The 3 Unique Benefits That Make Search Marketing So Powerful

While there are hundreds of ways to market yourself and your organisation online, search marketing is one of the most powerful. Understanding exactly why it is so powerful and the unique benefits it can offer you are two of the keys to success in search. Here’s a breakdown of three key benefits to make use of in your online marketing strategy.

1. Perfect Placement - Be In The Right Place At The Right Time Automatically

To be successful in almost every marketing medium, you have to actively research, target & find your prospective customers. This can be a laborious, costly, hit and miss process. With search engines, this process is entirely the opposite: Your customer is working hard to find YOU. A nice metaphor for this is recruitment: In most marketing media, you have to go out & scour the job boards looking for work. You have to tailor your CV, put together a perfectly pitched covering letter & then hope. With search, it’s like receiving a headhunter’s call out of the blue. You are exactly the candidate they’re looking for & they’d like you to come over for an interview.

2. Acquisition and Retention (Getting & Keeping Customers)

While most tactics have an impact on either your ability to gain new customers, or on your ability to keep existing customers, a clever search campaign can achieve both.

Search For Acquisition:

There’s no better way of acquiring a customer than to have a search engine they trust return the most relevant page on your site as the top result. If your site is good enough to follow that through, it immediately makes you appear to be the greatest authority & the logical choice.

Search For Retention:

Though it’s often overlooked, search can act as a fantastic tool for retaining customers. Many companies focus on email as their sole retention tactic: keeping customers warm & up to date with news, reinforcing share of mind & often gathering data on when the customer is next thinking about purchasing. If your site ranks closely to your customer’s search interests, with language relevant to them, your site can appear frequently in their search results. This keeps them warm to your brand, brings them back to your site without intervention & can put you at the top of their mind when they next need something you provide.

3. Search Can Provide Passive Results

Passive Income is something every entrepreneur seeks: removing the direct tie between your effort & your reward; the ability to make money while you sleep. While email marketing, pay-per-click, affiliate, online advertising, blogging & most other online marketing tactics (as well as offline tactics) all require you to constantly supply a flow of money or effort, search marketing need not.

Set up a highly relevant, highly linkable site, set the ball rolling firmly, and you can achieve ongoing results without any ongoing effort. Whether your site is a photography portfolio, a religous forum, a multinational business, or indeed anything else, building this principle into your strategy can be used to your long-term advantage.