Search Marketing Insights (Emerging Search Trends)
Search in 2010 and Beyond
By: Jamie Keaney, Senior Search Strategist
As 2010 continues, companies will explore more effective ways of managing their online and offline campaigns and target spend to the most productive channels. Many companies will focus on making their campaigns work independently while aligning them with a similar message to yield better results. Learning from each marketing channel, creating efficiencies between them, and integrating their marketing messages will be a core focus for many marketers.
Google Leads the Way in the Media Mix
In 2009, Google announced that it was struggling to attribute online customer activity to offline advertisers. Although the inability to see concrete results has limited Google’s spend on offline campaigns, Google is currently looking for a solution that will help attribute customer activity to both online and offline channels.
For this reason, 2010 will be the year Google helps marketers build synergy between offline and online marketing campaigns. Google may offer tools like attribution and media mix models, which will help drive advertisers to invest more money with Google’s Paid Search and banner ads. According to Eric Schmidt, Google is well on its way toward developing a multivariate media mix model.
This advance in Google services will ultimately drive many companies to test Google as a consulting company. If Google is successful in aligning these services with what competing firms offer, it will provide a cheap yet effective way for clients to manage their marketing campaigns.
Social Networking Cools Off, But Keeps on Trucking
It’s clear that Search Engines are taking social networks seriously. Witness the fact that real-time search is a new feature on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. We believe that search engines will start incorporating social media metrics, such as brand mentions and the number of links shared, into their ranking algorithms.
In 2010, we expect to see more companies utilize social media, to achieve a more active voice. At the same time, companies will continue to struggle in defining the proper usage and place for social network campaigns in their business. In the next few years strong penetration rates of social media users in the US will begin to saturate the audience, causing growth of social network users to slow, as reported by eMarketer:
The saturation of social media channels will be accompanied by a maturation in social media marketing tactics. As ad models are developed on the popular social networks, and media mix models are developed to include social networking Web sites, marketers will better understand its ROI and begin allocating more budget toward them.
More Companies Discover the Power of Multichannel Marketing for Cross Channel Brand Development
When a consumer wants to purchase a product or service, they can research it, compare it to similar products, and see what their peers think in just minutes. The ability to use mobile devices during all stages of the buying process and access social networks to see what their peers are saying has made this process even simpler for consumers. Forrester had a great visual depiction of customer touch points in their June, 2008 report titled Creating A Multichannel View Of Your Customer.
Each channel is a path to the consumer and must work independently to accomplish individual goals that lead to a common conclusion. Unfortunately, many companies are still rushing into these channels without an understanding of what customers hope to accomplish. They miss out on creating a strategy that will allow each channel to integrate.
For instance, most agencies tout Search Engine Marketing (both SEO and PPC) as the ultimate way to see results, yet few companies have fully embraced SEM as a channel for brand development. Less than one-third of companies surveyed by Forrester said they want to or can provide a consistent cross-channel experience. Over the next year, companies will begin to use SEM as a branding vehicle while they begin to understand what brand equity non-branded keywords can drive. Marketers will learn that brand development can begin with and be reinforced through online channels, including and perhaps especially Search.
As more companies become aware of opportunities in multichannel marketing, there will be an increase focus on multi-channel online strategies at the core of marketing campaigns. More marketing dollars will flow toward developing compatible mobile Web sites, mobile applications, and the management of social networks. Marketers will work harder than ever this year to connect online and offline channels and realize the importance of multichannel campaigns.
