This is my first time attending SMX West and my first search conference ever. The Paid Search session from this morning focused on customer segmentation and brought together diverse, yet very experienced and interesting speakers. It was insightful to hear some of the stats about reaching specific customer segments - Youth, Gay and Lesbians, Blacks, Hispanics - and I encourage all of you to browse through the decks.

But, most importantly, it was good to hear every speaker reiterating several times the importance of looking at search as an integral part of the overall marketing plans which, in an ideal world, start with clearly defining target audiences. Investing in research to understand customer needs, preferences and profiles is something every business should regularly do regardless of size.

For example, Bobby Jones of Alloy Access spoke about a young female Black teenager and that, unlike conventional wisdom, her lifestyle preferences are more closely aligned to a Youth segment and less so to a Black segment. Companies should focus more on the emotional, lifestyle, needs and other nuances and less on the standard demographic segment as it's defined by the industry. One of the cheap and quick ways to start research for a small businesses is to leverage U.S. Census data to understand local or regional markets better; then the insights coupled with geotargeting could deliver a higher ROI of search campaigns.

How come then not much or even effort and budget are dedicated to customer segmentation, someone in the audience asked. The speakers thought that often advertisers are looking for efficiencies (especially in recent economic environment and in fragmented media environment) and tend to generalize the messages to reduce the number of ads, creatives, individual campaigns, etc. that need to be managed. Also some of the top 500 brands have a fear of alienating a core customer - Bill Carter of Fuse Marketing gave an example when Harley Davidson in an attempt to reach a younger male demographic initially rejected their suggestion of a messaging/creative for this audience for the fear of pushing away their established customers.

This is the first time the organizers ran this session and it was great overall. My only wish for next year is to bring more specific search advice and tactics when it comes to customer segmentation and targeting.

Rimma