Marketing Consistency Across the Board

In a past post I discussed the lack of search engine marketing education within university advertising and marketing curriculums and the adverse effect on the search engine marketing industry reaching its full potential. In the following post I pursue a similar theme in regards to reaching full potential as a business.

As a Paid Search Project Manager, it’s more than apparent how easily a lack of communication can hurt campaign performance. More often than not, this lack of communication points back toward setting initial campaign goals.

It only makes sense that marketing play a fundamental role in establishing campaign goals and objectives, however there is another internal player often overlooked during this stage. That player is the IT department.

Let’s say the marketing department’s goals include launching new initiatives along the lines of usability testing, video content, and social marketing. Everything appears to be running smooth until four weeks down the road IT approaches marketing with a timeline three times of what had been set initially.

Whether you’re planning to bring SEM in-house or develop a relationship with an outside agency, IT should be involved during the early stages of the campaign, ensuring that both parties are aware of what they need to be thinking about.

In addition to a strong, two-way communication flow between internal departments, marketers need to understand search and how it can contribute to their overall marketing initiatives. As Search Engine Watch Expert Matt Spiegel explains:

The key players across the media world are all definitely interested in learning as much as possible about search. After all, paid search is predicted by eMarketer to remain over 40 percent of digital media budgets through 2011.

The key concept to understand is that offline marketing initiatives generate demand and search marketing captures that demand. Studies have found that 67% of online users are driven to search by offline channels, implicating the immense impact offline marketing efforts have on a search campaign. What marketers need to know is that search campaign goals need to coincide with the overall marketing objective(s).

Ultimately, successful marketing begins with consistency. Once consistency exists internally it can exist externally, throughout all marketing channels.