SEA Archives - Social Email Marketing

Last Sunday I posted an article about the state of both search engines and search engine marketing, from a personal perspective on my personal blog. It’s a bit provocative but, again, it’s my opinion and so I invite you to add yours. I think search is still in a very premature stage despite recent innovations such as Google Instant. All these tools are very nifty and some might find them cool, that’s OK.

Regarding the impact of them on search engine marketing, the jury is still out. But what matters most to me is that search is not relevant enough in these social media times from a user viewpoint. On top of that, I strongly feel the importance of content and context in search engine optimization and in the way search engines work should be much more prominent.

Besides email marketing, pay-per-click advertising is one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising out there. Remember the findings of the latest SEMPO survey.

PPC advertising is most commonly used as a standalone marketing method which is a shame in a customer-centric and multi-channel marketing reality.

On top of that, PPC advertising is still too often seen as SEA (Search Engine Advertising). But some social media PPC platforms that are more content-based (such as social bookmarking) show a much better cost per lead (certainly if you are focusing on ‘expensive’ keywords and not engaging in long-tail SEA).

Today, many marketers are looking at PPC advertisements as a method for generating leads and email marketing list opt-ins.