Is It Time for Senior Marketers To Broaden the Search Agenda?
A decade has passed since the birth of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in the UK and senior marketers now “get” search… right?
After all, Paid Search alone counts for around 60% of online marketing spend and around £2bn was spent on the medium in the UK last year.
Over the last few months we have sought out Marketing Directors and CMOs at big brands to canvass their opinions on search marketing. Whilst there are some extremely clued up senior marketers out there, especially at web-based brands, the feedback we received broadly fits into one of two areas:
1) I don’t understand it at all, not even the difference between Paid and Natural Search
2) It delivers great results but it’s dull and technical and I don’t pay much attention to it
Could these conceptions of search marketing be affecting the way brands in the UK are using search? Does this mean senior marketers are missing opportunities to fully understand the potential of search data through lack of knowledge or preconceptions of what SEM is and isn’t?
Many marketers see search as a pure direct response model, where users pre-qualify themselves through the terms they type into search engines. This gives businesses the opportunity to market to those users in a targeted manner. There are many excellent guides and training courses providing marketers with the basic knowledge of both Paid and Natural Search. In addition to this, Google and the other search engines provide detailed information on running successful Paid Search campaigns.
If optimised correctly, search clicks deliver users directly to the most relevant pages of websites increasing the likelihood of conversion to sale. Due to the “trackability” of search, and the auction based pricing model of Paid Search, marketers have a great deal of control over the cost of sale at a keyword level. This leads the way to one of the most efficient marketing buys currently available. As marketing solutions go, it’s accountable, proven to deliver great ROI and provides a “safe” way to deliver results. Search sits in a box marked “results” and Marketing Directors often pay limited attention to this seemingly bland, technical area of marketing. Search is commonly left to online marketing teams with limited crossover with other areas of a business and limited visibility to senior marketers.
As “credit crunch friendly” marketing options go, Paid Search is an obvious choice to maintain spending levels as budgets come crashing down in other, less accountable forms of marketing. There is now a generation of search-savvy Online Marketing Managers at top brands who are facilitating agency relationships that deliver excellent results from Paid Search. This means that Senior Marketers don’t need to involve themselves with search unless something goes wrong and the results dry up. If we are honest, Search can seem dull in comparison to brand advertising, sponsorship and even online rich media campaigns, which may explain the lack of interest. However, there is no doubt that many UK brands have a decent grasp of how to drive sales through SEM, but this should not be the limit of marketers’ ambitions.
Outside of driving conversions, there are four areas that I Spy Search believes are crucial in highlighting the benefits of a deeper understanding of Search for senior level marketers:
1) Search engine data as a barometer of consumer interest and a provider of insight.
2) The interplay between offline, brand driven marketing and search
3) The impact of search results on consumers perception of brands
4) Insight into competitor activity
In his essential book on search marketing, “The Search”, author Jon Batelle describes the information available from search engines as “the database of intentions”. This theory provides the key to a better understanding of search engines and how the information available through them can give smart marketers the advantage they need in an increasingly competitive online market place. In simple terms, Batelle suggests that the data available from Google and the other engines gives marketers a previously unavailable level of insight into the interests and desires of consumers by collecting and making available the search terms consumers enter into Google. Tools such as Google Trends allow marketers to track consumer interest over time and relate this to outside factors such as news stories, television advertising, product launches, adverse publicity and countless other factors. An opportunity exists for brands to adapt their offerings based not on focus groups or market research, but on the actual search queries of the 30million plus users in the UK who regularly “Google”.
With the penetration of relatively fast wireless broadband connections in the UK driving ever increasing internet usage, coupled with the availability of low cost high quality laptops, more and more consumers are interacting with more than one form of media simultaneously. Across our client base we see the direct impact of offline marketing, especially television, on both search volume and sales. Whilst it’s fair to say that many businesses are aware of and are capitalising on this correlation to some extent, many are not doing so in a meaningful way. Search volume for brand and product names gives a very valuable insight into the success or otherwise of offline marketing campaigns. Tools such as Hitwise allow marketers to understand whether users are being driven online to search for more information having been prompted by brand advertising. Measuring success of this type of activity is not restricted to transactional websites. Increasingly, non-transactional sites, FMCG brand sites for example, are using Paid and Natural Search to ensure that users searching for more information on products advertised offline find relevant results and are driven to a page where a user can interact with the brand. Once here, the brand can capture user details for outbound marketing purposes. The internet is where modern consumers go for information about brands and products, and the primary way for users to navigate this medium and to find this information is through search.
Much has been written and discussed about the impact of search results on users’ perceptions of brands. Recent Google and Yahoo research suggests that search listings have both a positive impact on brand recall and a potential negative impact if brands do not appear where users expect them to. Equally, the presence of consumer opinion through blogs and other social media sites in search results is highly important in the current online landscape. Marketers should be increasingly aware of the potentially damaging impact of the presence of these opinions and the opportunity to gauge consumer opinion based on online conversations. The availability of tools such as Brandwatch allows Marketers to monitor online opinion of their brands and use this information to inform online strategy and wider commercial decisions. Ensuring strong presence in both Paid and Natural Search is certainly crucial in online communications but the wider opportunity exists in engaging with consumer opinion in a landscape where reputation is as crucial as outbound marketing.
There is no question that search provides marketers and businesses with unbeatable ROI online and that results are paramount. However, this is only part of the search story. Senior marketers have a clear opportunity to understand online user behaviour through search and form strategies to capitalise on the mine of data available to ensure those strategies are relevant, timely and fully integrated with other marketing activity.
Author: Nick Jones, Managing Director, I Spy Search