As you may already know from my previous post, SES Chicago is rapidly approaching and the agenda has several very interesting sessions lined up. One of the sessions I’m particularly interested in is “Selling Search to the C-Suite”, which has been an issue in previous years. I think search has approached a point now though where it should seem obvious that companies should have some presence in search. However, even today, we still have clients we need to convince that search is the right venue for them. I had the chance to interview Russ Mann, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, of Covario, who is part of the panel on Day 3 on the trials, tribulations, and some tips on how to sell search more effectively to those higher up the marketing food chain.
Perhaps as a result of the recession, online has taken off even faster than many expected, due to its lower costs and higher measurability. Do you feel like selling search to the C-suite is any easier now that online and specifically search is so much more widely used and accepted?
Selling search to the C-suite as a concept is most definitely easier. We heard CEOs of Fortune 500 clients refer to needing “a Google strategy.” No one debates the importance or the ROI of search. The challenge now is to make search more strategic. For many CEOs, CFOs and CMOs, if they have one “in-house search person” or if they believe “their agency is doing it,” then they are satisfied that they have checked the box. The C-suite now needs to understand that search represents the purest voice of the customer in aggregate, and represents not just attitudinal behavior (what they say they’ll do)- it’s behavioral data (what they’ll actually do). The problem is that too many search marketers are overly eager to expound on the fascinating details of SEM and SEO, while the C-level exec’s eyes glaze over. C-level execs care about big picture, direction, business impact and “moving the needle.” That’s the next wave of enterprise class search marketing.
Are there any industries you think have embraced search marketing more than others? Any idea why?
Originally the etailers and SMBs embraced search, because they are early adopters for anything that works! Then we saw retailers and more direct-response type models (travel, insurance, mortgages, consumer financial services etc) embrace search, especially given the economy of the past few years. More recently, we see the more traditional CPG, branded manufacturers, B2B service providers embracing search, in particular SEO, because they have come to understand the accountability and relevance to their business models.
In many industries, search budgets are still low in comparison to other mature channels (TV, print, radio, etc.). Why do you think that is?
In my blogs “The Rise of the GenX CMO” and “The Agency of the Future”, I described the historical and macro circumstances that got us to where we are. The Baby Boomer CMOs, who grew up in the age of TV and Ad Agencies, are still “in the chair”- although they are gradually retiring or moving on in the next 5 years as their tenure has shortened and CEOs and CFOs demand more accountability, more quickly. The new GenX CMO, who grew up with computers in their schools, are more numerate, financially savvy, fast paced and demanding. While consumer tastes and media consumption habits have changed, the Baby Boomer CMO and their Agencies remained in the old paradigm. As the GenX CMOs get promoted, however, they will radically shift the spend and balance for digital, including search, versus the mature channels.
Search marketing reports are often filled to the brim with data, which can make a CMO cross eyed. Can you recommend some tools that can help the data junkies make their reports more visually palatable?
Of course I am going to recommend Covario solutions. In general, as advice to folks who are in the trenches of any discipline (not just search). In my blog on how to get budget, staff and promotions, I recommended:
- Use charts, not data tables
- Answer WHY things happened, not just “what happened”
- Suggest multiple options for what to do next, and give estimates of what might happen with each option, and Why you think that
- Think in orders of magnitude (left of decimal thinking), not in terms of precision (right of decimal thinking)—execs want to “MOVE THE NEEDLE!”
- Similarly, directionality and velocity are more important than precision- up or down and how fast are much more important than having perfect data
Finally, what tools do you think CMO’s and search marketers will need in the coming years as the search industry matures and the landscape becomes more competitive?
Those are two very different constituents with very different needs. Executives need visualization and recommendation solutions like dashboards and predictive analytics at the macro scale. Search marketers in both SEO and SEM need easy visualizations of their very complex data that they can “send up the chain,” but then they also need highly granular, transactional-level data and tools to execute on daily tasks and make themselves more efficient. Both groups will need solutions that play across media types (display, social, video, mobile, etc) as attribution modeling and multi-channel analytics become more pervasive and discipline experts are forced to synthesize their results and play better together. These types of solutions are still in early innings, with many folks like Covario in the hunt to provide best-of-breed solutions to clients.
Disclosure: I have not been financially compensated for this post, although I have received a free press pass to cover SES Chicago.