I'm at the Toronto edition of SES 2008 and there is no question: there are a lot of companies in this space. Search marketing has become a multi-billion dollar business, almost overnight.
Why so popular? Well, it's hard to match the targeting, agility and return on your investment, as measured by business results.
Yet search marketing, as with most online marketing, can struggle to connect the dots when it comes to off-line actions. If you don't sell online, you have to be creative in terms of how you measure success - what actions exist (or can you put in place) to measure or indicate adoption, an engaged audience, and a message that 'sticks'?
There are a lot of promising secondary technologies on show; call forwarding, chat ... and many facilitative technologies, like profile matching. At Warren Huska Associates, we've been exposed to many of these, and deploy them when we determine they might serve a customer. Like anything else, we test (and negotiate for a free trial if one is not on offer!) - and measure results, so you can be assured that any given tool or technique is workin' for ya.
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I still love the Yellow Pages tagline: "The Find Engine". Good for them.
