Search Informed Marketing Panel – 360i Summit

Panel: Using Search to Inform Your Digital and Offline Campaigns

Aimee Reker, Senior VP, Global Director of Search, McCann Worldgroup

Michelle Borja, Director of Marketing, Scripps Emerging Networks

Paula Chiarucci, Media & Entertainment Manager, Google

John Ragals, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, 360i (moderator)

We started off with several varying viewpoints on the Search Informed Marketing process.

Michelle Borja from Scripps kicked it off showing how 360i helped create a rich media campaign for her (yes, even rich media and search are connected these days… an interesting paradigm to consider for future posts, especially having worked on both sides of the interactive media fence). She really presented the Search Informed Marketing 1.0, or even the BC, or BSIM, version, before the process itself was crystallized, and the results of that campaign helped inform the SIM process. Consider it battle-tested.

Then came Paula from Google: “Consumers really want to express themselves and be involved with the brand, and that’s really a challenge for marketers.”

One of the challenges is that traditional channels used to match up nicely with stages of the sales funnel, but currently, consumers can be interacting with any medium in any stage of the process (with any luck, I’ll get the green light to post the visuals).

Aimee Reker of McCann had the most to say about SIM in an actionable sense, and how an agency uses it. She said how search is at teh center of what they’re doing. It helps with competitive audits, for instance, and their SWOT analyses. When’s the best time to launch a product? How can online tools help with cost efficiencies? How can log file analyses help improve natural and paid search? How can we shift more of our marketing away from paid media so we can be smarter about investing? What can we learn from keywords that our not converting, which may present market opportunity? How can it tie into our PR strategy and our blogging strategy? Search Informed Marketing sums up how they find the answers.