Has Your Digital Marketing Strategy Evolved with Search?

For the past 25 years, retail and internet shopping specialists have analyzed purchasing habits and trends, distilling the experience into a marketing funnel most of us can recite. But what happens when you pour that funnel into a blender?

Customers no longer put a search keyword into a search engine, view advertising that matches those criteria, and then click on the first choice using their credit card.

Audiences have swiftly adjusted to receiving material and inspiration across several platforms. Search today includes social media, markets, travel portals, video sharing, and entertainment sites. Search is ubiquitous. And the audience data necessary for marketing activities must evolve and adapt to reflect this shift in audience behavior.

And if the search is everywhere, so are your consumers. To reach them, marketers must drastically change their outreach efforts.

Where are Gen Z Searching?

With over 40% of Generation Z searching on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, a brand’s search presence has never been more important on all relevant searchable channels.

For the first time since the beginning of the internet, the search engine’s supremacy is waning.

Meanwhile, search is becoming more inspiration-driven. It’s no longer only about search engine optimization (SEO). Instead, we’ve developed a new search paradigm in which gaining exposure, commanding attention, and optimizing performance across the board are critical. Brands that depend simply on click-through rates from 2022 to plan their digital marketing strategy for 2024 will need to catch up

Google processes around 3.5 billion queries daily (some estimates go as high as 8.5 billion). However, with Facebook averaging over 2 billion daily searches and Instagram reporting in 2019 that 83% of its users stated the network helps them find new products and services, it’s time to embrace the search revolution and acknowledge that search is everywhere. The audience-first strategy is the only way ahead.

To meet this problem, my organization, Found, has spent the past two years building the Everysearch architecture. It was developed by an in-house team of engineers and AI specialists and offers cutting-edge audience intelligence data from a variety of networks, platforms, and markets. It gives deep insights into audience behaviors, assisting in establishing market positions and determining the best way to spend marketing budgets wherever the client is, whatever platform they are using, and whoever motivates them.

Always Seeking

The aim was for my team to deliver unmatched performance across every searchable platform. The most difficult aspect of developing the framework is that it is not a tool that can be constructed and maintained in six months or a year. Search is continuously evolving, changing, and adapting, and so must Every search. There is a lot of work to do to encourage companies to move away from their comfort zone of market share, click-through rates, and last-click ROAS to target audiences. We must let them rely on something other than media schedules and purchasing habits from five years ago to compete in today’s competitive environment.

By spending more than £1 million on this unique technology, we are wagering that audiences will drive the future and placing ourselves in the strongest position to advise our clients as audience behavior specialists. Experts, not just in search, but also in areas where audiences invest their time, money, and loyalty. Where audiences discover inspiration, love, and happiness. What trends and platforms are taking off – in Japan one week and in Los Angeles the next? We are not simply stepping away from the funnel; we are embracing the blender and giving order to what appears chaotic at first look.

We’ve created tools to maximize money, target the clicks that count, and design the correct searches to produce solid ROI.

We must employ audience expertise to assist brand CMOs to be agile, to identify their audiences, and to leverage generative AI developments to generate efficiencies and be responsive to material that their customers interact with. Recognizing the development of search is difficult, as is advising customers on how to capitalize on audience behavior and trends. We’re taking it one step further: we want Everysearch to become the industry standard.

Source- TheDrum