Search Engine Marketing SEM and its high-flown cousin, branding
separates success from failure. People love to talk about what
doesn't work: Super Bowl ads and other expensive campaigns which
raise awareness but don't attract customers; annoying forms of
"interruption" marketing; and so on. Inevitably, one clever marketer
has even launched a review of bad online marketing strategies called
fuckedmarketing.com. But let's focus on what works.
Search Engine Placement: Marketing that Doesn't Look Like
Advertising
It's no accident that search engines are still seen to be a great
marketing tool. Not only is much of the traffic free, but it's
targeted, so the response rates are higher. Think about it: you have
pre-qualified customers looking for solutions - even looking to buy
something. They'll be much more predisposed to your message, since
in a sense they initiated the transaction themselves. This and other
forms of marketing which are unique to the Internet are still poorly
understood by many. Just as you shouldn't believe the hype about
everyone in the technology industry getting rich, you also shouldn't
listen to all the doom and gloom that says nothing works.
MSN Works the Soft Sell
Everyone's selling something on the net (or, some say, if they
aren't then they need to be). I just leafed through some featured
"top" news stories at MSN - they were, curiously enough, all about
dating and relationships. These things lead right into the more
targeted (and highly emotion-charged) content directed at women.
Some of this stuff is very successful, and why shouldn't it be?
Print women's magazines make a bundle on advertising, in part
because the subject matter leads into sales for products relating to
personal care, which is linked to emotion and wants as opposed to
rational assessment's of one's so-called "needs." Although it hasn't
been totally figured out, content can sell products on the Internet
just as it does in print. You wouldn't believe that if you'd been
reading the newspapers lately. (Part of the problem, of course, is
that some of the more lavish online content sites were launched as
if a whole editorial organization could be supported by banner ads.
Nope.)
But content can also sell content. If print magazines are
profitable, then maybe their online incarnations need to (a) reach
more relevant readers and (b) make sure there's a compelling reason
for a lot of them to subscribe to the print version! Thus let's
never over generalize when it comes to the media business. There are
many reasons for trying a number of strategies, and the "business
end" may be lurking at several removes. Hard-nosed students of
business models may miss the subtleties of how growing awareness can
be turned into profit.
Why Shameless Self-Promoters Love the 'Net
It's also becoming apparent that individuals with something to
promote (even if it's just themselves) can make great use of online
strategies. Let's take a glimpse at something like this in action.
MSN's featured links about the perils of dating lull the voyeuristic
reader to glide from one article to another, and suddenly there I am
reading a Miss Manners column. Because of its subject matter (it's
gossipy voyeurism), it's fairly riveting. The first thing to realize
about it is that in reading her column, we just "bought" a bit of
Miss Manners - again. What I mean by that is that Judith Martin just
got another bump in the mind share department. For that alone, it
was worth it for her to give away her column.
The coup de grâce, though - and what she couldn't get so directly
from a column in the newspaper - was a plug for her latest book. If
you liked the way she put readers' problems into perspective - a
unique perspective that is far from psychoanalysis but more like
"sensible advice for not making mountains out of molehills," you
might be very interested to read her latest book, Miss Manners'
Guide to Domestic Tranquility. With a column featured on a major
portal like MSN, even a miniscule response rate would sell a lot of
copies of the book. Amazingly though, MSN doesn't make it easy to
buy (no link and no affiliation with Amazon or Barnes and Noble
online book sales).
The point is, this is a very old game. The Letterman interview
provides legitimacy for the sales pitch for the latest Tom Cruise
flick. Emeril Lagasse appears on nationwide TV for a cooking segment
on Jay Leno, and it boosts his ratings for the annual Super Bowl
edition of Emeril Live. The Oprah interview gives that John Gray
book a publicity boost, and again, the sales pitch aspect is almost
invisible to many viewers. Why would online media not seek to create
similar marketing opportunities?
Online marketers therefore need to think a bit about what kind of
journey the customer is travelling before she lands on a site. What
paths set up the site as a legitimate authority or vendor? This is
why there's so much to love about search engines and portals from
the marketer's perspective.
Case Study: Say You're Promoting a Motorcycle Magazine...
Think about this for 30 seconds or so. A consumer who just happens
to use Hotmail frequently does many searches at MSN (since Microsoft
has done a clever job of getting a lot of people, not least Hotmail
users, to use MSN). They go looking for print magazines relating to
their hobby - motorcycles. Now here's the important thing: MSN uses
the LookSmart directory structure and LookSmart directory listings
to power its web search. That's a lot of queries, as MSN is a top
three portal in nearly every country in the world. This means that a
magazine which is in the category "Lifestyle > Auto > Motorcycles >
Publications > Complete Coverage" in the LookSmart directory is one
of a select few which are getting found by consumers searching on
MSN. If Texas Moto has a prominent listing here, they're getting a
steady stream of paying subscribers. And if your magazine isn't
here, you're losing a steady stream of paying customers to Texas
Moto. And note the sales-friendly description the LookSmart editors
have written under the entry: "Publication contains useful resources
for motorcycle enthusiasts such as a dealer, ride and club locator.
Learn how to subscribe."
If you've got a business, then your issues are no different. You
need to take some quick shortcuts to ensuring maximum search engine
visibility. Instead of sitting around and getting jealous of the
Texas Moto's of the world, do what they did: get into the Looksmart
Directory right away. You can do this by paying for the LookSmart
Express Submit service, which gets your submission reviewed by an
editor in 48 hours. Not only does a listing in this directory get
you into MSN results, but also into search results for dozens of
other wide-reach portals: iWon, Excite, and the list goes on and on.
How To Get an "Unfair" Advantage
LookSmart listings (and other paid listings, like GoTo, Sprinks and
Realnames) can also give a site a higher ranking at metasearch
engines like Metacrawler, which gives sites an aggregate score based
on rankings in various search engines and directories, or Ixquick,
which gives a site a "star" for each time it appears in the Top 10
on a major search engine or directory. As it happens, a search for
motorcycle magazine using those two keywords on Ixquick gives Texas
Moto two stars - one of them thanks to Looksmart, the other from
Alltheweb, putting it on the first page. More hits for the Texas
Moto site, and more to the point, perhaps, a certain legitmacy.
Ixquick is a bit of scientific magic, so if you're ranked high here,
the user might assume, you've got to be doing something right.
A check of Metacrawler shows Texas Moto a #3 ranking overall there
using the keywords motorcycle magazine - another nice result, this
time owing to good (but not Top 10) placements in Google and
AltaVista. It looks like Texas Moto's really got some horseshoes.
But to some extent, they made their own search engine "luck."
Make no mistake about it: search engine and directory listings are
not just good because they're targeted, it's because they are seen
as legitimate, even scientific. Consumers click on search results
because they are NOT advertising, NOT a sales pitch. They're seen as
objective - at least about 100X more objective than a banner ad.