From mass marketing to keyword marketing
Mass marketing is a product-based approach which does not require the analysis of Customer data. On the other hand it may yield poor results, when used to promote specialized products which appeal to a small Customer group. The increasingly competitive environment has led to a shift from product-based to customer-based strategies. This shift allowed businesses to focus on specific customer groups and offer them products customized to their needs. These groups are identified based on customer’s profiles and behavior, stored in a database. Direct marketing techniques are applied to these groups.
The internet presents new opportunities to improve marketing efficiency. It has a great potential to enhance dramatically the Customer experience. Throughout all stages of Customer lifecycle, the interactive nature of the internet, combined with its automation and information management potential, can contribute substantially to an effective marketing strategy. For example, email marketing can be far more efficient than conventional mail marketing, since it can be much cheaper, faster and more proactive & frequent. The web channel can be developed to become a very powerful Customer touch point, used not only for marketing, but also for high level Customer service.
A very effective form of internet marketing which shows tremendous potential to expose a Business to millions of interested parties, has emerged in the recent years. The highly prevalent mode of searching on the internet via the use of search engines, has led to the tremendous growth of keyword marketing.
Keyword marketing enables a highly effective pull strategy on marketing, since it is dynamically activated following a customer request for information on the specific subject of interest (keyword). Keyword marketing can serve as a real-time lead generation tool, as well as contribute to the analysis of demand for products.
Unlike other forms of marketing, in keyword advertising there is an active intermediary affecting substantially the user experience. Google, Yahoo and others, offer sponsored links on each search result page. Google is aiming at improving the user experience and boosting its revenue, by promoting to a more visible spot, the perceived as more relevant links. It ‘promotes’ links which are frequently selected to higher spots on the result screen.
Suppliers aiming at promoting their products and services, try to select relevant popular keywords. The prices paid in order to appear on the sponsored links section when a specific keyword is requested by the User, are settled at Google via an auction process.
Keyword marketing (or advertising) is a form of context marketing. Context marketing is not a new invention. Traditionally yellow pages depict highlighted entries on the same context (e.g. a specific profession) which are paid or paid at a higher price than the rest entries. However this pages are printed once a year and do not change dynamically, as happens on search engine result pages.
The momentum of keyword marketing can be understood by the fact that Google, with a market capitalization of approximately 117 billion dollars (July 2006), bases a major part of its revenue on it.
Google is trying to improve the User experience. Towards this direction, it has launched the landing page algorithm (last update in May 2006). Specifically Google is evaluating the landing page and how it relates to the ad itself.