Today's businesses place a high premium on Internet marketing--and they're willing to pay high premiums for results. ECommerce and brick and mortar companies alike do business in a digital environment where the fundamental key to success echoes the familiar real estate slogan, "location, location, location."
From Fortune 500 firms to small marketing boutiques, advertising account managers have had to shift their traditional media expenditures and promotion techniques to the new frontier of paid click methodologies and search engine optimization (SEO). Where they once studied the locations of roadside billboards and newspaper ads, today's marketing professionals are returning to school to study contextual ad programs and Web-search algorithms.
It's the Click, Stupid
Entrepreneur.com has predicted that by the end of the decade, almost half of all consumers will make their purchases through online storefronts--and that's not taking into account all the business-to-business products and services sectors. The real tricks today include making yourself visible to consumers and directing your online advertising to its precise constituency or user group.
Unlike traditional print or television advertising, online ads appear in search results or are listed contextually, adjacent to related Web content. For example, you type request into your favorite search engine and the listings pop up. Advertisers either pay to show up in prominent, so-called "paid listings," or they hire marketing gurus to design their Web sites with the metatags and other content that zaps them into the forefront of the search result rankings. Market ranking relies upon a combination of math, research, and persistence.
You Get What You Pay For
In the late 1990s, companies specializing in search engine ranking and ad performance were already pioneering today's well-known click strategies for Yahoo and Google. In 1998, the Web incubator Idealab! financed the startup search engine, Goto.com.
The business model for the Pasadena, CA, company assumed that people would pay for search terms and then bid against competitors for the highest rankings on search results. You could buy the term "toy" and then bid for how many cents you'd pay to have it appear in the first, second, or third result slot when consumers searched on the term.
In 2002, GoTo (now named Overture) boasted first quarter profits of $29.3 million in profits. It wasn't long before Yahoo decided to buy Overture and use its technology to power its sponsored search program.
Google followed suit in 2003 with its own version of paid-search (a Java program called AdSense) and cut deals with owners of high-traffic sites identified by their own search engine metrics. The program is now available to anyone with a credit card and willingness to play.
Consequently, independent SEO and paid search firms have sprung up across the land to manage digital campaigns. Traditional media buyers are returning to school to learn how to manage Overture and AdSense campaigns that can level the playing field for medium and small-sized businesses.
Learning the SEO Ropes
You only have to look over the standardized curriculum of trade schools and colleges offering marketing and advertising degrees to see how deep new digital merchandizing has carved itself into the culture. Classes in market research have embraced data mining, user segmentation, online targets and brand marketing, SEO and banner placement.
Today's marketing majors look at so-called "integrating strategies" across networks that include email campaigns, paid-search bid tactics, peer-to-peer newsletters, spam blogging, keyword saturation, and click conversion tactics. They learn how to build out strategic planning campaigns for customers that includes Web metrics and return on investment projections.
Copywriters are retrained for carving out language for the Web and how it differs from traditional print advertising. Graphic designers from traditional print shops or those training for the professions for the first time now are learning animation and Web-optimized image software.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that emerging technologies have decidedly increased the need for ongoing training for advertising professionals. Employment in the field is expected to rise 22 percent through the end of the decade, and those with skill sets that fall under the umbrella of internet marketing will have the best opportunities.
The Internet has removed traditional regional and international boundaries when it comes to marketing and commerce. Today, a medium-sized business in a postage-stamp sized county in Kentucky can sell its products to consumers in Tokyo if their SEO or sponsored listing results have the muscle.