Search Marketing Fundamentals

People have always asked me in the past, as what are the most important things that a person should possess to get into Search. My answer has always been based on certain common factors.

Divine Concepts:

Your concept regarding the subject matter should be good and clear. Some of them are as follows:

• Should know about the Editorial guidelines for different Search Engines.
• What are their policies regarding online advertising?
• How do they function? – Method, Technique, Technology used.
• Which of these search engines are successful for what kind of campaigns?
• Approach of these search engines to the online consumer.
• Market penetration of these search engines.

Analytical Skills (1+1 = 2)

You should be good with data analysis and understand them well. As they speak a lot about past, present and future trends. Based on this data your future strategies are going to be formalized and executed. The data to an online search marketer should appear as a picture which tells you a story.

Cool Strategies:

Be aware of the winning strategies in the game as you should know what has to be done and when it has to be done. These may include bidding strategies and campaign strategies. There are certain basic rules and success strategies in online search marketing know them well and use them wisely.

Bidding Strategies: what amount to bid and at what time is very crucial, there are certain tools provided by different search engines like ad scheduling feature of Google Adwords gives you this option to automate your bids according to particular time and date. Even there are certain independent vendors that can provide you with bidding tools e.g. Dart, Atlas etc.

What kind of budget to be spent and in what time it has to be spent can be easily decided and monitored by the help of these tools.

Campaigns Strategies would include what kind Search engines that have to be used to target the audience. What networks should be targeted (search or content). The negative keywords to be used, both at the campaign as well as adgroup level. This acts as a filter and ensures that only relevant traffic comes to your site. Keyword selection, Landing page creation and many other things form a part of the campaign strategy.

From Convention to Innovation:

Be innovative & creative, try new things as the online search marketing is very dynamic in nature and it keeps on evolving. You can’t stick to certain rules and strategies for long as they keep on changing at a very rapid pace. You should have a knack to learn and understand technology well as new features are kept being added by these search engines.

“Make the difference” factor is very important in marketing and advertising industry this can be only achieved through being innovative and creative. Even the success of a campaign can be simply relying on this factor.

One of the most important thing, that can fall under this criteria would be the ad-creative. Ad-copy is the voice of a campaign and they should speak well and appeal to those that matter the most. Understanding the target audience is a very important factor and your creative should be done in a manner that appeals the targeted segment.

You should know that you are targeting a teenager, a person in 40’s, a Man or a Women etc. and this should reflect in your creative, as this acts as a filter and keeps unwanted visitors at bay.

Keep your friends close and enemies closer:

There is a saying keep your friends close and enemies closer would rightly fit into search marketing as you should know what your competitors are up to. A thorough competitive analysis based on (SWOT) should be done at a strategic level which would finally be helpful in deciding the Goals, objectives and the Scope of the campaign.

You can further go into doing a PEST or a STEP analysis to better understand the industry and segment. This would help you in further classifying and narrowing your target segment.

There may be many approaches and views to search marketing but mostly they would be based on certain crucial concepts that have been discussed as above.