Search Marketing: Dear Steve Harty, Chairman of Bartle Bogle Hegarty
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 1, 2008 | Share This
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Does Bartle Bogle Hegarty really not believe in search? Do you, Steve Harty, Chairman of BBH, really think that your clients and prospects don’t Google? Yesterday there was a lot of talk around our office about your quote in a recent AdWeek article by Andrew McMains (we attributed it to Brian Morrissey due to an error in their content management system). For those who didn’t see the quote, you said:
We’re not convinced that the people we are marketing to are using that as a channel…We have a more targeted strategy than, ‘We’re open for business.’ Search is kind of indiscriminate in a way.”
We believed that sentiment was pretty dismissive of search marketing beyond being a broad lead generation tool, which you seemed to feel was not relevant to the clientele BBH goes after. Reprise Media’s Managing Partner Joshua Stylman even posted a critique of why we disagree strongly with the premise of your quote.
As Brian Morrissey reported today (and yes, we checked, it really was him this time) we thought it might be fun and instructive to demonstrate how a targeted paid search campaign in tandem with SEO could work for prospective BBH clients who might leave that initial pitch meeting and search for Bartle Bogle Hegarty, or even Steve Harty to find out more about your firm (as they are likely to do). As you can see the combination of our paid search ad and Stylman’s optimized blog post pack a powerful punch. Both results lead the user to yesterday’s post.
Searching for your own name shows how important paid and organic search are to reputation management:
While the paid search ads were really just featured to make a point, Josh ended his post yesterday by wondering where it would end up on an organic search for Bartle Bogle Hegarty and today, less than 24 hours later, we’ve seen the results – top five, for both the brand and the chairman’s name.
Those organic results are kind of like bad luggage, or herpes. This digital asset will always be out there ranking in your search results. Of course, some canny SEO on your part could start to push the post back to page 2 of Google’s organic results but then again, your clients don’t do these kinds of searches. Do they?
Topics: Advertising: Online, Blogging, Google, Reprise Media, SEM: Paid Search, SEO |
Many companies see SEO as a supplement to marketing and almost an after-thought. For many Internet facing companies the minute they participate, SEM becomes the life-blood of customer acquisition efforts.
To Alan:
I agree, there is often a dip a toe in the water approach for companies that can lead to an eye-opening experience of what search can bring to the bottom line. The danger in “toe-dipping” is that, as you say,it is sometimes done as an “after-thought” and yields disappointing results because of a lack of strategy going in.
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