SPECIAL

A day in the life of an

Search... and ye shall find! Make a career of surfing the net!

Anish Pednekar

Internet marketing?

What is that? It’s pretty much like old-school marketing... using all the means at your disposal to ensure that your client’s message reaches its intended audience effectively and at optimal cost. And your basic tools here are internet search engines, email campaign managers, web creatives (including sites and site collateral like banner ads and ad exchanges), effective language skills, and a teensy bit understanding of how people (such as yourselves) use the internet.

And the best part of this job is: if you are good at it, you can work from anywhere in the world for a client who could also be anywhere in the world. You could work for the biggest corporations and government bodies and educational institutions and celebrities and sports clubs and music labels or anybody who thinks the net could help their business. Routine: it’s a thing of the past with this job!

So what exactly does the job involve?

You may (or may not) have heard of a term called SEO. It stands for search engine optimisation and is the oldest and still the most vital part of online marketing. SEO entails ensuring that your site is found in at least the top 20, preferably the top 10, results on a search engine like Google for the keywords (search terms) identified by you as relevant for the site’s target audience. EG: for a travel site that allows for hotel bookings in Kerala, you might decide that search terms like “hotels in Kerala”, “visit Kerala”, “staying in Kerala”, “Kerala resorts” are most representative of your website. You will then focus your efforts on ensuring that whenever users on search engines use these terms, your site should appear in the first page. This is the essence of SEO.

Once your site features in search engines, you will have visitors coming to your site. The next phase of online marketing kicks in here. You have to make your site relevant and useful and “sticky”. This ensures that having reached your site, visitors don’t leave. This is the most interesting part of the whole exercise because you have to constantly keep tweaking your site, make note of how users are interacting with the site, which sections are most visited, how much time do they spend on the site and several other factors and ensure that most visitors get what they want from your site.

Also important is to keep your site in visitor’s frame of reference for which you need traffic retention programmes like newsletters, RSS feeds, online offers and the like. You may also want to put a subscription form on your site that will allow users to sign-up for your email newsletters. Once you’ve created a database of subscribers, you can start your email campaigns, segmented if you want on subscriber profiles. A well-done email campaign is a great tool for customer retention and further referrals and actual business. Plus, you also have the option of carrying sponsored ads. And if you ensure that these ads match your subscriber’s interests, it will be appreciated by both your subscribers and your advertisers.

Career options

Increasingly, online creative houses are resorting to building online marketing resources in-house. Also, large corporations across the world are also moving towards internal resources for managing their internet campaigns. Once you prove your worth at it, you can also become an independent marketing consultant. And know this: 15 years from now, all jobs in the world will need an online expert to complete them. So, picking this as your career choice might be best if you want to work across different industries without any tedium.

Anish Pednekar is an Internet Marketing professional with The Busy Bee Co.