Selling Your Search Strategy

By Aaron Goldman, VP, Marketing & Strategic Partnerships

Last week I participated in a webcast sponsored by comScore on the topic, "Selling Your Search Strategy: Timely Advice to Win the Budget Battle."

Along with co-presenter Eli Goodman from comScore, we shared a number of practical ways search marketers and agencies can leverage search data to create a business case for allocating budget to search.

Given the economic climate, this topic is more sensitive than ever. Any request for budget must be backed up with solid rationale and there's no better rationale than hard data.

We broke it down into 4 main areas:

•Sizing the marketplace opportunity
•Defining your target audience
•Identifying the competition
•Setting & selling your budget

And we gave examples using a variety of free and subscription tools:

•Google Insights
•Microsoft Ad Intelligence
•comScore Marketer
•AdGooroo
•Microsoft AdLabs
•eMarketer

We did not touch on the data available via campaign management tools and web analytics platforms. The assumption we were working under was that this data might not be available to a marketer testing search for the first time or an agency pitching a new client. We wanted to draw from a baseline of data that is generally available to the public.

Overall, it seemed like our methodology was well-received. At one point, we polled the audience and over 85% of the attendees thought I had made a good enough case and would've approved the search budget if they were the decision-maker.

As for the other 15%... I'd like to think that had I been given longer than 20 minutes, I could've made believers out of them too.

I invite you to judge for yourself. The webcast is available on demand at SearchMarketingNow.com. Enjoy.