What big companies get wrong about search marketing

Didit Editorial

8 years ago

June 27, 2016: New research from Clutch.co – a firm that evaluates professional service firms – sheds light on why search, despite delivering high value in comparison to other media, has historically been denied the budget it deserves in large corporate (“enterprise”) firms. The study was based on questionnaires sent to 500 respondents employed in a marketing capacity in firms with at least 500 employees.

Key findings:

1. Search is not a primary marketing channel for most enterprises. While 84 percent of marketers surveyed reported using a Web site, and 78 had a social media presence, only 47 percent used SEO, and only 40 percent used paid search.

What’s intriguing about these findings is that many of the channels that came in ahead of search – including print, television, direct mail, events, and display ads – are demand-generating channels. These channels all work in a very different way from search, which works by harvesting demand – not driving it. The problem – and it’s not addressed in this study but is obvious to marketers who have studied it – is that there’s a major opportunity lost when one attempts to build demand (say with a TV ad) but when users (perhaps at a later time or on a different device) attempt to find the product mentioned in the commercial, can’t do so. So it’s likely that a lot of enterprise marketers are allowing a huge hole in the demand generating/demand harvesting cycle to occur, which is a very bad thing.

2. It’s not going to get better anytime soon. If the survey data is correct, it appears that enterprises aren’t going to make any progress balancing their channel allocation decisions in the near future. Only 5 percent plan to prioritize paid search in the next 6-12 months, with only 4 percent pushing SEO, whereas television (22 %), social media (16%) and website development (12%) are all racing ahead.

The study authors offer no explanation for why paid search is prioritized in such a lowly manner, but suggest that SEO is given the short shrift because SEO value can take a long time to accrue for marketers engaging in it, and the authors suggest that “it can be difficult for companies – especially large ones – to prove the value of search marketing and obtain resources for it. Many large companies do not allocate a specific budget for SEO since it can require a mix of time and resources from IT, marketing, PR, and other departments.” Frankly, it’s amazing – and more than a bit alarming — to see search suffering from this level of siloization in 2016.

3. Chasing the wrong success metrics. While search marketing provides a peerless mechanism for lead generation and direct conversions, most enterprises are using it to generate traffic. While 23 percent do use search correctly – for leads and conversions – other success metrics (onsite engagement, keyword rankings, and impressions) are objectives almost as popular.

Again, this data suggests that all too many enterprise marketers misunderstand what search is for, how it can be used, and which metrics should be employed to evaluate campaign success. Soaring traffic might look great in a report – but is this traffic qualified? Will it result in actual business growth or is it just a vanity metric? The same applies to rankings, impressions, and sentiment. Obviously, if one’s success metrics are wrong, one will fail if one actually achieves them. But it does not appear that many enterprise marketers understand this basic Marketing 101 truth.

The good news

While it’s depressing to reach these kind of statistics in the year 2016, there’s a bright side to these findings: marketers – whether they’re large “enterprise” firms or scrappy small businesses – can profit from this kind of budgetary misalignments by running search campaigns that are well-funded (with all the benefits that accrue to high-spenders, including better Quality Score), balanced in terms of supporting demand-generating media channels, and using success metrics appropriate to the channel.

None of this is easy of course, and organizations hoping to thrive in search need to either staff qualified internal teams or reach out to qualified agencies who can handle the task. Still – for those that can pull it off they’ll likely benefit from a situation in which big companies – despite all their resources – are having so much trouble actually harnessing the potential of search marketing – in both its paid and organic forms.