The Future of Search Engine Advertising and Why You Need to Innovate
This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Bing Network. All opinions are 100% mine.
Effective search engine advertising is about delivering the right message, to the right person at exactly the right moment.
It’s answering people’s questions, whenever they have them, in the most personalized and accurate way you can.
As advertising technology continues to evolve, yes your ability to achieve this becomes easier, but user expectations of real-time understanding and intuition grow just as fast.
If you don’t keep up, your ROI from paid search will continue to deteriorate.
As we move into the next wave of the digital revolution, you will be able to deliver highly intelligent advertising messages, backed by enormous amounts of personal and behavioral data on your prospects.
The future of search engine advertising is exciting, but blink and you’ll miss the opportunity.
Table of Contents
Real-time expectations, personalization and big data
People want information, and they want it now. And with a sea of data and insights available to advertisers this expectation can only grow.
It will become the norm to type a query into your handheld device and get a real-time recommendation based on your location, preferences, demographic information and a thousand other data points.
Advertising personalization will go BEYOND basic remarketing.
The ads you see won’t just be about the last web page you visited, they’ll be tailored based on years of behavioral cues and off and online activity. This is your digital footprint, and brands will be able to capitalize on it.
Ads will be triggered based on the weather outside, the store you just walked past, or the birthday party you have coming up next weekend. And these ads won’t just pop up in search engines. They’ll be everywhere. In mobile apps, across your favorite websites and even on digital billboards.
BIG data is more than just an email address and some website history. It’s your shoe size, your dating history, the type of books you read, the ads you click on, the ads you don’t click on, every car you’ve ever bought. All of this information is being aggregated in a way that will change the paid advertising industry.
Your smartphone, powered by Siri or Cortana, will recognize that it’s your Mom’s birthday today and suggest stopping to pick up flowers as you approach the florist on your way home. As it turns out, that specific florist has a sale on and you were just told about it by a computer.
This is what search advertising will evolve to be.
Voice search and multi-platform advertising
Voice search is primed to overtake text-based search, and advertisers will need to adapt.
It requires a new approach and a deeper understanding of the natural human language.
Not surprisingly voice search is powered by technology such as Cortana, Siri and Google Now, which are all owned and operated by the search engine giants.
Then we have mobile…
Sure it’s not groundbreaking to suggest that mobile search is the future. But as an advertiser it’s even more important than you think. 3 out of every 4 people who search for something locally on their smartphone, visit a business within that day.
As more and more people start searching for geographically based information on their phones, there is more and more opportunity to personalize the advertising experience for them. And it’s not just about showing a relevant ad in a search engine result. To win in the future of search advertising you will need to expand your ad’s visibility across multiple devices, and on multiple platforms.
Bing alone powers tools such as Cortana, Xbox, Windows, Microsoft Office, Twitter translations, Siri and Amazon search. And that is just scratching the surface. Your ads will need to create touch points across multiple platforms in a person’s day, with each touchpoint being more and more personalized.
Wrap
Search engine advertising has come along way in the last decade, but the biggest changes are yet to come.
Some of what we can expect is predictable based on the trends and innovations we see today. But most of what lies ahead is beyond our imagination.
What we do know is that data, real-time expectations and personalization are rapidly becoming significant influencers over how we deliver advertising messages to our prospects.
Are you ready for the next wave of the digital advertising revolution?
About the author: Jeff Bullas
Jeff is an entrepreneur, blogger, author, marketer and speaker and works with personal brands and business to optimize online personal and company brands with emerging technologies, content, social media technologies and digital marketing. He has spent most of his career involved with information technologies, telecommunications and the web.
