When a person uses an online search engine, the results are a mélange of corporate content, blog postings, and customer reviews. All the results appear to have equal weight and importance, creating a level playing field for content creators.
In this environment, traditional mass media advertising and communications become ineffective. This is fundamentally changing business, how people communicate, and how people buy.
By using digital tools, companies can build awareness and beat the competition. One of the goals is to help businesses produce valuable online content and become their own media channels.
One way to begin is through contextual advertising: an organization buys a targeted keyword from an Internet search engine and when a user searches with that keyword, the company's ad appears in the results.
The power of contextual advertising is twofold:
1) it appears when a prospect is in search mode and
2) the company only pays for the advertisement if the user clicks on it.
Most companies do not have a strong enough presence in search engines, leaving opportunities behind for competitors. Every business and entrepreneur should have their own unique digital footprint, defined by the first page of search results that appear in a search engine.
This article is based on the book "Six Pixels of Separation." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.
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