Intent-Based Marketing (Search Marketing)

Widely considered as the harbinger of the field of digital marketing, intent-based marketing, (also widely known as search marketing) became one of the early ways in which marketers could use internet for digital marketing in a structured and predictable manner. In the pre-search marketing era, companies were mostly using internet as a fringe medium to put static information on their websites, develop non-targeted blogs, and be a part of random classifieds listing. But with the advent of search marketing, marketers for the first time got a definite medium which they could rely upon to deliver results in a campaign format and also measure their initiatives and investment.

Intent-based marketing, as the term suggests, includes those types of marketing which leverage the biggest strength of the digital medium—the exact knowledge of the specific intent of a particular consumer. In traditional marketing, there was never a possibility to understand consumer’s intent and be able to target them on their specific needs. But with the advent of search technology and specifically the arrival of Google, there was a sort of revolution, wherein marketers could know at a mass level, the intent of a particular set of customers through the keywords they typed in a search bar and be able to bid against those keywords to place their ads in front of those who had shared that intent. That is why we call this category of search marketing in broad terms as ‘Intent-based Marketing’, since this is the most powerful way for marketers to know the keywords related to their specific industry, product, geographical region, and be able to choose the ones which matter, to target customers in their buying cycle (researching a product or trying to satisfy a present or a future need). Let us look at the history behind the development of search technology and concepts like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC).

Search engine marketing, by definition, involves marketing to internet users through natural search engine result page listings and paid advertisement placement next to the search results. In simplest terms, any form of search engine marketing involves:

1. A user typing any combinations of words (known as keywords in search terminology)
2. into an input space (called a search-box)
3. through usage of search technologies (crawling and indexing)
4. application of complex programs (known as search algorithms)
5. delivering the best matched weblinks (known as Organic Search results)
6. displaying paid weblinks (known as Pay Per Click)

In the above definition (related to point ‘e’ ), the process by which any specific website, blog, portal, etc., applies efforts and techniques to optimize its content to be matched to a specific keyword searched is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

On the other side (related to point ‘f ’ ), the structured set of marketing programs run by the specific search engine to put a price to a specific set of keywords and sell them to multiple businesses (web-marketers) is known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Paid Per Click Marketing (PPC).

It is typically the application and execution of search engine marketing, which forms the base of this first category of digital marketing channels, which was popularized by Google and is now one of the most widely used marketing channels in the world.

History of Search Engine Marketing

The development of search engine marketing as a channel goes back to 1996 when the search engine OpenText initiated the paid search business model through a preferred listing service that aimed at highlighting businesses, services, and products, when users searched for relevant keywords. At that time, the company drew flak and did not want a commercialized version of their search results. As the market matured, post OpenText, GoTo.com pioneered the paid search business model with its Pay-for-Placement model. It also introduced an auction (bidding) process for ad placements on the search engine page. With its name changed to Overture in 2003, GoTo.com was purchased by search engine Yahoo that strengthened its paid search marketing services. In 2000, Google launched the AdWords program which saw limited success till 2003 after which it started gaining popularity. This was followed by Ask.com with its PPC services in 2005 called Ask Sponsored Listings and soon after MSN followed it in 2006. Search engine marketing programs since then have established well enough as a prime source of revenue for search engines, the biggest gainer being Google which has extended AdWords services from text ads to display, video, mobile, etc.,

How Search Engines Support Marketing

The key aim of any search engine is to help users find a specific piece of information from the billion pieces of content lying on the internet. The more powerful the search algorithms and technology, the more accurate and effective the results would be for the user. With this as the core concept, the commercial idea which search engines built was to help connect users with a specific intent for a product or service to websites, portals, blogs which could best service their need for information or a purchase. Through this, marketers who wanted to market or sell their specific products could bid against the intent of their target consumer segment (specifically bidding is done on the keywords typed in the search box and is known as search engine marketing) or optimize the content on their sites in such a way that the search engines would naturally pick up their content first and post them on the top of the search results (the activity being defined as search engine optimization). Let us have a quick look at how a search engine goes about mapping specific searched keywords to the most related content on the web.

Search engines execute two major functions which form the core of their business:

1. Crawling and indexing: A search engine’s main job is to crawl and index the billions of websites, their content (text, audio, video), and other unstructured files and data which typically would not be easy to locate and access by a common user.
2. Mapping and serving most relevant content: includes ranking the crawled and indexed content with pre-defined parameters to filter and present the most relevant answers to a particular query put up by the user through his/her keywords.