A few months ago, I posted an open invitation for anyone who’d like to contribute to the Idaho Ad Agencies blog. Recently, Shane Vaughan, Vice President of Marketing at Balihoo, took me up on the offer.
Search Marketing
Search marketing is defined as a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is an exploding industry…$9B dollars spent in 2006 and that’s expected to double in the next 5 years. Search Marketing is leading the exploding growth of internet advertising and is revolutionizing the marketing and advertising fields with it’s metricability and true ROI measurement.
Here’s the question…where’s the expertise in Boise? As I talk to the major agencies here in town it seems that no one has this type of expertise on staff. I’ve seen a firm or two (Cendesic) pop up that specializes in this, but it seems that traditional ad agencies are hesitant to add this to their abilities.
This is where web development was in 1998…traditional agencies thought they didn’t need to have this type of ability on staff. They soon realized that specialized agencies were eating up all of the internet business and as campaigns became more integrated they scrambled to build this capability for fear of losing entire accounts. Search marketing is in exactly the same space. Smart agencies and smart people who want to be positioned to be successful in the future will develop these skills.
Feel free to comment away.
Technorati tags: balihoo, search marketing