SmartSearch Marketing Cashing In on the Growing Online Marketing Industry

May 13, 2005
By Elizabeth Gold, Boulder County Business Report

Online advertising good fit for SmartSearch Marketing

BOULDER — Since 1999 Patricia and Dale Hursh have been cashing in on the growing online marketing industry.
Revenues for SmartSearch Marketing, their full-service search-engine marketing company, grew 83 percent from $143,743 in 2003 to $1.3 million in 2004.

“The future looks bright,” Dale said, “even though in the bigger picture interactive advertising constitutes only about 9 percent of all advertising dollars spent. It’s just a tiny drop in the water, but it’s still the fastest-growing type of advertising.”

According to New York-based market research firm Jupiter Research, paid search advertising in the U.S. increased by 34 percent in 2004. And Jupiter projects that the sector will increase from $2.6 billion in 2004 to $5.5 billion by 2009.

In dollars and cents that means that money spent for online advertising jumped from $3.5 billion in 1999 to $8.4 billion in 2004. Projections expect the kitty to grow to $16.1 billion in 2009.

Because of the success of search-engine marketing, advertisers are flocking to companies like SmartSearch to get their piece of the pie. SmartSearch went from five clients in 2003 to 25 clients in 2004.

Companies hire SmartSearch to increase their visibility on the Internet. The goal is to increase traffic to their Web site and increase Web-site activity for sales, lead generation and brand awareness.

Search-engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising and Web-site conversion are part of the package SmartSearch sells.

Converting clients means acquiring customers.

“Some of our major clients, like Time Warner Cable, grew, and that helped us grow, too,” Dale said, giving trickle-down reasons for his company’s good fortune. “The industry is growing so rapidly because it works as a way to acquire customers. This is the lowest cost way of doing that.”

The Hurshes increased their clientele by stepping up their own marketing efforts. “Patricia and I co-founded the company, but prior to 2003 she was the one doing the work,” Dale said. “In late 2003 we turned it more into a company rather than a contractor for hire.”

Patricia helped secure the company’s foothold in the market by becoming a recognized authority in the search-engine field. She writes for SearchEngineWatch.com and speaks at about seven search-engine strategy conferences around the world yearly.

Clients who use SmartSearch pay on a month-to-month basis. The investments range from $3,000 to $150,000 a month, according to Dale. “Some are startup companies, and some are Fortune 100 companies.”

Companies always can spend more money if they wish to with search-engine marketing, Dale said. “We ask ‘How interested are you in acquiring customer X,’ and they say ‘As much as I can spend.’ That’s really one of the primary reasons for our growth.”

SmartSearch employs six people, and both Patricia and Dale continue to manage daily activities. To assure that they can keep up with the growing demand for their services and continue to provide quality work, they’ve paid attention to management of their own growth.

“My history in life has been in sales and business management,” Dale explained. “I’ve actually turned down accounts to focus on companies that can spend $3,000 and up on search-engine advertising each month. Since we were getting plenty of larger clients, we were able to be selective and focus more on them.”

Since finding and training knowledgeable employees was posing a challenge to the Hurshes, they turned to an off-the-shelf training tool.

“Search-engine marketing is relatively new — you can’t get a degree in it,” Dale said, “That means we have to train employees from scratch.

“We run the company virtually so office space hasn’t been a problem, but as the business grows, infrastructure and delivery has also been a challenge,” he added.

Another off-the-shelf tool – a project task management system — helps manage the demand by enabling SmartSearch staff to message each other and keep up on projects.

SmartSearch Marketing
4450 Arapahoe Ave. Suite 100
Boulder, CO 80303
(303) 444-3134
Fax: (303) 449-7235
www.smartsearchmarketing.com

Posted on May 13, 2005 01:15 PM

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