I was browsing Quora this morning and saw this question which picked my interest. The difficulty in articulating an answer is Search Engine Marketing (S.E.M.) can be used in multiple ways. The set of skills required will depend on the desired outcome.

Brand marketers will typically work on a set of goals that promote, reinforce or protect their brand. SEM is only of the things they work on and therefore their primary interest will be to ensure alignment between SEM and the overall brand campaign. They will place stronger emphasis on overall brand positioning and experience. This will result on more emphasis on creative’s and off-site engagement metrics (Click-Through-rates).

They will also be strong proponents of defensive SEM, where they will ensure that the brand is prominent in search results in response to competitors’ and media campaigns. Look at the BP SEM’s brand campaign as an example. Brand marketers are becoming more sophisticated around measurement particularly on integrating SEM and on-site engagement metrics. But their forte remains corporate and creative alignment.

Finding the right skill-set

Educational marketers are a sub-set of brand marketers. They understood that the brand promise can only be fully executed when customers experience intangible benefits that help do better in their life or job. This is particularly true in a Business-to-Business environment. Comscore is great example of a company that has been able to leverage their unique data pool and make it available to potential customers. They will use SEM a bit differently.

By bidding one educational keywords (‘online case studies’), they will be able to reinforce their brand positioning and drive qualified traffic to their web site. Skills for educational marketers and similar to those required in the Communications world. Those include the ability to promote added value content combined with on-site content publication.

Performance marketers are the most common breed in the SEM world. Their goals are clearly customer acquisition. In the B2B world, this starts with lead generation. The ability to engage customers all the way through from a search engine (or publication) to contact us mechanism is paramount.

They often look at a broader variety of metrics that encompass the multiple stages in the sales funnel. Ultimately the will look at Cost-Per-Acquisition at their primary performance indicator. They will then compare the C.P.A. against incremental net margin to assess the pay-back time of a particular campaign.

Performance marketers should relentlessly challenge themselves in improving creative’s, web site experience and acquisition at the keyword level. They understand data more than anyone else and are comfortable with it.

All in all, there are definitely some common skills required whether you are a brand or performance marketers. Good SEM marketers should understand creative alignment, be able to leverage data all the way throughout the sales funnel and have a relentless appetite to challenge existing campaigns.