “Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
is not about optimising for search engines, it’s about optimising for humans”
(Dharmesh Shah, Hub Spot). And when you optimise for humans, you ensure you can
be found; with relevance and authority. Search marketing has given marketers a
fantastic tool that enables them to personally sell to people who want to hear
from them.
Gavin Fox MSc
W: www.foxmarketing.ie
E: gavin@foxmarketing.ie
T: +353 87 649 7660
Connect with me...
LinkedIn... http://ie.linkedin.com/in/gavindfox/
Twitter... https://twitter.com/gavindfox
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