Learning and sharing... by Zoe Sands

Region Bing Market Share (Dec ‘11)

France    2%
Russia    1%
Spain      1%
Germany 2%
UK         5%
Italy      1%

Recently I was looking at the search engine market shares and noticed that even though Bing has had some heavy investment in marketing spend in recent years to make this a challenger search brand to Google, it still hasn’t made much impact in terms of search market share in Europe. As you can see from the above table Bing’s market share is low with the biggest share gained in the UK with 5% and this probably relates to the large MSN user base. In Russia, Spain and Italy its share is hovering at just 1%. Even though these results see little impact on Google’s dominance on the search market (Google’s market share ranges from 90% to 95% dependent on the Euorpean country with the exception to Russia where Google is the contender brand to Yandex), I still believe that you need a balanced approach in your search engine optimisation strategy and plan and that it is not sufficient to just focus on Google, although as the market leader it should take a prominence in your search strategy, but you should not solely focus on one engine.

I wonder what Bing’s market share will be in December 2012? I’ll revisit this post then.

It was an early start for me today as I attended the IBDG Digital Strategy Meeting 2009 in London. Initially, I thought the event wasn’t as large as I was expecting, but on a plus note the agenda was tailor made for my needs from the pre-registration document, which was good. I found myself in the following roundtable sessions:

• Implementing and developing a successful social commerce strategy - I was amazed at how many organisations haven’t tried social media or were testing it and didn’t have many Twitter followers, YouTube subscribers, Facebook fans etc. I think some lacked strategy and clearly hadn’t identfied what the purpose was for using this medium.
• Implementing an effective B2B digital marketing strategy - this was by far my favourite session and was led by Hugh Murphy, General Manager, e-Channels at 3M. He shared a lot of 3M’s learnings and took on board what others had to say, a very interactive session with my digital B2B peers.
• Calculating the value of blogs and podcasts in enhancing online reputation - quiet a varied session. The majority of the audience had dabbled a little in blogging, diappointed that there was no outstanding use demonstrated here. I think most people were scared of having an interaction with their websites visitors and handling negative publicity. Hardly anyone was using podcasts either audio or video, which is a shame because this is a great way to engage with an audience.
• Optimising search engine strategy to ensure maximum traffic - a thorough discussion was held, with participants at varying degrees of knowledge on both natural (search engine optimisation) and ppc search (search engine marketing). No one other than me had used mobile search marketing.

In conclusion, I found the day to have been good use of my time; I learnt a few new techniques, shared experiences and made some good contacts. Next IBDG meeting is planned for 12 October 2009.