And, if that is true, then the same is prob­a­bly true for “search mar­ket­ing.” The main gist of my argu­ment last week was that the word “search” implies the expen­di­ture of a sig­nif­i­cant effort with no guar­an­tee of a suc­cess­ful out­come. But today, more than ever, we look to these engines to con­nect us with infor­ma­tion and func­tion­al­ity. We want to “do” things when we click through to the other side of the search results.

I also said that it was dif­fi­cult to find any one label that cov­ers all our inten­tions when we turn to a “search” engine. In the begin­ning, when the Web was one large bucket of ill-formed data, “search” worked as a uni­ver­sal label. But that’s not true today. Now, the web is becom­ing increas­ingly struc­tured, and a search engine that excels at bring­ing order to unstruc­tured data often falls dis­ap­point­ingly short when it comes to actu­ally get­ting stuff done. In try­ing to be the uni­ver­sal Swiss Army Knife of the web, we increas­ingly find that for many com­mon tasks, Google (or Bing) doesn’t do any of them par­tic­u­larly well. For those, a ded­i­cated and spe­cial­ized app often does a far bet­ter job of meet­ing our expectations.

Again, this starts to define the conun­drum cur­rently fac­ing search mar­keters. When the label we used was “search” our job was sim­ply to make sure our sites were “found.” Within the para­me­ters defined by “search­ing” (to explore in order to dis­cover) our job was straight­for­ward: reduce the explo­ration effort required on the part of the searcher by mov­ing our sites into a more “dis­cov­er­able” position.

But what if we sub­sti­tute some of the other labels I sug­gested last week for the word “search?” Sud­denly, our job becomes much more complex.

Let’s start with “con­nec­tion.” In this case, the buyer already has an idea that the right online des­ti­na­tion exists, so they also have a pre­con­ceived notion of what they would find there. In game the­ory, this is called “expected util­ity.” In this case, our job is not sim­ply to make the site easy to find but also to make sure it’s a rel­e­vant match for our prospect’s expec­ta­tions. If it isn’t, we may cap­ture the click but miss the con­ver­sion. And that puts a whole new spin on search mar­ket­ing. To under­stand how to cre­ate a “con­nec­tion” we have to under­stand what hap­pens on both sides of the click: pre-connection and post-connection.

This requires us to delve into our prospects “frame of mind”. Again, the words used here pro­vide a clue for what’s required as a mar­keter. A “frame” col­ors our entire view of things. There’s even a term for it in psy­chol­ogy – they call it the “fram­ing effect.” It’s cat­e­go­rized as a cog­ni­tive bias, which means that our frames deter­mine our real­ity. To be a suc­cess­ful “con­nec­tion” mar­keter, we have to be famil­iar with our prospects “frame” of ref­er­ence. When we are, we can pro­vide a rel­e­vant and per­sua­sive post-click path.

But “con­nec­tion” wasn’t the only alter­na­tive label I pro­posed. What about “action” or “ful­fill­ment?” Again, both ask us to sub­stan­tially stretch our hori­zons as a marketer.

“Action” is an even more deter­mi­nant label than con­nec­tion. If we’re look­ing to take “action”, each step inter­posed between the end goal and the prospect is another level of frus­tra­tion for them. Here, our job as “action” mar­keters is to remove as many of the steps as pos­si­ble between intent and action. Actions are usu­ally well defined and spe­cific. We should be equally as spe­cific in the alter­na­tives we pro­vide our prospects. Our calls to action should be a clear invi­ta­tion to “do” things.

“Ful­fill­ment” is a lit­tle tougher nut to crack. To be “ful­filled” can take sev­eral forms. Is there an emo­tional com­po­nent? How would the prospect define “ful­fill­ment?” Is the post-click result a step towards ful­fill­ment, or does it take a prospect all the way there? A suc­cess­ful “ful­fill­ment” mar­keter should be part psy­chol­o­gist and part clairvoyant.

Given the chal­lenge we have in even attach­ing label to what it is we do, it’s no won­der that recent ana­lyst reports are all report­ing a com­mon theme: the best search mar­keters are expand­ing into other ser­vices. We’re expand­ing beyond “search” into “social”, “mobile”, “local”, “dis­play” and other chan­nels. It’s not so much that “search” is passé, rather it’s that “search” isn’t really the right label any­more. I’m not sure that “social” or “local” are any bet­ter. Per­son­ally, I think the per­fect word, what­ever it turns out to be, should clearly iden­tify “why” peo­ple are online rather than “what” they’re doing online.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mediapost’s Search Insider September 15, 2011


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.