Editorial Articles

With the incredible attention on social media and online public relations in 2010, it is easy to forget that there are other digital media channels which arguably warrant more attention. For new customer acquisition, search engine marketing, remains, and in my view will remain, the predominant digital acquisition method in many markets.

I believe, that for many companies, the greatest strength of a social presence through networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In is as a method of remaining relevant to current customers. The fans or followers you can build complement or perhaps replace email marketing as a direct channel to existing customers. Of course, like email they can be used to encourage advocacy from existing customers in order to recruit new customers, but this is not their main strength.

The most recent benchmarking data from the IAB/PwC survey of media spend shows that around 60% of bought media budget goes into paid search advertising across the UK business surveyed. Similarly, Forrester projections for the next 5 years show that search engine marketing investment will continue to dominate over the upcoming approaches such as social media and mobile marketing. The continued importance of search activity within customer journeys suggests to me that search marketing should be at the heart of the digital communications mix, integrated with other forms of digital media. So which forms of integration should digital marketers review?

The starting point for integration has to be analysis of the synergy between paid and natural search. Every organisation should regularly complete an opportunity-gap analysis to audit the difference between the volume of the searches performed by prospects against the number of visitors attracted for different search keyphrases. When I perform this analysis for clients, it always shows keyphrases that are effective within paid search that are underperforming in natural search and vice versa. There are also major discrepancies in bounce and conversion rates from reviewing web analytics data which suggests problems with traffic routing or the landing page quality.

Next we have to look at the integration of search with paid digital media such as display ads and, if applicable, affiliate marketing. Many studies have shown that search marketing is more successful with prior awareness generated by other media increasing brand search terms and conversion rates. Indeed, no audit of search marketing effectiveness is complete without isolating brand search terms and understanding where they fit within the overall customer journey through attribution studies. The increasing popularity of targeted Facebook engagement ads in 2010 suggests that it is useful to consider the role these can have in improving results from search through building brand awareness and familiarity.

Finally, the integration between social media and search engine optimisation should be reviewed. In the course of meeting marketers on training courses, I’m seeing increasing blending of SEO, PR and social media marketing activities. Indeed I have met several client-side marketers who have a SEO and social media role. I think this is a great combination to help integration of these activities towards a common goal. Given that, in ultra-competitive markets, success in SEO is largely based on generating relevant backlinks from partner sites, it makes sense if social media and online PR campaign activities are harnessed together. This way more specific SEO objectives such as terms and landing pages to be targeted can be built into the campaign.

So, there are many different opportunities for integrating digital media, although the biggest challenge is making sure that organisational silos don’t limit integration.

Dave Chaffey
Insights Director
ClickThrough Marketing
www.clickthrough-marketing.com
www.twitter.com/clickthroughsem