What is the holy grail of marketing your business online? Think about it :: what type of marketing strategy would increase your bottom line the most?
Direct Response Marketing Online
A direct response :: that’s what you want. You want the sale as quickly and with as few obstacles as possible. You want the “ready buyer.”
If an increase in direct responses is the goal (a lead submission, sale, phone call), we would then want to increase the amount of properly targeted traffic to the right pages on our site. We would also want to 
target our message to searchers even when they are not on our site – so when they are ready to make a decision – we are it!
That being the case, the question becomes: “how do we find these visitors and get them to see our message in an online space that is becoming ever more crowded and filled with noise?”
The Answer is Individual-Centric Marketing
This is the ultimate segmentation model that promises the highest rates of conversion, as long as you are able to answer the right questions at the right time.
Individual centric marketing is an attempt to optimize and coordinate a user’s personal digital experience across every channel on the web. (display advertising, email, websites of all kinds, mobile devices and tablets, and social networks.)
Did you know that Google is working very hard in order to make this a reality? In fact, we already have most of the tools needed to accomplish this, but the thinking and the infrastructure need to exist in order to launch it at scale.
Two recent developments from Google are the Universal Analytics beta and “Enhanced Campaigns” now available in AdWords. It is my opinion that they are intended as complementary products, but I have not seen a lot of literature yet reflecting this situation.
Enhanced Campaigns are basically the presupposition that mobile devices are not going away, or better put that Google’s public recognition of the fact that we now access the web via multiple devices every day. Capabilities for the deployment of advertising on these devices are now baked into the platform, without the need to select them separately. You may create different ads, extensions, and bids for mobile users with greater ease.
Universal Analytics is a move toward a more sophisticated measurement of cross-channel marketing efforts, very much necessitated by the golden treasures that Enhanced Campaigns promise us. Still, there are much more interesting implications such as the nudge toward server-side user tracking in lieu of the traditional cookie model that exists today. Besides this, we have the capability to customize the tracking code and apply it to many devices not traditionally included in analytics.
What could result from the combination of these two new powerful features from Google? I imagine the day when someone wearing Google Glass walks past a local business and receives an ad for a tailored offer being run – after they have expressed interest by previously searching online for that type of product or service. Imagine knowing a user’s intent while they are walking down the street nearby your store…
While we wait for that kind of tech to get legs, there will be executions of the strategy on mobile to be sure. The future is starting now. The new synergy of paid and organic search promises incredible possibilities for users and for marketers alike. In fact, it will make this relationship more fluid and more relevant as time goes on. Direct response marketing online will soon blend with offline behaviors, that is the future. Are you ready for the new Search Engine Marketing?
