Editorial Articles

Hydra has surveyed over 300 digital marketers and focussed on how digital marketing teams currently operate, based on collaboration, use of technologies and competitor analysis.

The survey* focused on the current state of Natural Search, Paid Search and Social Media integration and has revealed three interesting facts:

• There are benefits to sharing keywords and phrases across digital channels
• Technology is a necessity for managing, reporting and implementing digital campaigns
• There is a need to simplify benchmarking against and understanding of competitor data

Advantages of collaboration
Measuring performance for terms at a granular level and discovering new high value keywords is challenging for most marketers. Nevertheless, Hydra's survey shows that teams sharing terms between disciplines display greater confidence in dealing with them when compared to their peers working in isolation.

Those that do are more confident:

• The keywords and phrases in their campaigns reach their target audience (73% vs. 64% of the general sample and 54% of those that do not share keywords)
• Their team is 'on trend' when handling new keyword trends (47% vs. 42% of the general sample and 28% of those that do not share terms)

Although most respondents (55%) answered 'no' when asked about knowing which new words or expressions are worth spending money on, there was a palpable difference between these subgroups: of those that share terms, over half replied 'yes' (54%); whereas a great majority of those that do not share terms answered 'no' (80%)

Consolidated technology
The use of technology in online marketing has become ubiquitous. However, marketers are in need of a more consolidated technology landscape where single-task tools can be replaced by more comprehensive multi-functional systems.

29% of respondents indicated under 50% of their needs are met by their current toolset [pp. 12]. Unsurprisingly, however, those with a greater number of tools (10 or more) had the highest percentage (39%) of replies within the '75+% of needs met' band.

In contrast, a resounding majority (90%) saw an advantage in having digital teams use a common reporting and campaign implementation platform.

Desire for competitive intelligence
Benchmarking performance against competitors is crucial for most online marketers. Yet there is a palpable need for facilitating access to competitor information.

The majority of respondents (77%) regularly benchmark their site against competitors. This was relatively consistent regardless of the number of keywords they managed.

However, 56% admitted accessing competitor data was either 'moderately difficult' or 'difficult'; the most prevalent answer across the whole sample was 'moderately difficult' at 45%.

Those with tens of thousands of keywords displayed the highest percentage of respondents finding access to competitor data 'moderately difficult'.

Hydra's survey show teams that share terms and work collaboratively have greater confidence in their success than those who don't because they can consider the whole picture. Across the board, however, there is an obvious desire to gain greater insight into competitor data easily and efficiently. These two challenges justify their request for better, more comprehensive technology that meets most of their needs: an all-encompassing solution that can replace a set of multiple tools.

www.onehydra.com


* Hydra surveyed over 300 digital marketers in April 2011 and focussed on how digital marketing teams currently operate, based on collaboration, use of technologies and competitor analysis