What skills are required for SEM?

Does search engine marketing belong in marketing, IT or somewhere else?

It’s a marketing job right? That’s why the word marketing is in there.

So is it just the case that the medium is different? Online rather than print or television? Do the same general marketing skills apply and should the person responsible for creating and managing a paid search campaign have a marketing background?

I’ve been pondering these questions because I see many more people from an IT background rather than a marketing background in a SEM role. It’s also an often voiced concern within the industry that there is a divide between traditional marketing agencies and search marketing consultants or agencies.

My overall thoughts are that it’s necessary to understand the whole process in order to get results. I touched on that in this post about the real problem for adwords beginners. PPC marketing does however require a technical, analytical approach that suits typical IT skills. There are also restrictions which I can see make it unappealing for creative marketing types. Here are some of these aspects:

Search marketing is largely pull rather than push

Pay per click advertising is keyword driven and the searcher has already expressed an interest in the product, or at least the topic, by entering a search query. The searcher is goal driven and the advertising copy that works best is one that does three fairly simple things:

• conveys that they’ve found the right place (most effectively done by simply echoing the keywords in the ad headline)
• states the offer
• provides a call to action.

There isn’t a great deal of creative scope for a copywriter or marketer. Also the rules imposed by the search engines are very restrictive. You get a certain number of characters and some formatting rules to follow. Anything unusual isn’t allowed and even if it falls within the guidelines it’s likely that quality score will suffer.

Don’t get just one shot

It’s quick and easy to create an ad, start it running and then see what happens. It doesn’t involve any significant design process. The general technique is to try multiple things and keep tweaking to improve the results. It’s an iterative process rather than one shot at a best effort. Ready, Fire, Aim rather than Ready, Aim, Fire.

Huge amount of data to work with

One thing that really differentiates pay-per-click advertising from other advertising mediums is the sheer volume of data that it produces. You know what people searched for, what they clicked on, whether the click converted into a sale and how much it cost. It requires analytical and statistical skills to analyse this data and take action.

I think in the future search engine marketing will be a more integral part of marketing courses and roles but with some cross discipline elements to cover the technical and analytical aspects.