So Chris Brogan just finished reading Branding is for Cattle, and he highlighted couple of points made by the author:
The first was that money spent on marketing should be money spent on shifting a buyer’s behavior closer towards buying. [...]
[and] marketing strategies that don’t include a heavy element of search won’t work well for us.
Search engine marketing is so powerfully, basically, because it doesn’t just complement consumers’ behavior, it targets it. After all, to search for a certain kind of product offer is, itself, a certain kind behavior, and a very targeted one at that because the consumer is showing an active interest in that range of products.
This is why a confluence of SEO and PPC is so powerful (and necessary) to any successful marketing campaign: because they help you reach out to consumers who are already calling out to you. With search and social media giving consumers as much prerogative as they have, so-called “conventional” branding strategies start to look like cerebral spam. And that reminds me of this video I found on the American Apparel blog over year ago.
