Over the years I've
talked to hundreds of IT marketers about web advertising. And I often discuss
what other types of promotion they've tried, and recommend other places to look
at in addition to advertising on our sites, or sometimes instead of advertising
on our sites, if I think the promotion costs are better suited to their product
mix and typical customer profile. That's one of the reasons I created faqs pages
like our
Web Advertising
Strategies: quick and dirty checklist which suggests advertising on
search-engines like Google.
But I guess there must be a majority of
marketers (those I don't get to talk to) who may think that when their company
is listed #1 on major search-engines, either through advertising or intrinsic
content, that's the end of what they need to do. Mistakenly, they may even think
they've done the most important part of their web promotion.
They would
be wrong, and this is why.
Think of who uses general search-engines to
find information about vertical subjects such as "computer storage"
for example (but the same applies to all subjects). The people who use
search-engines are a segment within the universe of all potential customers who
use the web to find information. Within the B2B world, they are a small segment
of the market you want to address.
Every year companies in your market
recruit new people, maybe fresh out of college, or from other industries. They
don't know where to look, so they use general search-engines and directories
like Yahoo. After a few months, or bunch of searches they discover that there
are better places to look. Their time is more productively spent starting out
from specialised portals.
The buyers and technical support people
who've been in the industry a couple of years, start out their new product and
supplier searches on the specialised portals, and only go out to general
search-engines when they can't find what they want.
This is where you
say "That doesn't sound right." You, most likely start
from and prefer search-engines...
...Well that's because
marketers
search for information in a completely different way to most of their
customers, and as a result have a poor understanding of how their customers
operate on the web. (Something we have tracked through analysing tens of
millions of searches on our portals.) In fact there's a game I sometimes play on
the phone when I'm talking to a marketer who is online, and I ask them how they
would navigate to their own company. The predictable route is usually
completely different to that taken in fact by most of their potential customers,
and I'll say more about that in a future article.
Suffice it to say for
now, that the most experienced and influential buyers in your market don't
waste their time seeing who is listed in the top 10 in AltaVista. They're
starting a long way down the curve from their favorite vertical portals which
they have bookmarked and used and trusted for many years. (Upto 10 years with
our Sun directory which
started out in print.)
It's the new guys, and the novices you mostly
reach with search-engine advertising... oh yes, and all those marketers (who
love search-engines) who work in the companies which compete with you. And you
wondered why those banner ads on Yahoo didn't work?
Don't blame the
media if your web advertising didn't work in the past. Blame poor segmentation.
Search-engine advertising should be the start of your web promotion activity,
but it's nowhere near the end. And anyone who tells you different doesn't know
what they're talking about.
BTW many of our own portals do feature
well on search-engines, but that represents only a tiny percentage of where our
readers come from. | |
|
