Rejoice! According to the DMA, Brand and mass marketers are now using direct techniques in their campaigns in much the same way I’ve advocated before.
More than half use one or more direct marketing channels such as search, email, or SEO in conjunction with their brand advertising. According to Peter Johnson of the DMA,
“We began this report with the hypothesis that brand and direct marketers would differ substantially in their responses, but when we analyzed the data, we discovered that, for those marketers with more experience, the differences have faded away. Marketing experts are combining direct techniques into brand advertising — and in all media, too.”
The DMA added that these findings confirm that marketing activities designed to increase awareness are all but the same as those that drive awareness and mirror those of a 2006 SEMPO study showing that the top goals of search marketing campaigns were 1. Direct sales and 2. Branding.
The most important consideration marketers still overlook is that direct marketing with search is critical to responding to the demand created by an awareness or brand campaign. Not running both puts you at risk of promoting someone else with your ad dollars and missing out on the opportunity to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
Ask really threw me for a guilt trip. I stand by my criticism of their ad campaign (as I think do most) and a poor man’s review of their traffic suggests it hasn’t delivered (though, admittedly, Compete data is incomplete and only through May). Then again, through my investigation , I found Ask performs well when searching for products and services.
It seems I need to update that investigation.
Ask leaped ahead of Google’s Universal Search with a redesign of their SERP being dubbed Ask3d. A clean 3 paneled results page moves the search box and refinement options (Narrow by, related searches, related names, etc.) to the left, making sponsored results more prominent in the center of the page. I can more easily overlook the box and variables unless I need them, allowing me to concentrate on the content without having to scroll down to ignore the Ask branded material.
To the right are the accessories Google has tried to integrate, to my dissatisfaction, within the search results: images, music tracks, weather, news, events, and encyclopedia. Again, keeping the SERP clean and specific to search results while other valuable content remains within reach.
The WebGuild is a wonderful resource for search professionals with two blogs available to help you align search marketing considerations with user experience. They host Searchnomics where you’ll find me at the end of the month in Santa Clara, CA.
Zvents is up for their Search Engine Website Award to recognize leadership, outstanding achievement, and innovation in the search engine industry. Obviously, I think their recognition is justified or I wouldn’t be here, stop by and share your opinion of Zvents.
They are also good at including keywords in their own content so I’m going to share a descriptive quote so I can do the same:
“The leading forum for internet professionals providing programming that fosters learning, professional development, and networking for engineers, usability & user experience professionals, designers, internet marketers, IT managers, search engine marketers, and entrepreneurs to learn about emerging technologies, innovations, business models, and best practices and industry standards in the web field.”
At the inaugural SMX Advanced conference in Seattle last week, Matt Cutts discussed Google’s webmaster guidelines but failed to address heavily sought detail on site quality considerations and violations that can result in your being punished by Google (whether your intentions are honorable or otherwise). He did though commit to deliver more insight and Google added content yesterday to accomplish just that.
The guidelines haven’t changed but are still worth your review as they serve as an excellent SEO guide. Added are details for each guideline:
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. – commentary as I’ve been dealing with duplicate content lately: replicating, syndicating, and repurposing content is usually ok. Google is smart enough to figure out what you’ve done and typically discounts the value of content not in its original source. Make sure the page is unique and this shouldn’t be a problem.
The concept of using behavior, namely search behavior, to understand user intent and awareness is difficult to grasp. In an industry in which focus groups and panels are the norm, the most alien of insights is that of the searcher but, consider, the ability to track the behavior of an immense audience actively seeking, evaluating, and purchasing your product or service is an opportunity to great to ignore.
But how does one do that? How do I model different activities and assign those models to traditional indicators of success? We do so plotting the following general activities against an index and monitoring patterns that reveal changes in behavior.
The 5 marketing metrics of success
Awareness – My customer must be aware of my brand, product, or service
Interest – My intent is to create interest
Consideration – I hope to influence consideration of my brand against others’
Intent – This is where most marketers focus, I want to measure the influence I have on my customers intentions to: buy, sign up, contribute, pay me.
Loyalty – Keep them for the long haul
Successful marketing demands positive influence of those 5 factors.
If I were to start a an ad campaign tomorrow, I would, at that point, create an index measuring various metrics and set the value of those metrics at 0 (or effectively so). One of those metrics might be searches for my brand name; quite simply, using the fact that a user is searching for your brand as an indication that the user is aware of my brand. Tomorrow, I track 1000 searches for my brand name, that becomes my bench mark, my guiding light, the number from which all activity matters. Why? My campaign had better make more customers aware of my brand and in turn, search for my brand. An increase in those searches indicates success. Over the coming 8 weeks of my campaign, searches for my brand increase creating a plot not unlike what you see here.
As I’ve suggested in the past though, this science is not as simple as plotting one activity as a measure of success. My campaign does not simply create awareness for my brand as it also drives sales, newsletter registrations, consideration, and loyalty. How do I take all that into account?
Start by mapping out the activities you can track against the metrics of success:
Awareness – Searches for your brand or products
Interest – Click throughs on those searches, multiple searches
Consideration – Click through on only products or services, aggregate visits to your product content
Intent – Searches on “action” related terms: buy, compare, and order, as well as the % of users adding things to their cart
Loyalty – Searches for accessories, parts, support, and customer service. Remember, this methodology is dependent on your constantly running a search program for anything someone might be searching so that you can track and model all interest and demand. The results deliver what I consider the most insightful dashboard of campaign performance.In the chart seen here we’re plotting multiple activities and tracking changes in behavior relative to the 5 core marketing metrics. Over the 8 weeks of the campaign, noted interest in my product peaked, with awareness of my brand, as I measured an apex in click throughs on searches for my brand and products as well as the greatest frequency of multiple searches (brand -> product -> store name -> brand). Initially, consideration for my product fell as customers were perhaps confused by the new ad and needed time to absorb the message. And intent plummets most rapidly as my campaign ends suggesting the ads’ tremendous influence on customer’s purchasing product; after the ads disappear, so do purchases.
The Journal of Consumer Research published findings that repeated exposure to banner ads results in positive feelings for that which is advertised. They asked students to read an essay with the pretense of answering questions about the essay when, in fact, the survey focused on the content of banner ads displayed alongside the content. Those asked about their positive feelings towards the brand advertised saw positive reactions consistently increase in conjunction with number of exposures to the ad.
Consider now, as you already should, that banner advertising can not be measured in click rates or CPCs but that the ads indirectly influence behavior. With this continued support of that influence, take a broader look at your site metrics, search behavior, or action rates (conversion, registration) when running display campaigns to evaluate that indirect influence.
Anyone still question that search behavior and trends are your greatest source of insight to customer awareness, interest, and demand? Google doesn’t.
Tuesday, Trends released a feature displaying the most recent, dynamic 100 searches (excluding porn, weather, and popular websites & celebrities), replacing Google Zeitgeist and giving us insight to why Dancing with the Stars and American Idol still dominate our television media while World of Warcraft is the only game that matters.
Each keyword displayed links to a rich data set including hourly volume, related searches, news articles, and blog posts. While many come as no surprise, keep an eye our for the unexpected search to practice a similar application for your own business: What caused that search to spike? An ad? some buzz or news? Perhaps it is seasonal or related to a larger emerging trend. Now replicate.
