Be Careful What You Search For....

It all started when he once wanted to buy gunny bags - jute sacks - and went online and made enquires at a few sites. And lo behold, he was inundated with sackful of responses. Mind you, the enquiry was not made to any person. He just searched for suppliers and that was it. Of course he had to give out some details including email etc. And what he got was was a few dozen suppliers eager to get is order. Not just his inbox, every site he visited ads popped up informing him of sacks available from Kolkata to Beijing. One year after the one time enquiry he still says he gets pop ups informing him of sacks. He is thankful, they have not permeated into his dreams yet.

That is the power of Search Engine Marketing. Or paid advertising which is also called PPC or pay by per click. For those who are new to this let me elaborate. There are two ways of reaching out to people on the net. The organic way - which is to use search engine optimization by using the right key words etc and this does not cost a penny. The other is the paid way and is also called SEM meaning Search Engine Marketing. With Google holding the sway over a billion people and more followed by Bing and Yahoo and a motley crowd of wannabes, businesses have no other go but to use their services.

More and more people do their research on the net before they make any purchase and it is close to 80 percent of buyers. That means, you have no alternative but be present where your competition lurks.

Search engines are the lifeline of the web, crawling through hundreds of millions of websites, blogs and posts. They scan and index specific words and phrases to produce a relevant match to the search words that people use. And these searches take just a few seconds to deliver hundreds of results. Competing for the attention of this search engines are millions of businesses, services and products. Organic search offers free responses but that is where your SEO capabilities measure up. On the other hand, paid search means that that the Search Engine provider himself picks up your Search Index at the first go - whenever people are searching for the specific words or phrases that you have used. Yet in a world where you are competing with similar products and services what is it that ensures the consumer will click on your advert and land on your page? What again will make him browse and make up his/her mind to go for your offer?

Content Marketing comes in to fore here. Getting to the customer might be easy with SEM but advertising not only has to attract but also retain attention and cause action. Hence your landing page and your key messages etc play a vital role in the final outcome of your marketing efforts.

SEM marketing is not very costly as you have to pay by per click. It also gives you a definitive target and more important - unlike other advertising modes - shows immediate results. SEM helps in improving your SEO performance and while you are paying for every click, you gain with brand promotion when you appear on pages and potential customers see your ad (even though they do not click on it) giving you that great brand recall value.

For people like Gopal who have queried for some products, they will have to live with targeted advertising. One way companies can do not to antagonize their consumers would be to make use of forms that search engines and other platforms offer that requires customers to fill in details of the completion of their jobs. Such as, when they have successfully found what they are looking for, they can indicate so, thence making it clear that they are not looking for the said product or service any longer.

However, that is not a 100 per cent guarantee that you will stop receiving notifications.

Which brings me to my question - how do we differentiate the forest from the trees? The need for a market has made organisations insensitive to people's privacy. At one stage, the successful SEM's may end up at the wrong side of the barrel when consumers will get tired with the constant barrage of communication from these companies. How do we control this Frankenstein's monster that we are unleashing on unsuspecting consumers? These search engines that seem to have stepped out of the Matrix celluloid dimension into the real world? Reading our emails and our most intimate thoughts.

Gopal was much more displeased yesterday when I met him. His doctor had sent him his medical report by email. Among others the doctor, an old classmate of his, had mischievously written to him to have a healthy marital life with more innuendo on the physical part. Now, he says, he has started getting notifications on mail and advertisements banners on every page he visits, coaxing him to buy medicines that could increase his libido. He asked me what he should do about it.

I had no answer.

Perhaps you have one. If so share it with me.