Search Engine Marketing isn’t an island

SEM should be an integral part of an agency’s marketing planning – sit back and let Vertical Leap’s fully managed service bring you valuable ideas directions and support to complement it.

Forward thinking advertising agencies are discovering they can extract more value from Search over and above the direct benefit to the bottom line from performing keywords in the main search engines.

Given its accountability, managed search engine marketing such as that offered by Vertical Leap can be an invaluable finger to measure the sales and marketing pulse of a brand. And more than that, increasingly there is a strong argument to integrate a search campaign with other sales channels with each feeding and learning from each other in the process.

Think about it from the most fundamental of angles – Pay Per Click search and display advertising. Display ad copy can and should reinforce keyword searches by using the same terms. As more pre-sales research is carried out on-line before contact with a retail outlet for instance, the more performing search phrases you can channel motivated visitors down, the better!

In addition to those actual words and phrases used to find a website, there may well be mileage in honing in on the creative solution applied to a particular client or specific brief and to use that as the foundation for campaigns in their own right.

In addition to the brand or product specifically, strap-lines, character names and other associations with the brand become keywords and phrases in their own right and can make for clear blue water between them and rival brands competing for attention with their own unique words and phrases.

Typing in “Quote me happy” in Google takes you directly to Norwich Union Direct. “Fluent in finance” could arguably to be applied to any of the major banks, but again, keying it in to Google takes you to Barclays and confirms its ownership – and multiple first page positions. Search offers the potential for these monoliths of insurance and banking to add value, create clear differences and maximise the investment made in those campaigns.

Ad agencies are also discovering that Search can enhance a campaign by prolonging its life for consumers. One of Vertical Leap’s client agencies found that recall of a cookery promotion had been vastly extended as prospects continued to use the words and phrases associated with the campaign in the search engines long after the press advertising had finished.

Over time search analytics, or the analysis of what consumers are actually typing in to a search engines, can have a bearing on the overall planning of on and offline advertising. Strong keywords can be adapted as themes and directly in headlines and body copy. In addition, ‘sleeper’ keywords that may yield fewer click throughs but whose overall conversion rate is high may help to identify new niche audiences worth targeting in their own right.

Of course there is nothing new with the idea of the web complementing and supporting offline promotions. Increasingly Vertical Leap is seeing a company’s own name being amongst its most popular keywords as it is those names, or specific brands that are remembered from printed ads, shop fronts and editorial rather than a telephone number.

Paid for search can also be a useful and highly cost-effective tool in research. Offers and responses can be tested online first before committing to expensive press advertising and associated collateral. It’s a lot cheaper, easier and faster to change a search ad than a printed one!

As search engines are now an integral part of most people’s lives – ask a ten year old kid or your granny to ‘Google it’ and they’ll know what you mean – the data gleaned in determining the keywords and phrases used to find a website is invaluable, not just in formulating new advertising directions but as marketing platforms for a company in general.

All business sectors have their own slang for products and their consumers used every day by companies immersed in their own particular ‘marketese’ speak. Travel agents may abbreviate their passengers to ‘pax’ and Gatwick to LGW for instance, but crucially consumers have their own vocabulary when it comes to find your good and services. The story about the search agency devastating a bank’s boardroom by suggesting that they ought to change their search terms to reflect a consumer angle ie borrow money rather than lend it may be apocryphal, but the principle is sound and is a valuable reminder that it’s the consumer who leads demand, not the marketing department.

To make the most of these opportunities an agency must have access to search engine marketing data. This gets problematic when the advertising and SEM agency aren’t one and the same. Recognising this, Vertical Leap offers agencies a simple and straightforward outsourcing service whereby the company works direct with their clients or direct with the agency in establishing and maintaining rankings within the key search engines.

Online marketing, and search in particular, offers unique opportunities to maximise the effects of other mediums such as print advertising – and all support material come to that. By taking control of Search, agencies have a great chance to strengthen their position as far as clients are concerned not only with sales results but also in regular salvos of invaluable marketing ideas and directions from where it counts – those buying the service or product.