Back to News

Search Engines are Media

BOSTON MA - Dictionary.com defines media as "A means of mass communication, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, or television." I submit that "websites" and more specifically "search engines" should be added to the short list. In fact, search engine marketing is more effective in reaching B2B prospects than any advertising method.

For those not familiar with search engine marketing (known in the trade as SEM), it is the art and science of being there when someone is looking for relevant information on the Internet. SEM can put any relevant business within a click away from customers when they are at the most critical moment.

As many of today's B2C and B2B players are looking to get more out of their marketing dollars, they are also beginning to find real ROI and value in search engine marketing. However, I think it's true that many media people still do not consider search engines to be a fullly eligible media. If they did, search engine marketing would play a major part in their marketing plan. I can tell you that with most companies, even very prominent ones, search engine marketing is only an afterthought. When it's not an afterthought, there can be tremendous benefits.

Doing a search on Google, I was lucky enough to find a report called DoubleClick Summer 2002 Cross Media Reach Study. The study came about in response to a survey where marketers indicated their customers were not online. Using the trusted sources media planners use when they develop media plans, DoubleClick looked at Nielsen/NetRatings for websites; Nielsen/NTI for network TV; and MRI for consumer magazines. They found "the most popular websites deliver audiences that are larger than the audiences delivered by the average episode of the most popular prime time TV shows and are often comparable in size to the most popular consumer magazines audiences." As you can see from the "Popular Vehicles" comparison chart, search engine properties are three of the top four most popular internet destinations.

More recently, Piper Jaffray's Senior Analyst Safa Rashtchy summed up the search engine market in a report on the search market entitled The Golden Search. The report said that "Online search is a rapidly growing and profitable segment of the Internet and is expected to be a $7 billion industry worldwide by 2007". In addition, he believes that the key driver of growth is "the increased popularity of search as the most efficient way to find products and information, and simultaneously the rise of search as the best way for advertisers to find and acquire customers."

The reason that search engine marketing makes sense for business is that not all marketing budgets can afford to cast the widest net and advertise on a prime time TV program or even in a major magazine.

search engine marketing is the non interruption media

I've been comparing search engine marketing to traditional advertising but I would really like to convey to you that SEM is something even better. I believe that most advertising is interruption advertising. For example, the primary content vehicle such as the Survivor TV show draws the audience in. Then an advertiser like Saturn attempts to impart its message by frequently interrupting the audience with branding and a call to action. With the exception of the advertisements during the Super Bowl, most audiences do not tune in to be interrupted by ads.

While the interruption model is widely used and does work offline, online users want the info without the ads. I believe that search engine marketing is very effective as a non-interruption information source. Research shows that Internet users expect the Web to be the provider of answers to simple queries, and they do not want to sift through advertising to get what they want.

Search engine marketing is more commonly viewed akin to traditional public relations (PR) because the "advertising" is the content that the audience came for. I would say that a search engine listing is more like a referral because the end user is asking a trusted source for an answer. The answer is the search result.

From a commercial perspective, a visitor entering from a search engine is usually pre-qualified and in one of three general stages of interest. In the first stage the "information seeker" is gathering information for an upcoming purchase. In the second, the "shopper" is looking for more specific information and getting prices. The third is the "active buyer". This is the visitors who know what they want and the price that they are willing to pay for it. Now they're just looking for the right provider. If your company is relevant to any of these modes but is not listed in the search engine results, then you're leaving customers on the table for your competitors.

Another clear advantage is that search engine marketing evens out the playing field for savvy marketers to compete with established brands and household names. This is because search engine position is not based on the size of your company or annual revenues. It's based on the depth of your content. You don’t have to match your bigger competitors advertising dollar for dollar because search engine marketing is proven to have the lowest cost of acquisition of any advertising vehicle. It provides a very high return on investment (ROI) because of its high conversion ratio of visitors to buyers and its relatively low cost per lead. This chart from the Piper Jaffery report proves that you can get just as much advertising mileage out of search engines for a fraction of the price of direct mail or even banners.

If search engine marketing is effective, then why is it an afterthought? Because it is new, but people who do it believe in it. Ask someone who has marketed through a search engine or take a look at what our search engine marketing clients are saying.