Does Search Marketing Belong in Marketing or Sales?
There are different ways in which people perceive about search marketing. The major concept behind successful search marketing (and indeed all of Internet marketing) is direct marketing. And the more one knows about direct marketing, the better they will understand about search marketing.
Any person involved with direct marketing for a long period of time would tell that direct marketers don’t easily distinguish between sales and marketing. For instance, if a brochure is mailed to a person , he or she simply opens and fills out the order form and sends it back . Hence it is difficult to say where the marketing stop and sales began.
However, most companies can easily separate their sales from their marketing. This differentiation is done by having two separate departments and having a Chief Marketing Officer on one side and a VP of Sales on the other. Any communications that go to big groups of customers are called marketing, while interactions with individual customers are the sales.
Brand marketing, where the companies promote their brand is easily separable from sales. Now coming to Internet marketing and search marketing in particular, it is based on direct marketing where , it revolves around the concept of tying each individual sale back to the marketing that produced it.
Hence if the company has speculations and differences over weather search marketing belongs to marketing or sales, then this kind of argument is sorted out by simply bringing search marketing in tandem with marketing and sales.
Thus if it’s the question about selling things online, then direct marketing is the one that is completely involved. It is accepted that it is difficult to count offline sales than online sales, but it’s just as important. If one can’t tie the offline sales to how they started on the Web, then one will never figure out what he or she did right to get that sale. Once this aspect is understood clearly, one becomes a direct marketer and probably a successful search marketer, too. As mentioned earlier, search marketing belongs to marketing and sales. It’s all about aligning these together and makes it work successfully.
