Search – Starting Point of Understanding for E Marketing Exercise

As a Marketing professional you are too familiar with marketing research. In fact Organisations spend millions of dollars into market research to know anything, everything and all things about their customers. The market research analysis and outcome becomes the input for developing Marketing, Advertising and selling strategies as well as in designing product strategy as well as supply chain and pricing strategies as well.

So if you are now faced with the assignment of developing an E-advertising strategy and E Marketing strategy what is it that you have got to do?. The answer is very simple. You have got to start from the basics of getting to know all about your E-Customer.

If you map the actions of any individual customer who switches on his computer and connects to the internet, you will notice that there is one basic function that he happens to engage in. He begins to search for information and data. Therefore search is the beginning and connecting link between your business and the customer. Understanding all of the customer’s search behaviour, understanding how the search happens through the search engines, the dynamics of searches is the first step.

This understanding will give you an idea of how to position your advertising and build your content in websites in such a way as to be able to be picked up by the Search engines and be ranked on top.

Individuals normally look to the first two or three top ranking websites that come up in the searches. Therefore it becomes important to be able to position your website and advertising in such a way as to be amongst the top ranking sites.

Understanding all about the search trends provides you with a lot of market research and information on your potential customer and markets. From the searches that users conduct on the internet you are able to see the trends, look at the products and services that most customers are trying to look for and buy.

Further you can also use the information gathered to build effective marketing communication that enables you to get closer to your customer. You are better positioned to speak customer’s language for you know what exactly he has been searching for from the past data.

When the number of internet users is increasing daily, you have got to accept that your potential market is growing. You need to develop an effective search acquisition strategy to be able to reach out to this audience.

As the population all over the world is shifting their focus from reading magazines and print media and instead are concentrating on getting the same information from the internet, you will know that the time has come to re-design your advertising strategy and concentrate more on the online advertising rather than on the print media.

The words and criteria that the individual users to search for information on the internet plays an important part in designing your advertising as well as entire website strategy.

An individual might be looking for information on latest mobile phone but might search the internet by typing cell phone or smart phone or by a particular brand etc. This information when analysed gives us the clue to understanding customer’s requirement, his/her thought process and the information he is seeking. It also helps us to build the advertising and web pages make them SEO optimized and in a way that ensures that it gets picked up by the search engine easily and is listed at the top.

The entire e-marketing exercise is built on the internet search. There are basically two types of searches namely Organic Search and Paid search.

• Organic search refers to the process that the search engines use to search for web pages, to rank the pages and list them using the algorithm that has been developed for its search function.

• Paid search on the other hand refer to the paid or sponsored advertisements that are picked up by search engines and listed as sponsored advertisements.

Furthermore one should also note that the offline advertisement can spill into the e advertisements and vice versa. The line between the two different platforms is narrowing.

For effective design and delivery of advertisements and to be able to reach the customers first, you have got to be at the top of the list when the customer is searching. Understanding all about searches then is the first step in developing E Marketing and E Advertisement plan.