I have always been interested in new business models, market disruption strategies, and start-ups. Back in 1997, during my studies, I decided to specialise in Air Transportation, knowing there would be new entrants (and jobs for me) as European Air Transportation was opening up.
Low-cost airlines
As a Master student I heard about EasyJet and Ryanair and the potential rise of low-cost carriers in Europe. Those airlines were the ones I wanted to work for: low-cost airlines would end privileges, develop local economies, re-unite people who live far apart, and I will be part of it ! Enough of these expensive, inefficient, state monopoly, traditional airlines…
Easyjet only had 6 aircrafts when I joined in 1998. I was the Marketing Manager in charge of creating demand in the French market. I was the only EasyJet employee in France for 10 years. In the beginning, I was based in Luton, then in Nice, then Paris. EasyJet quickly became the 2nd biggest Arline in France.
After EasyJet, I spent a couple of years working as a marketing consultant for startups (dress rental service, news website), before joining Air Asia in 2010. This is where I really specialised in digital marketing and got involved with search. I was first in charge of SEA (Google Ads) & SEO for the French market, then I led SEA for the Asia Pacific Markets (with local agencies) when AirAsia withdrew from Europe. After low cost airlines, SEO was the obvious next thing for me…
What do I like about Search Marketing as a marketer?
SEO : a low cost marketing channel
SEO democratises market access for start ups. No need to spend millions in TV commercials to build your brand awareness, no need to give away a third of your turnover (at least) to an intermediary retailer… You can start selling your products yourself, on your website, via SEO!
It’s true that SEO takes a bit of time to kick in, 3 to 6 months for a new site, so it is a good idea to activate the final domain name as early as possible. And SEO is long term, you have to look at it as an investment with everlasting ROI.
SEO is an investment in the future, not an advertising spend, and you will benefit from the organic traffic forever.
Keyword analysis is a great source of market data
As a marketer, I like to know what my competitors are doing and what the market opportunities are before recommending a strategy. SEO and Google tools let you do that very easily. SEMrush is one of my favourite tool for this.
I am a great fan of quantitative analysis applied to social sciences : Steven D Levitt (Freakonomics), Malcolm Gladwell (Talking to Strangers, Outliers, Tipping point) , Paul Dohan (Happiness by Design), Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Everybody Lies) are examples of authors I like…
Search Data is a bit like being able to read people ’s minds. As Seth Stephens-Davidowitz said, people don’t lie to Google…
So, thanks to Google, we can find an infinite amount of interesting data: flu virus progression, rumours, politicians’ popularity, prejudices… You can get search data about any kind of topic, the limit is your imagination.
On the topic of marketing, SEO data and tools can help:
- Find out what people want (existing demand for a given product)
- Evaluate market sizes for different products
- Compare market sizes across countries
- Find out how people express their needs (impact on brand name & messaging)
- Find out about your competitors’ online strategy: brand awareness, SEO strategy, paid search & social media activities …