What Search Can – and Can’t – Do

Our friends at Enquiro recently published an article making some cogent points about search. 

On the one hand, it’s exciting to see search, including SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) flourishing as a marketing option. On the other, it’s alarming to see so many people jumping into an admittedly-sturdy lifeboat in a raging sea.

Rather than seeing search as a marketing channel, Enquiro suggests, we should view it as a connector, connecting interested prospects and customers with your place in cyberspace.

A similar article in Ad Age compares search to trade or in-store promotion.
 
Our experience in B-to-B search is very similar.

Search is one of the greatest things going, helping web prospects zero in on exactly what they want. But the problem comes when search is expected to raise awareness.

We’ve found that search is not the best way to raise awareness. As a “connector,” it can only connect awareness that’s out there – symbolized by the words the user types into the search box – with pages that exist on your web site.

If you’re not running other promotional programs and have little awareness, it makes no sense to build an Adwords program and expect that to do the trick. Especially if there’s no awareness of your brand. Or your product is a “departure” into a new market or technology where awareness needs to be raised.

At Godfrey, we define the marketing portion of the sales cycle in three ways: attract, for the awareness-generating tools like traditional advertising, public relations, and online promotion; interact for those tools like the Internet and trade shows where prospects show up for their first look at your offerings; and engage, for the cultivation or nurturing process of turning an interested prospect into a serious sales lead or even a customer. We look at search as a “portal,” if you will, between those first two stages, attract and interact. Perhaps even the “eye of the needle.”

It certainly makes sense to have search working as well as possible, connecting attract and interact. But it’s not much help when there’s no attract to connect to the interact.

And we’ve also seen situation where marketers had no “interact” – no pages to pay off the concepts they wanted to advance. Search certainly can’t happen in a vacuum; it will only generate high bounce rates and low quality scores.

So many things, especially PR, work well with search and search works much better with a fully integrated marketing program. But alone? Search isn’t much different from any other isolated tactic. That’s what B-to-B integration and hyperintegration is all about.