Online Marketing CMO: Why Search Marketing Doesn’t Stand Alone
Executives sometimes underestimate the amount of integration online marketing should have with a company’s internal business processes, sales processes, and offline marketing efforts. Search marketing, for example, is often run as an independent effort, with results measured by direct ROI alone. But as part of an integrated marketing strategy, in addition to driving ROI, those search marketing efforts can also be powerful research tools that help business executives make improvements in other areas of their businesses. Bill Muller of iProspect, another SF marketing agency, put it well in this interview video from a recent industry conference:
Search certainly doesn’t happen in a vacuum. CMO’s often make the mistake of judging the success of a campaign solely based on the conversions or the revenues that are generated directly through conversions on the website whereas we all know that Search is an excellent research channel.
Both you and I probably several times a week go online and do a search for something and it ultimately drives us to a store, drives us to make a telephone call, helps us in the consideration process.
But if CMOs judged their campaigns solely on what converts online and don’t develop mechanisms for tracking purchases that take place via the phone as a result of someone who did research online or take place in a brick and mortar store as a result of research that was done online, they could be drastically underestimating the ROI produced by their search marketing efforts.
Watch the full interview:
Frankly I think that’s absoluetly good stuff.