Breaking the Search Marketing Silo

Posted on | September 17, 2009 | No Comments

In 1886 John Wanamaker coined the phrase that would define traditional marketing:

“I know that 50% of my advertising is wasted…
…I just don’t know which half!”

Then in 2000, search marketing made its official debut with the launch of Google AdWords. This redefined the marketing game, as Pay-per-Click (PPC) gave rise to a measurable form of consumer-initiated pull marketing. Not only was the consumer driving the interaction with the advertiser but also each level of the online touch point was highly measurable. Oh, and it was cheap. Back in the day when AdWords hit the market it was dirt-cheap with bids starting at 0.05 cents. This ability to so precisely target a market, deliver a highly relevant ad message initiated by the ad target and then accurately measure the resultant interactivity was to the traditional marketing world a panacea to all those campaigns that had previously gone into the 50/50 pool.

So what did traditional marketing do? It gave search marketing its own budget, its own department, its own staff and they watched with glee as their cash cow grew. Slowly, as the years rolled by, search marketing continued to outgrow all other forms of marketing, bringing in ROAS and ROI figures with which traditional marketing could not hope to compete. This continued to make search marketing more independent, more isolated, more siloed.

Online marketing also evolved and what may initially have started with banner advertising and PPC expanded to user-generated content, online video, blogging, social networks, podcasts, widgets and mobile marketing, just to highlight a few. Thus, increasingly, ‘search marketing’ did its own thing while ‘traditional marketing’ continued business as usual.

Old Barriers Meet New Barriers

The rocky relationship between sales and marketing has been well documented in the last decade. BusinessWeek online describes this in an aptly titled article - Sales and Marketing: Lost in a Thorny Forest The title follows to say: Our survey is in, and its picture of divided and dysfunctional efforts to achieve cooperation is fascinating, surprising and – a little sad

The almost rehearsed divisions between sales and marketing attitudes unfold:

Marketers see themselves as vastly underappreciated, and they regard sales teams as self-serving and short-sighted. Meanwhile, sales teams see themselves as indispensable, and they look upon marketers as ivory-tower strategists out of touch with the real world’s pressing demand of generating revenue.

Diagrammatically we can illustrate the sales & marketing relationship as follows:

Sales & Traditional Marketing Clash

The clashes are frequent, barriers to communication are embedded in the misconceptions held by each party and attempts to communicate often result in miscommunication, even open altercations. But while sales & marketing battles it out, what is happening to search marketing?

While in traditional marketing there is a fundamental understanding of integrated marketing communication, there appears to be a significant disconnect in integration between traditional marketing channels and search marketing. The examples vary, from a company advertising an online promotion omitting to place their website address in the TV ad, to no mention being made in online promotions of offers redeemable offline. Sometimes the online messaging diverges so greatly from the offline offer that it becomes difficult to recognise that it is the same brand being represented. A significant benefit of search marketing is the opportunity to track offline & online interaction and the ability to see the resultant website traffic just after a direct mail piece or e-mail campaign has been implemented. However, cross-channel communication is required to reap these benefits.

As much as sales & traditional marketing have a feisty relationship, at least there is one to speak of! Between traditional marketing and search marketing there appears to be very little interaction. A potential illustration of this relationship is represented below:

Search Marketing Silo Where sales and traditional marketing may make some headway, search marketing is completely out of the loop. Often it appears that search marketing and traditional marketing efforts are run by different departments and different people that barely know of the others’ existence.

What people seem to have forgotten is that ’search marketing’ is in fact another form of marketing – it is an additional channel to the existing ‘offline’ marketing repertoire of print, TV, radio, outdoor etc. Search marketing should then be integrated into the offline channels much in the same way that these offline channels are integrated with one another. So, instead of creating another division, it might be wiser for marketing to reign in the search marketing team and create in them an ally against those pesky sales people.