June 12, 2006 | Monday

Search in Sunnyvale

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Events |Marketing |Online Sales |Search Engines |Search Expertise

On Saturday, I attended the second Techdirt Greenhouse event in Silicon Valley (I also reported here on the first Greenhouse, held back in March).

In one of the breakout sessions, I discussed ‘behavioural marketing’ with tech personalities such as Mike Sigal (CEO of Guidewire Group), David Henkel-Wallace (co-founder of Cygnus), and Sam Pullara (of venture capital firm Accel). The broad question we were trying to address was whether businesses employ ‘behavioural marketing’ online as well as they do offline.

We touched on a range of issues, including privacy, the lamentable fact that individuals do not have access to their own clickstream and behavioural data, online reputation and recommendation systems like Amazon’s, and why many companies invest so much in trying to acquire new customers whilst putting less effort into exceeding the expectations of - and maximising sales to - existing customers.

In the end, I had to bring it all back to search.

With search engine marketing, the individual user is telling you exactly what they want to buy - no guesswork and no coercion necessary to discern what they are looking to purchase. If your SEM is expertise-driven and always on top of the latest developments, you can save yourself a lot of trouble in exploring ‘behavioural marketing’ tactics. Via search engines, your potential customers are talking to you. How well are you listening?