• by Gerry Bavaro , June 9, 2008

Over the past couple of weeks, I've had the opportunity to digest the thought-provoking, inspiring conversations that occurred at this year's Search Insider Summit. It's clear to me that we as an industry are beginning to view search more holistically.  Yes, we still call it "search marketing," but let's face it: search is a behavior among many behaviors and interaction points, ultimately leading down the path to the golden ticket: an action (conversion, page view, subscription, lead, etc.).  Here are some tough issues for us to wrestle with as the industry continues to evolve.

Silos: Who created them (and who should get rid of them)? Consumers don't see silo'd channels as they move through the awareness, interest, desire, and action stages of marketing.  But we as an industry have organized ourselves into a set of lenses so narrow that they often result in failure to see "the forest for the trees."

Don't get me wrong: the conferences and trade shows that define our industry, including Search Insider Summit, SMX, and SES, are important venues for imparting specialized, granular knowledge, but their very success reinforces a kind of "silo-think" that prevents us from advancing. Marketing is a fragmented, specialized world today, and one important insight from Search Insider Summit concerned the fact that search is most effective when you "get the right people in the room working together."
 
Will SEM morph into CRM? A vision of cross-channel, targeted marketing based on behaviors and interaction points is essentially what CRM is about, because the pillars of effective CRM strategies are technology and data warehousing/analysis.  After years and billions of dollars wasted on failed CRM implementation strategies, major corporations are just now realizing clear best practices for effective data-based marketing and customer relationship management.  SAP, Siebel, Oracle, are all software vendors providing platforms that store and tie various data points together with the purpose of acting on that data. 

But in search, most technologies have been focused primarily on bid management and campaign performance reporting (many tools don't even perform these limited functions very well). Add multiple customer interaction points that must be warehoused, analyzed, and used for the purpose of improving cross-channel campaign performance, and one has to ask the obvious question, "what are you doing right now in real time based on data that's being collected?"  Because search, display, social, mobile and website visits all happen in real time, like great CRM, let's not underestimate the power of technology to transform an evolved search vision into reality.

Web sites -- and other neglected things. Even while we in the industry watch the leading edge of this new world of marketing, we shouldn't forget that much of the commercial world lags behind. I'm continually amazed at how often companies (many large and quite capable) lack proper Web site reporting and analytics processes. Many lack the all-important usability and other testing processes to improve engagement and conversion rates, almost as if they were stuck in the late 1990s. Shame on those who disregard their landing page and overall Web site experiences and user paths in the hopes that an aggressive PPC search campaign will save the day. 

Search competency dilution. As agencies and in-house teams break down channel silos in an attempt to shift the focus toward true cross-channel media management, a phenomenon I call "search competency dilution" can negatively affect overall performance.  As the ways of search become a staple of other channels, integrated agencies and cross-functional in-house teams risk dilution of the ever-critical operational components of search.  These components, steeped in pushing and pulling various levers to influence changes in performance (optimization), will continue to be critical for the development of ROI-founded campaigns.  As it is likely that other channels such as display media and TV will soon require the same real-time technology platforms, analysis processes, and optimization approaches, a high level of search competence within agencies should be sought and valued by advertisers in the future.

Re-thinking creative. Creative messaging, from text-based ads in paid search to static display and rich-media format ads, must share consistent messaging that picks up where consumers leave off as they move through different channels.  Even more important will be the creative planning process that must move from a design focus to an "intended behavior" focus. Successful creative will not just look pretty and communicate, but aim to drive engagement, use, sharing, dialog, entertainment and other forms of interaction on a consumer's path to actions that hold the most business importance. 

For mobile and social media, this means that advertisers will need to break up and distribute valuable Web site functionality, videos, community content, and more in a way that represents brands and products effectively and achieves strategic intent (engagement, click-throughs, conversion, etc.).  Best-performing ads will include best-performing applications and communities that have been designed and developed through the clever planning of light, moderate, and heavy interaction points through the use of creative.

What does this all mean? Well, for one, get ready to cooperate with your peers. From tech teams to brand shops and media buying agencies, what matters most when truly living a cross-channel approach to marketing, is the consumer. Data will need to be shared, strategies will need to be collaborative, technologies will need to act in real time.  We've got our work cut out for us .