Dallas Internet Marketing

Why Search is Powerful

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This is part five of the Business Owner’s Guide to Internet Marketing. The other posts in the series are:

• Introduction
• Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business?
• What’s In a Website?
• Internet Marketing Opportunities
• Why Search is Powerful. (This Post)
• How do Search Engines Work?
• What is SEO and What are Opportunities for Your Business?
• Pay Per Click Marketing and Opportunities for Your Business
• Relationship Driven Internet Marketing

My father-in-law, who has his own business, told me one day about how he used to advertise in airline in-flight magazines. He knew that for every $x he spent on those advertisements, his return would be $20x. Now, that is a good ROI!

Unfortunately, those type of advertisements don’t offer the same ROI as they once did. David Shenk, in his 1997 book “Data Smog” said that in 1971 the average American saw 560 advertisements daily, in 1997 (and that was over a decade ago) the average American saw 3,000 advertising messages a day.

Whether these advertisements come on TV, radio, print or banner ads on they fall short of the power of search for two reasons:

1. There are an overabundance of these type of advertisements
2. They are hard to target

Overabundance of Advertisements

First, the overabundance is obvious. Watch an hour of television this evening, and then watch the same hour program after downloading it from iTunes without commercials. The difference is huge (it ends up decreasing the shows running time by about 20 minutes). When you watch an hour of TV, basically a third of it is advertisements.

How many of those do you remember and are influenced by?

Limited Targeting

Second they are hard to target. For example, I like the show “The Biggest Loser.” If I watch an hour of that, I will see ads for all sorts of topics that someone has paid money to play at that time, based on the demographic of Biggest Loser viewers. The same is true for magazines, newspapers etc. But no two viewers are alike, and while there may be some general commonalities in those people watching BL, there are a lot of ads coming in front of people that just aren’t interested.

Why Search is Different

Now, harnessing traffic through search engines is quite different. You can focus your marketing dollars on customers that are actually looking for your exact product or service.

When someone searches for “Interior Designer in Dallas, Texas”, and you are an interior designer in Dallas and you have invested your marketing budget to show up well in the search results, you have spent your advertising dollar only on people looking for your service, and not the thousands of other people who just glance over an ad in a Dallas magazine or newspaper.

It is essentially like you are sticking your hand out to greet the customer who just decided they needed your service, AND were in the mood to see what you offer.

Now that is smart marketing!

And search is one of the only marketing mediums that allows you to focus your efforts only on interested, high converting customers.