Search Marketing: The Art And Science Of Giving People What They Want

Synopsis: Did you know that you might be spending more time and money on demographics that may end up not being effective and miss nearly 70% in mobile search revenue if you fail to take into consideration the intent of the consumers? In 2017, marketers will concentrate more on intent rather than demographics.

Although marketers normally anticipate frequent customer behaviour changes, they often underestimate their magnitude. Marketers now have to deal with a raft of issues ranging from ever-rising expectations by consumers to mobile obsession on a daily basis. However, there are some customer behaviours that matter more than others, such as device usage. Marketing industry insiders have predicted that consumer intent is rapidly changing. In other words, how consumers search online in terms of the devices they use as well as the components of their search has rapidly evolved. So, in order to stay ahead of the competition, marketers must stay alert.

According to eMarketer, mobile search is growing by double digits in the United States as users include more voice and visuals in their search. In fact, mobile will account for more than 54% of Google’s total revenue in the United States for the first time.

Forward thinking brands must now rebuild their customer data by recognizing individual customer device habits and addressing them. This will make it possible for you to serve them personalized ads almost anywhere online. Seeking out consumer intent is everything advertisers and marketers should do to remain competitive.

Demographics No Longer Provide Effective Marketing Information For Targeted Marketing

How times have changed! Marketers have always used demographics to market their products. However, according to Dmnews, marketers who solely rely on demographics risk losing up to 70% of potential mobile customers. It turns out that demographics alone cannot give you the complete story regarding your customers’ needs, preferences, dislikes and habits. Online competition is rife; therefore, you must get it right the first time. In other words, you must know exactly what the consumers are looking for, what they expect, where and how they need the product, and the exact product they are looking for, among other things.

Intent Beats Identity Any Day

The error of demographic marketing is gone. Now, we usher in the era of intent marketing. The intention of the consumer is more powerful than the identity. This is another way of saying loyalty comes second to immediacy. When someone wants something, they mostly turn to their smartphones for help. Whether you are a housewife looking for the best diaper for your kid or you are looking for Yoga classes, you will turn to YouTube and search for answers via your smartphones. These are called micro-moments or intent-filled moments and marketers should take the opportunity to capture the attention of the consumers. The key to marketing, therefore, is to understand the intent of the consumers and seek ways to meet their needs in the exact moment they are keying in search boxes so that you can win more minds, hearts, and dollars.

While demographics will always have a special place in the hearts of marketers, users want exciting digital experiences that match in-person experiences. Business organizations try to establish meaningful one-on-one relationships with users in order to affect behaviour and achieve certain income. Every interaction is personalized so much so that every time the consumer is online, they receive personalized offers based on their online behaviours. Clearly, this goes beyond just gender, age group, and location. For instance, mobile search & video behaviour analysis estimates that only 31% of mobile search for video games is done by men between 18 and 34 years.

User Segmentation

At the end of the day, every user is different, and this is manifested in the way they use their mobile devices to search the internet. How do you ensure that you build personalized user experience even when you serve millions of customers? Clearly, using traditional analytics like demographics isn’t going to work anymore. Instead, the effectiveness of marketing can be achieved by segmenting users into niche groups of users with specific needs, priorities, goals, wants, beliefs, interests, and preferences.

Customer Identities Should Direct Your SEO Strategy

Online marketers should get into the minds of their target customers to understand what the audience does and think when consuming their data by building what marketers have come to call customer personas. The customer personas are meant to act as the roadmap to help you determine areas that you need to fill with content. Here are some basic questions you need to ask when finding customer identities:

• What services or products have they used in the past?
• What are your consumers’ pain points?
• What are your consumer’s fears?
• What type of solutions do they don’t want?
• Why do consumers keep on using the same products and services? What has made them to discontinue the goods and services?

Having said that, customer personas are going to help you to synchronize your content with your consumers’ needs, preferences and wants. Customer personas help you align your content with the qualities of your readers.

How To Determine Your Consumers’ Intent

Modern-day search engines like Google are working round the clock to ensure you get personalized search result experience, thanks to your mobile search habits. Now, there is increased relevancy and quality in your search engine results. Simply put, each time consumers search information on Google, they are essentially asking questions. So, you need to publish content that seeks to answer that question because the questions will reflect the intention of the user.

Here Are Three Tips To Help You Formulate Correct Consumer Intents:

• What are different types of user intent?

Different users come with different intents. Some just want to seek septic needs while others want to buy specific products. In essence, the three types of user intent can be grouped into three main categories:

• Informational: Here, the users just want additional information regarding a certain product, brand or services.
• Transactional: the user wants to buy something.
• Navigational: the users want to find a specific page, resources or web page.

It is critical to tailor your content based on the above broad categories. The easiest thing to do is to study the keywords used by the users to do their searches. For instance, if someone keys in the keywords “how to make homemade cake”, you can be pretty sure that the intention is informational. If someone queries “best bathtub London”, you can also be very sure that the consumer is looking for the best bathtub offers to buy within London.

• Does The Existing Content Support User Intent?

If you want to know whether your content is satisfying your users’ intent, the best thing to do is to look at your Google Analytics tool. For example, if you discover that a top performing keyword such as “How To” keywords lead you to the sales page then it is highly likely that your users will not achieve their goals.

• Walk In Your User’s Shoes

Sometimes, you need to assume that you are the consumer to get into the heart of consumer. Go to your site and assume you are the visitor and ask yourself:

• Did I find what I came here to do?
• Is the site rendering on my device?
• Does it do what I need to do?

Targeting users based on their intent in your site, app or product in terms of who they are, their main pain points, where they are, what products they like, and what devices they are using is the best way for marketers to get the most from their online users. This is a win-win for both the marketer as well as the users. If you rely purely on the traditional demographics, you are likely to lose 70% of potential revenue resulting from mobile searches. Focus on user intent to get the most out of your online marketing campaign.