Introduction

Recent studies by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) have confirmed what a lot of search marketers believed: the power of search engine marketing, and the advertising medium of search, in driving branding and awareness; and the IAB reported in a recent survey an increase of 27 per cent in brand awareness from search ^[1]. Further research performed by Comscore suggests that, for some retail sectors, some 92 per cent of purchasers willing to buy researched the purchase online and subsequently bought offline ^[2]. This indicates that search marketing is one of the largest influencing mediums for researching products and services that are researched online.

With this information available the construct of a search-marketing plan around the objective of driving brand and corporate awareness is of high importance. This chapter ill study the components necessary in the construction of a search-marketing plan around this topic.