Consumer Behaviour and What SEM's Can Learn
Rather than digging into psycho-analytical consumer behaviour data that would leave the audience second guessing their marketing strategies, the panel discussed some practical thoughts that served to stimulate what we perhaps already knew.
A recurring theme in many of the conference sessions was brought up again in this one: keep content relevant and consider what customers want. Just because search is growing rapidly and because internet adoption is continuing to increase dramatically doesn't mean that, as online marketers, we should throw everything on the wall. As session moderator Gary Stein of Jupiter Media said, just because you have a hammer, don't treat everthing as a nail.
The following question was asked to the panel: What was the single most dramatic change in the technology landscape in 2004 that will shape the search engine industry? The answers: Google desktop search; the battle of Google vs. MSN; and broadband adoption.
The panel agreed that marketers will need to spend more time gaining client information, rather than guessing, and will need to apply that knowledge through the channel available to them, whether it be rich media, enhanced search engine indexing, local search, mobile search etc.
