• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 5, 2015

Sorry, it's true. Most brand marketers -- especially in search -- are not mentally ready for the Internet of things, and their company's infrastructure is not physically ready. That doesn't mean the strategy isn't high on the list of priorities for CMOs or senior marketing executives. Several studies suggest the topic is high on the list of priorities for 2015. Perhaps the disconnect falls in the "not now" thought process. 

Research from the Economist Intelligence Unit found that CMOs and senior marketing executives believe the IoT will not have the biggest effect on marketers until 2020.

Still, eMarketer points to research from Gartner forecasting that IoT devices worldwide will rise from 4.88 billion to a tad bit more than 25 billion between 2015 and 2020. This "network of physical objects" connected through IP addresses will dominate search engine marketing, both in terms of optimization and paid search. SEO professionals will want to optimize inanimate objects like soda machines or electronic billboards to serve up in search results depending on the location of the wearable devices or mobile phone.

Retargeting will cross from offline to online. Let's say you search for a dress on the Anthropologies Web site from your laptop computer in the morning before breakfast. At noon, you put on your iWatch before walking out the door for a lunch meeting. On the way you pass an electronic billboard advertising a sale at Anthropologies. The electronic billboard would not need a beacon to transmit the signal about the sale to your smartwatch, but rather an IP connection. Optimizing the ad to serve up in directions or high in local or nearby results would also do the trick.

This means marketing departments will need a new mix of skills, from SEO to native advertising and Schema.org skills to markup HTML pages. Search marketers will need to learn how to identify hardware as well as pieces of content that live on the Internet, so search engines like Google, and Bing can index them in search results. It's a topic we will discuss at the June MediaPost Search Insider Summit.

Unfortunately, few marketers are prepared for this type of thinking. It became apparent in December during the MediaPost Search Insider Summit when marketers couldn't see the connection between search engine marketing and signals from inanimate objects that would serve up on the screen of wearable devices or in mobile phone search engine results based on historic searches saved in browser queries or on the hardware of the phone.