Search Engine Marketing Ireland – Who’s Responsible?

As part of a recent marketing campaign, Interleado have been talking to a lot of companies in Ireland about their website.

Three very clear pictures emerged from our campaign about the attitude Irish companies have to their website…

1. In larger SME’s it often very unclear who is actually responsible for the website. The IT function invariably get landed with the responsibility of talking to anyone about the company’s  website requirements.
2. When there is a non-IT person tasked  with looking after a company’s website, very often this person has other responsibilities and find little time to actually develop a clear plan for marketing their company’s wares successfully online.
3. There is still a lot of confusion when it comes to understanding the differences between organic search activities, paid search activities, Local Search..etc

Naturally the first question is, ‘Is it only Ireland that has a problem with defining internal responsibilities when it comes to Search Engine Marketing?’

I’d like to get your feedback on this one. From my our own experience, similar issues exist with UK companies, but not with US companies.

Let’s take a look our three findings and tease them out.

The IT Guy Approach to Internet Marketing

When a company gets a new website, the IT guy is sometimes landed with the ongoing responsibility of managing site. This can be anyone from the IT Director to the tech support guy. Probably because it’s seen as a more technical role, what with the ftp details, uploading changes, domain registration,  email related issues, spam fighting – it’s all technical right?

The obvious problem with approach  is that the IT will only ever look after the IT related stuff and will never get involved in thinking about promoting your latest products or services. I think this approach is maybe a legacy of the days before content management systems (CMS) . Before the days when anyone who would write a sentence in Microsoft Word could edit a webpage or even god forbid develop  a new page from scratch.

Some of the  CMS solutions on the market today are very easy to use, the likes of Wordpress or Joolma spring to mind, but some still leave a lot to be desired in terms of usability for the complete technophobe.

The marketing executive approach to Internet Marketing

Picture the scene! You have a very competent, very experienced person that is key to your business. You have faith in them, proven years of loyalty to the company. Everyone is talking about the web, everyone’s getting business from the web these days, we need to ‘up our game’ on the web. The only thing we need to decide is who will look after our new web strategy.

Who’s going to be the internal champion for our new strategic online marketing plan? Who can we trust. Who wants the responsibility? You have a management meeting and you decide to give it to a member of your team that is doing a great job on the marketing side of things. They have proven themselves in supporting the sales guys over the last few years. They know the company inside out and know the customers. You give the responsibility to Jane.

Now, notice I said you give the ‘responsibility’, not the job. This is inevitability where the problems starts, because now Jane not only has to continue to deliver on her existing responsibilities, she now is responsible for marketing the company online. Can you guess where Jane is after 3 months? Frustrated?Annouyed? Left the company?

What happens is that nothing happens. Jane’s primary responsibilities will always win out over the new online marketing responsibilities. What also sometimes  happens in this situation is that nobody is quiet sure what responsibilities one person has over another. The IT Guy looks after part of the website, Marketing another, Sales another, Support another. You end up with nobody really taking the responsibility or managing the development of the business online.

I know this is changing and more and more businesses are appointing staff whose sole responsibility is to manage the online marketing of the company, but I still get the feeling that there are many many companies who are still trapped in the traditional sales and marketing roles that have dominated the last 30 years.

The advertising approach to Internet Marketing

If you are running an advertising campaign with Google Adwords, or Yahoo or Bing, does this mean your business is running an Internet Marketing campaign? Let me put it another way, if your business is targeting 25% of the online market, are you running an Internet Marketing  campaign, or are you just dipping your toe in the water?

Internet Marketing, like everything else these days is becoming more and more fragmented. Putting all your eggs in one basket is selling your business way short. Internet marketing these days is so much more…

As the channels to market fragment, so does expertise. It very hard to get one person who knows everything about marketing your business online. Point three is really a fallout from point one and two where nobody rally takes the role of online marketing seriously and you get an ad-hoc approach and possibly the easiest approach to getting visibility is taken. Running a small Google Adwords campaign takes very little time to setup and manage. Running a successful Internet Marketing campaign takes, time, money and serious management backing.

Can you identify with any of the cases above?

Have you been in that situation before?

Are there cultural differences to how business run their business online?

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