Escaping the Search Ghetto: Becoming Digital Marketing Strategists
I recently had the pleasure of attending Pubcon 2013 in Las Vegas, where
my brain was jam packed with a plethora of awesome internet marketing
information – a lot of it directly relating my role in managing search engine
marketing campaigns. One session, however, stood out from the others
– it challenged me to take a step back and view my role from a different perspective. The presenter, (Bill Leake, CEO of Apogee) asked how many people in the room were search engine marketing specialists. Not surprisingly, most were. He then asked how many people wanted to be search engine marketing specialists 10 years from now. I’ll admit that I didn’t raise my hand, but surprisingly nobody else did either.
– it challenged me to take a step back and view my role from a different perspective. The presenter, (Bill Leake, CEO of Apogee) asked how many people in the room were search engine marketing specialists. Not surprisingly, most were. He then asked how many people wanted to be search engine marketing specialists 10 years from now. I’ll admit that I didn’t raise my hand, but surprisingly nobody else did either.
Now don’t judge me yet –
I LOVE search engine marketing. Search marketers are a pretty devout crowd. We
take pride in what we do and stay up with the newest trends in the industry. We
are awesome at the subtleties of the tools
we use – AdWords, Bing Ads, Webmaster Tools, Analytics, etc. We could (and
often do) spend entire days clicking through our PPC accounts making
adjustments or performing keyword research to write the perfect <title>
tag for our client’s niche landing page.
So that begs the
question: why didn’t anyone raise their hand?
It’s Not Just Search Anymore
If we don’t want to
pigeon-hole ourselves as search engine marketers, doing so on an even broader
spectrum as “marketing professionals” seems that much more foolish. Search
engine marketing is an important aspect of online business and the digital
marketing mix. If you learn how people interact with search engines, you
can clearly see that search needs to be a major consideration for companies
doing business on the net. At the same time, however, you don’t want to put all
of your eggs in one basket. The technology landscape is changing faster than
anything else in the world. The next big change in technology could happen
tomorrow without warning, encouraging
us to adapt and expand our thinking to that of more of a digital marketing
strategist. If for some reason it affects how (or if) search marketers do
business, then a lot of people could be without jobs, or worse, without other
technical skills.
This is why we as search
engine marketers MUST begin developing the skill sets and critical thinking we
need to rise above as marketers.
Even if that worst case
scenario never happens, we still want to develop those skills to become more
effective with our online marketing activities. With Google’s recent
Hummingbird update and [not provided] becoming 100% of organic search queries
in Analytics, it is clear that even the search engine landscape is volatile. If
we are ever to move out of the “search ghetto”, we need to stop being “search
marketers” and become “marketers who happen to be freaking awesome at search”.
Instead of using tactics and short-sighted strategy to get people to a website,
we need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and try to truly understand
our clients, customers, and where we fit into the marketing mix.
3 Tips for Escaping the Search Ghetto
- Try to better understand context, cohort marketing, and develop strategies for semantic search. Identifying specific language cues will help you better understand your audience and better communicate with them. Likewise, people using social networks are in a different mindset than people who are performing a Google search. Learn how all of these channels work together and, more importantly, how your audiences use them. In the same respect, proactively stay ahead of trends and develop a mobile-friendly website. You have different audience segments using different channels in different contexts, so marketing to them all in the exact same way is like trying to make a living as a sad clown for hire – you may make a dollar here or there, but mostly you’ll just freak people out.
- Make sure your clients have a freaking foundation to their content strategy. Content is great, but as my teammate Alex Morask says in the linked post, “Rolling out a content marketing program without addressing structural content strategy is like trying to build a beautiful new skyscraper on top of a landfill”. Truth. Don’t just innovate for the sake of innovating. Know why. Have content rooted in a deeper cause.
- Do more to understand your clients’ businesses, their products, their customers, and their competitors. This seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how little some search marketers really understand the businesses they are working for. They may know the “top keywords”, but do they know what differentiates their client from competitors? If so, are they reflecting those key differentiators in ad copy, keyword targets, and website content? Sometimes these differentiators can be communicated tangibly – other times they may come through the attitude of the brand. If you cannot figure out what differentiates your client’s business, then you will fail. If your client can’t figure out what differentiates their business, then it’s about who has the lowest price and you wouldn’t want to work with them anyway.
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