Sam's Club® further Stratifies Search Marketing Industry

Sam's Club, a division of, Wal*Mart, is now offering small business owners local search engine marketing (SEM) programs through vendor Innuity.com, a publicly held Software as a Service (SaaS) company using their LeadConnect program.

This is hilarious such an unrelated industry giant would brand and offer these services. Although it should worry me that SEM could become commoditized by such a large non-industry company in this way, it may actually be a good thing for a number of reasons.

First, it will hopefully help build awareness for search marketing by making it more understood and mainstream offering the social proof SEM needs to convince the masses it is a viable advertising and marketing medium. Although there is no short supply of Wall Street Journal articles touting its benefits being tied to successful companies, who reads that?

Secondly, this could benefit high-end SEM shops, such as LevelTen in positioning ourselves. We all know what Sam's Club and Wal*Mart's positioning is according to http://www.leveltendesign.com/buzzlevel/general/by-chris/which-wal-mart-... ">who they consider their customers . : )

Furthermore, this should help automatically segment the marketplace. By offering "hand submission of your website URL to the major search engines" (aka: a useless service) this is most certainly on the low-end for SEM services. Many other SEO/SEM companies charge for similarly fruitless activities. I just hope that businesses will understand you get what you pay for.

Note to LevelTen AMs: When clients come to us and have no idea what SEM is just say Wal-Mart does it, but we are kind of like the Neiman Marcus of SEM.

This trend of large unrelated companies, as well as traditional advertising agencies, offering SEM is very likely to to continue as they are slowing realizing the enormous potential of local search and how much value SEM offers small and medium sized businesses. I would not be surprised if Target follows suit with such an appropriate name for selling marketing services.