Almost half the brands that spend money and resources on search marketing fail to connect those campaigns to their offline marketing efforts, according to research made public this month by search marketing firm iProspect.

The study, produced with JupiterResearch, found that only 55% of companies conducting search engine marketing (SEM) are purposely integrating those campaigns with at least one offline marketing channel. Those that do coordinate with marketing in another medium are most likely to integrate SEM with direct mail (34%) or with magazine or newspaper advertising (29%). Only 12% of respondents reported coordinating SEM campaigns with either television or radio marketing.

That goes against earlier iProspect findings about how users are led to search, the report says. An August 2007 study found that more than two-thirds of users (67%) perform online searches because of something they’ve seen in an offline channel. Further, 39% of those online searchers actually bought a product or service from the brand whose offline marketing they were first exposed to.

That earlier report found that TV spots are the leading offline driver of searches, accounting for 37% of online searches for a product or brand. Word of mouth was the second most prominent search inducement (36%), with magazine or newspaper ads trailing third (30%).

“Given those facts—and our assumption is that those numbers from last year would only be higher today—why is it that only 55% of the marketers we polled are intentionally integrating with at least one offline channel?” asks Robert Murray, iProspect president. “What am I missing here? To me, it’s just perplexing.”

Asked to explain the lack of integration between their SEM and their offline campaigns, survey respondents most often pointed to lack of budget to enable coordinated online/ offline efforts (19%), scarce human resources (15%), or simply a failure to consider integration (13%). Other reasons given for not linking search to offline marketing including a lack of support from senior management (11%) and separate divisions managing the search and offline channels (11%).

“If you think about marketing organizations today, they’re very siloed,” Murray says. “You’ve got the offline team and the online team. Even within online, you’ve got the acquisition team and the retention team, with different budgets and different players.”

“There’s no question about the combined power of search and offline channels,” said John Tawadros, iProspect COO, in a statement. “To truly push integration forward and fully reap its benefits, it is incumbent upon the CMO to break down the silos…and create a culture that rewards integrated efforts.”

But Internet marketing consultant Andy Beal sees the search-integration glass as half-full. “It seems to me that 55% is a healthy number,” he writes in the blog “Marketing Pilgrim”. “Search marketing is only just finding a dedicated place in the marketing budgets of companies, so it’s still early days when it comes to blending [search engine marketing] with other channels.”

Other findings from the most recent iProspect report include the following:

• The offline integration tactics most often used by search marketers are including the company Web address (84%) and the company name (66%) in offline marketing.

• Only 26% of marketers make sure to use the same keywords in their offline marketing that they use in their SEM campaigns.

• Interestingly, nearly one-quarter of all search marketer respondents to the iProspect survey reported doing no offline marketing at all.

Fifty-eight percent of marketers also that when they do search campaigns, they give priority to optimizing photos or images among their online assets, making sure those are found in any search. Thirty-two percent said they give priority to optimizing press releases and 20% to video.

But those emphases run counter to another iProspect study published in April of this year on what users actually click on in organic search. That report found that the major search engines now serve up a mix of assets on their results pages, and not the text-heavy Web pages they used to favor; it’s called “blended search”, and it’s evolved because users now use search to find more than just Web pages.

The April iProspect study, however, found that while marketers are fretting over getting their image and video content found, users are still more likely to click through on listings that look like news or press releases (36%) than on image results (31%) or video (17%).