Inquiry
Marketing Fulfills SEM's Promise
Sponsored by Oneupweb/ byFredrick Marckini | September 8, 2003
Search engines are, metaphorically speaking, the very heart of the Internet
-- the pump that allows the online economy to flow through the Web. Search
engines animate the Web; they make it useful. For marketers, they represent
the Holy Grail specifically because of the seeking behavior they facilitate.
Marketers are beginning to recognize the importance of search engines,
but two widely held misconceptions about search engine marketing (SEM)
persist. First is the idea pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising alone
constitutes a complete search marketing campaign. Second is the concept
SEM is simply about keywords and conversions.
As I begin this new weekly column for ClickZ, let me dispel those misconceptions.
Both, Not Just One
SEM must include both PPC search advertising and "natural"
Web site optimization to be complete. Today, many marketers overlook the
power of natural search optimization. In my next column I'll introduce,
in more detail, companies driving outrageous traffic and success from
their natural search campaigns -- independently of their PPC search advertising
campaigns:
A motion picture industry site that now drives an incremental 6 million
unpaid search referrals
An automotive retail site that gained an incremental 1.6 million unpaid
search referrals -- in the second year of a search optimization campaign.
An online retailer whose unpaid search traffic grew from 2,340 monthly
search referrals to 351,000 -- doubling online sales in two months.
The New Name of the Game
Though keywords and conversions are certainly important, focusing
on instantaneous conversions is insufficient for most marketers. Search
marketing has branding value as well, and offline conversions can be measured.
But the most important thing to remember is don't sell search marketing
short by concentrating on only clicks and conversions. How you conceptualize
it will impact your success rate. The industry is changing quickly --
don't get caught up in outmoded ways of thinking.
In essence search marketing seeks to understand your audience's buying
behavior and uses its query language as a proxy for purchase intent. Depending
on the language, marketers infer differing degrees of purchase intent
and make differing offers as a buyer moves through a qualification funnel.
When you think about it as a behavioral marketing approach, "SEM"
is a wholly inadequate title to embody the depth and scope of the strategy
involved in targeting an audience that searches. As a practice name, it
describes only the media on which a marketing tactic is executed, not
the robust strategy required to intercept the seeking behavior of a searcher.
For this reason, I propose a new category name: inquiry marketing. Inquiry
marketing emphatically suggests the buying behavior the marketer is attempting
to influence, not the medium on which it is applied.
Inquiry marketing treats SEM as a single tactic in a broader marketing
process and context. Inquiry marketing addresses buyers' behavior and
individual buying cycles by the exact words used to construct a query.
It considers the time of day and where a user queries, as well as any
buyer behavior after initial interest and awareness have been generated.
The first expression of inquiry marketing was the yellow pages, but the
Internet blew the top off that seeking model. Contextual ad units are
also a component of inquiry marketing because buyers will visit various
Web sites as they move along their inquiry process. Advertisers need to
reach them and be relevant to them as they progress through the various
stages of their buying decision.
I recently spoke with Forrester Research's Principal Analyst Charlene
Li. We discussed how inquiry marketing will be used in marketing campaigns,
starting with science-based keyword selection. According to Li:
On the consumer side, understanding which of your consumers are using
which keywords on which search engines is what most marketers are missing.
When I look at the keywords that are being queried on Yahoo! versus Google,
different keywords work on different sites even at different times of
the day.... It's all about matching the level of inquiry marketing to
where the user is in the funnel.
Ultimately, inquiry marketing seeks to introduce and place the brand in
the path of this interest -- after the interest has been generated on-
or offline. This new paradigm and marketplace descriptor is needed because
it addresses the fundamental macro shift in buyer behavior we witness
today -- namely, the buyers' use of these several global query utilities
(search engines) made available on the Web. We're seeing 400 million daily
inquiries, all seeking something. Never before in the course of marketing
history have so many searched for so much, using so few search tools.
Gary Stein, online advertising and marketing analyst at Jupiter Research,
which shares a parent company with ClickZ, agreed:
Inquiry marketing is an appropriate name because it suggests a marketing
strategy that looks at the bigger picture -- instead of simply, 'We found
this thing, [search], that customers like to do.' Search engine marketing
has shown the world that you can be more relevant by letting consumers
find the solution themselves. Thinking in terms of inquiry marketing produces
a much better long-term view because it suggests that we have identified
this way that consumers behave and we're going to service that need. The
notion that search marketing is on a continuum is dead on.... Customers
may be fielding their inquiries in an entirely differently way in five
years, but they'll still be making inquiries. Therefore, inquiry marketing
is a really good distinction....
There's still a need for traditional push advertising because you have
to cause people to want to learn about things. Getting customers to start
to inquire is still a huge challenge -- but thanks to search, marketers
can do a better job of working with that inquiry and making sure that
inquiry turns into a value-generating behavior.
Search marketing has always excited me but inquiry marketing fulfills
its promise. Welcome to the age of inquiry marketing. SEM has no idea
just how big this boat will be. In the next few weeks and months we will
explore it together.
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