SMX Advanced Day 2 kicked off with Aaron Levy reminding us of the complex nature of search marketing and the need to be customer-centric in our strategy.
Here are some highlights from his keynote, which included a look back at what the search marketing industry has been up to, how the new wave of changes in AI is nothing new, and his bet that search it won’t go away anytime soon.
1. Search won’t die, but it will evolve from its current state as long as marketers stop clinging to outdated views of paid search as the perfect direct response channel.
“Search survived some serious hits, in the case of the show, Nuclear Fallout, it has the weight of what it was and what it is known for. It adapts to a really hostile environment and is sometimes not so tasty to survive. I think a lot of search marketers just cling too much to what we think paid search used to be — that’s a perfect direct response channel, which I will say never was.
It certainly isn’t now, it’s a factor in the customer journey.”
2. Generative AI and assistants are transforming search into an “answer engine” that tries to understand and address queries before they are asked.
“Sundar Pichai, from Google’s Q4 earnings call earlier this year, said that generative artificial intelligence will allow Google Assistant to act more like an agent over time, and that it could eventually go more beyond answers and follow it for users and even more.And then at I/O in mid-May, Google announced a series of new features that further reflected its intention, which is to become an engine of answers instead of a search engine.
“[Search Marketers] you need a broad and deep understanding of all the tools in your toolbox. These features can be and often are extremely cost-effective, but developing a basic understanding of exactly how they work and helping you understand when and where you want to implement them.
Should you be exploring in your brand search campaigns?
Probably not.
Should you be exploiting retargeting even if it’s not particularly incremental?
I don’t think so, but that’s up to you to decide. And developing an understanding of how the machine makes decisions is crucial to making that decision for yourself.”
4. Performance marketing metrics alone are inadequate: There needs to be a mindset shift towards branding and incrementality.
“We have to evolve from a performance-only view, or what I like to call the search view. There’s always been this weird battle between performance and brand marketers.
And it’s time for this fight to end. Performance and branding are not separate. They are done at the same time. They are one and the same. We use different metrics, we use different measurements, and we may have different goals, and certainly the tactics are different, but they happen at the same time.
We most likely contributed to a conversion, but did we cause it? I’m not sure. We’re part of a more complicated journey, and so one of the more complicated things we have to do as modern search marketers is to provide the right targeting, the right reward mechanism, the right incentives, and assets to the engines suitable to do their job. Incentives or goals or conversions properly or whatever you want to call them are probably best thought of as compasses for automation.”
5. Customer centricity is crucial: Leverage audiences, alternative KPIs and creative assets to move customers throughout the funnel.
“For the past couple of years, I’ve been comfortably saying that keywords are optional in PPC and audiences aren’t. I’m all for it. Think of the good old marketing funnel. Yes, the customer journey is complex, but a funnel is the easiest way to understand it.
We don’t need every client appointment to point straight to marriage. You need to leverage alternative KPIs to help move people through the funnel instead of just moving through the first pitch fences.
Especially when the industry is much more crowded now, there is much more competition in search. We have to be a little more creative.”
6. Search is no longer just about keywords and language, it’s about understanding customer behaviors, issues and emotions to provide relevant answers/solutions.
“Aim for the heart and the head will follow. What it means is that we have to go beyond a simple question and answer. The question people ask is never as simple as what they actually say, and the answer they women have to talk about their emotions, their problems, whether they know they exist or not, we have to tell them: “Hey, I’m going to make your life better”
We’ve never done that in research because we made the relationship so transactional.”
7. Search is part of a broader and more complex customer journey that spans multiple touchpoints before and after search.
“People are strange and people are inconsistent. Search isn’t always the most influential part of the journey. It’s almost always part of it, but it’s rarely what actually caused the conversion.”
8. New AI search experiences may reduce site traffic, requiring new affiliate/commission ad models.
“I think the interesting thing will be that we expect SGE experiences to drive a lot less traffic to the site.
I predict that there will soon be some sort of negotiable affiliate commission model. We’ll see, but in my opinion, I think local service ads and some of the other products that Google and Microsoft have that are commission-based, I think they’re going to become more common, which will make it harder to evaluate the value of a conversion is even more important.”
“We have to remember that these new tools coming our way are just that. Tools.
We need to understand how they work, what they do, and how best to deploy them. There is an old quote that says “if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. We have complex problems, we have complex tools to solve them”.
10. While search advertising faces change, search itself isn’t going away as long as people have questions that need answering.
“Search as a medium is not going anywhere. As long as Internet users have a question that needs answering, the search will be there.
We simply need to understand that we are structuring our efforts around people, not just language. We are looking at problems. We are looking at their behaviors. We are looking at their hopes and dreams. We’re saying we’re the answer.”
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