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Net Equity: Search & Offline Marketing

How can you harness the power of search engine marketing for your offline advertising, direct marketing, branding and PR? Nicholine Hayward explains...

Net Equity: harnessing the power of search engine marketing for your offline advertising, direct marketing, branding and PR

By Nicholine Hayward

[Register and post your own comments on this article below...]

In the beginning, search engine optimisation (there was no search engine marketing in those days) was all about number one search engine positions and driving traffic to web sites. Here at Weboptimiser, for example, our strapline used to be ‘your number one partner in search engine optimisation’.

But this wasn’t what our clients needed. They didn't need number one positions on Google, but more profitable web sites. They didn't need more traffic, but more transactions. And, most importantly, they needed a way to integrate their online and offline marketing strategies in order to meet their overall business, as well as search engine optimisation and marketing, objectives.

In fact, it wasn't long before the savvier companies realised that, done right, SEO and SEM also made web sites faster, smarter and easier to use, as well as easier to find. Not only that, it had a strategic role in supporting a company's overall business and marketing strategies and in getting better results from offline campaigns at every stage.

Search as part of your marketing campaign

When you're planning a marketing campaign, your search engine marketing company can give you a wealth of up-to-date intelligence, direct from the search engines’ own data logs. They can tell you what your target audience is asking for on search engines, so you can develop more effective creative executions. They can monitor search terms trends, so you can spot new opportunities. They can tell you the relative size of market segments and help you size up the competition.

When you're testing a marketing campaign, pay per click search engine marketing provides a quick and effective proof of concept using a combination of providers, creative executions and other variables to see which approach works best. By tracking visitor behaviour as part of the test, it would also highlight any usability issues with the site before the main campaign, rather than after.

When you're managing a marketing campaign and using the web as the fulfilment, your search engine marketing company can not only help you attract qualified visitors to your site from the search engines but maximise the conversion rate when they get there and give you vital CRM data at the same time.

First, they'll look at ways to bring you all the people who’ll use the search engines to find your site, rather than go direct to your URL, as people always will not matter how impactful your call-to-action. Deep linking strategies can connect your listings on the search engine results pages to the relevant content on your site, to take people straight to the content they’re looking for.

What's more, your search engine marketing company can make the site itself faster, smarter, friendlier and easier to use, and make it accessible, in accordance with the Disability Discrimination Act.

Keeping your brand in focus

Branding is another issue. However well-known or well-regarded your brand offline, it is crucial that you are seen to own your brand on the search engines. A good search engine marketing company will ensure that you are in a highly visible position, not just under your company name, but your brands, products, services, trademarks and, just as importantly, promotional campaigns or creative straplines and keep you informed of any illegal or negative uses of your brands or trademarks online.

Audibility, as well as visibility, is a central part of a successful public relations strategy and your search engine marketing company can help you define your news, product information and corporate messaging based on the search terms that people are using. Likewise, they can ensure that your press releases and editorial features are search engine friendly and position you as an authority. Vitally, they can also help you provide a controlled response to either a long term or unexpected event or issue, either through the natural or paid-for search results.

Search engine marketing & customer relationship management

Just as importantly, your search engine marketing company can make a vital contribution to your CRM knowledge base. It’s about offering privileges in return for information. People are quite happy to provide information about themselves in return for an email newsletter, access to VIP content or to claim a special offer. Your search engine marketing company can set up your site to gather this information – with data capture at the front, database integration at the back and cookies everywhere to enable you to send out more targeted, personalised communications both offline and on.

Finally, you’re reporting on the results, your search engine marketing company can tell you which creative approaches and campaigns were most profitable, demonstrate improvements in your cost of customer acquisition, and best of all, show the return on investment.

In short, a good search engine marketing company won’t just get you to the top of the search engines or bring you traffic but can help you identify new opportunities, evaluate the competition, develop effective creative, test before roll-out, maximise response, optimise fulfilment, protect and enhance your brand, gather CRM intelligence and account for every penny.

Nicholine Hayward is Marketing Director of Weboptimiser, the search engine marketing company.

This article was taken from Nicholine’s latest search engine marketing White Paper, which can be downloaded from:

http://www.weboptimiser.com/resources/net-equity.pdf

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NMK Event - New Directions In Search, 23 June 2005

Discover the latest trends in local vs global search, integrated search, metasearch and mobile search from leading search engine and SEO/SEM companies including Overture, Infospace, Neutralize and Seekport at New Directions In Search on 23 June.

Nicholine Hayward will be speaking at this event on integrating online search with offline search and marketing.

About the Author:
Nicholine Hayward is Marketing Director at search engine marketing company Weboptimiser. A former copywriter, Nicholine helped to found search engine optimisation and marketing company Weboptimiser in 1996 with CEO David White. Since then, she has helped to pioneer the vision, technology and terminology of ethical, brand friendly search engine marketing. She has collaborated on a book, ‘Dot Com Heroes’, published several White Papers – the latest covering the integration between online and offline marketing – and spoken at industry seminars, including the IDM’s Academy and the CIMTech conference.