The Four “R’s” of Great Marketing

Great marketing – marketing that produces a high volume of quality leads for your business consistently and predictably – is essential to success in today’s hyper-competitive, highly-connected business world where consumers and business-to-business decision-makers face hundreds or thousands of interruptive marketing messages every day and an unprecedented level of choice due to the overwhelming amount of product and service clutter.

For marketing to be great, it comes down to the “Four R’s:”

• Getting the right message
• In front of the right people
• In the right medium
• At the right time

Yet consumers and business-to-business decision-makers alike are making it clear that interruptive marketing messages are becoming increasingly unwelcome – witness proliferation of advertising avoidance methods and technologies:

• Point-of-delivery mailbox bins for discarding direct mail
• Digital video recorders that enable viewers to skip commercials entirely
• Pop-up blocking software
• Do Not Call registries – in the United States, 72% of the population are registered on the list (source: 2009 Economic Report of the President, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisors)
• Anti-Spam software and the CAN-SPAM Act – according to a Ferris Research study, greater than 75% of email messages sent daily are Spam

In consideration of the foregoing, think about the last time you:

• Responded to – or even read – a direct mail offer?
• Watched commercials on recorded television?
• Clicked “yes” to the question: “Allow pop-ups to appear?
• Answered a phone call from an unknown caller ID?
• Marked mail in your junk-mail folder as “not junk?”

Now think about the last time you used a search engine to find a product or service you wanted to buy or, at least, information about a product or service you were thinking about buying. You can probably think of a lot of occasions. And you are not alone: according to a recent comScore report total global search volume exceeded 113 billion searches[1] for the month of July 2009 – a 42% over increase over the prior year, when total global search volume was around 80 billion for the same month.

Search engine marketing shifts control from advertisers pushing information about what they want to sell to consumers and business-to-business decision-makers pull in information about what they want to buy. And, as a result, it enables businesses to accomplish great marketing:

• Getting the right message – you can easily, and affordably, test different messages on a small scale and for a short duration, monitor results in real time, and make data-driven decisions about  which messages are most meaningful to your target audience
• In front of the right people – natural or paid search results provide searchers with the results that the search engines’ complex algorithms decide are the “best match” to the keywords the searcher has used
• In the right medium – the internet gives you to an audience whose scale and proclivity for buying cannot be matched by other channels
• At the right time – because the searcher initiates the search, the timing is always perfect: when someone enters the keywords “condos for sale vancouver” in the query bar, he or she is interested in something to do with condos for sale in Vancouver right then and there

The facts are there: consumers and B2B decision-makers are going out of their way to avoid advertisements –even if it costs them time or money to do so – and are embracing search in record numbers.

If you have not already embraced search engine marketing to enable searchers to find your website, don’t you think the time has come?

Author: Dawson Barber

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[1] Obviously, the searches were for many things other than product and service information

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