Optimise your Marketing
How your optimisation company can help you get better results from your online and offline marketing campaigns
If you suspect your search engine optimisation or marketing company could be doing more for you, you're probably right. In fact, when you're planning, testing managing and reporting on your marketing campaigns, your optimisation company can help you get better results at every stage.
When you're planning
When you're planning a marketing campaign, your optimisation company can give you a wealth of real-world inside intelligence. 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 ahead of the rest of the market. They can tell you the relative size of market segments, and show you how other web sites are positioning themselves in those markets, so you can size up the competition and devise an effective strategy to win market share.
For example, if you were planning a campaign to promote loans, your first port of call should be the search engines' data logs. Overture's keyword suggestion tool will tell you that of the 777,933 people looking for a loan in the UK in the last month, 241,252 are looking for a 'secured or secure loan', compared to just 24, 986 people looking for an unsecured loan. That means the online demand for secured loans is far larger than the demand for unsecured loans.
Likewise, 73, 217 people are looking for a car loan. That's nearly 10% of the market. So if you're a business-to-consumer finance company, you might want to consider adding car loans to your service portfolio, because, as the data shows, the market demand is certainly there.
Another way you could use this data is to help define the most effective creative approaches. For example, it shows people are looking for 'secured' rather than 'homeowner' loans, as they are sometimes known. So a direct marketing campaign that focuses its messaging on the former, rather than the latter is more likely to strike a chord with people and get a higher response rate as a result.
When you're testing
When you're testing a marketing campaign, your optimisation company could run an online campaign as a quick and effective proof of concept. To put together an online test, your optimisation company could use 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
When using the web as the fulfilment to your campaign, your optimisation 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 CRM intelligence at the same time.
To attract qualified visitors
You might be surprised to learn that the search engines are part of the fulfilment process. But even at the height of a campaign, with a clearly marked web address or even a campaign-specific micro-site it doesn't matter how big or clever you make it. As our own experience proved once, you can run a prime time TV campaign, with a celebrity footballer, whose name embodies the product, and a sizeable number of people still go straight to a search engine and do a generic search for the product, immediately after each execution was shown.
To improve the conversion rate
Next, your optimisation company can help improve the conversion rate. Fortunately, a good optimisation company will know how to make a web site visitor friendly, as well as search engine friendly.
First, they'll look at ways to take people straight to the content they're looking for. Campaign-specific micro-sites, with a memorable web address and dedicated content, often work well for this, but plenty of respondents will use the search engines instead. So a good optimisation company will use deep linking strategies that connect your listings on the search engine results pages to the relevant content on your site.
The second issue is the usability of the site. Your optimisation company can make the site faster, smarter, friendlier and easier to use, with the navigation and content people are looking for.
They can also make it accessible to all members of the online community, including those using assistive technologies. A good optimisation company will know exactly how to make your web site accessible - and will often include this as part of their standard optimisation service.
To help your Customer Relationship Management
Just as importantly, your optimisation company can help you get to know your current and potential customers in a completely new way - by providing vital intelligence for your CRM knowledge base. People are quite happy to provide personal information about themselves in return for, say, an email newsletter, access to VIP content or to claim a special offer.
Your optimisation company can set up your site to gather this information - with data capture opportunities at the front end, database integration at the back and cookies everywhere.
When you're reporting
Finally, when you're reporting on the results, your optimisation company can give you detailed information about your campaign. You can show which creative approaches and campaigns were most profitable, demonstrate improvements in your cost of customer acquisition, and best of all, prove how every penny of the campaign was spent and what the return on investment was.
In summary: the best of both worlds
So, when you're planning, testing, managing and reporting on your marketing, your optimisation company can give you everything you need to not only implement an integrated and cohesive online and offline strategy, but get you better results from your individual campaigns. A good optimisation company, in other words, won't just get you to the top of the search engines or bring you traffic but can help you:
- Identify new opportunities
- Size up the competition
- Develop effective creative
- Test before roll-out
- Maximise response
- Optimise the fulfilment
- Gather CRM intelligence
- Account for every penny
Nicholine Hayward is Marketing Director of Weboptimiser, the search engine marketing company
