B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

MediaBuyerPlanner reports ”Only about 55 percent of search marketers integrate their search efforts with offline marketing efforts; the other 45 percent make no effort at integrating SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with offline initiatives, according to a new study by iProspect and JupiterResearch.”

You may have an SEM management gap

The above article claims budgetary and resource concerns. I think the bigger picture is one of the following scenarios that many marketing organizations face:

1. Marketing, being resourced constrained, probably pawns this off as an “IT project” because it involves technology.
2. Marketing has assigned SEM efforts to a vendor specializing in SEM and no other marketing initiatives.

Scenario #1: SEM lives in IT

I can understand why SEM has traditionally been an “IT responsibility” because SEM in large part, is still a rather large mystery to marketers. They don’t understand the rules of the game and the execution of your organization’s SEM campaigns requires a fundamental knowledge of your website and the visitors of your website. It’s commonplace that a marketing communications department, who handles traditional print and television advertising, may not be the resident experts on web strategy and design. It’s easy to pass SEM off to IT — because they handle “the technical stuff.”

Scenario #2: SEM execution lives with an outside firm

There are many companies providing SEM services and not surprisingly, these companies are technical in nature and not traditional direct-marketers. Those that are direct marketers are generally small and have a localized client base, making it hard for them to penetrate the mold of Fortune 500 companies. Those that are technical may have a great technology to sell, but lack the marketing savviness of a direct marketing firm to truly bring SEM the return on investment it demands — resulting in poorly performing SEM campaigns. This leads to the disconnect in online and offline marketing mentioned in the above MediaBuyerPlanner report.

How do you close the SEM knowledge gap? Who should manage SEM?

SEM “belongs” in marketing and should be on the radar of anyone executing any outbound marketing and awareness campaigns (email, direct mail, or otherwise). “Belonging in marketing” and “being executed by marketing” are two different things. From marketing communications, to product marketing managers, to channel marketing, each group has their own functional needs/goals for SEM. Establishing a governing body to ensure the proper SEM techniques and optimization are in place is recommended — but simultaneously avoiding the bureaucracy that’s often accompanied by “governing committees.”

A good place? The web experience/usability group within your organization. SEM may be funded by marketing while the governing body and “gatekeeper” for SEM can be facilitated through the people who know your site inside and out and intimately understand the experience an end-user desires when arriving at the landing pages on your site via an ad. After all, not much ends up on the site that doesn’t pass the approval of this group. Any campaigns directing traffic to the site are right up the alley of a usability professional.

Sigh. This post claims that branding is irrelevant/dead thanks to search engines and how search is transforming the way in which people research and buy products.

Huh?

I couldn’t disagree more. You can’t honestly tell me that Lamborghini, BMW, Lincoln, and Hyundai (just to name a few random automotive brands) are all on equal playing fields when a consumer searches for “car” on Google. 

The post goes on to talk about the power of SEO and why SEO is not dead. SEO is most certainly not dead and should make for a critical component in your online strategy. His point in trying to prove why SEO is not dead is muddied by the claims of “branding being dead.” Brands don’t matter in certain categories (probably because there’s no clear category leader), but certainly not across the board.

Proper SEO can elevate your brand to the top of the listing for non-branded searches.

They key is creating brand awareness (through advertising, promotion, PR, etc. outside of search engines) and dominating on branded AND non-branded searches for your category. This is done by juggling your SEO work with your SEM campaigns to find the “sweet spot” so SEM can pick up the slack where you lag behind in SEO. Branding then goes onto heavily influence clicks on search engine results.

This type of tunnel-vision thinking is why “online” is still broadly viewed as an IT function.

Flat-out comments like this show the still “techy” and misguided view of some Internet strategists and how marketing and “tech” still quite aren’t aligned — even on established sites such as searchenginewatch.com. Any marketer worth their salt should understand that brands can drive search results. When industry publications and commentary throw out claims like this, it’s difficult to create alignment with a marketing department — especially when marketing should “own” (or at least have visibility to) SEO and SEM strategy.

In a tough economy, advertising dollars are typically the first to go. On the flip side, in a flourishing economy, advertising dollars seem to be readily available without needing much justification or proof that the advertising will pay off. Why is this?

Many advertisers have no methodology for measuring the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. In a flourishing economy, taking risks with a low probability for success is often encouraged in hopes of the big pay-off. In a tough economy, investing in anything (advertising, R&D, etc.) will require a great deal of scrutiny.

At SES NY in ‘06 I attended an invite-only dinner with WebTrends with a group of about a dozen online marketers — some existing clients of WebTrends and some were potential clients they were wining and dining. One of the dinner guests I sat next to was Rex Briggs, co-author of What Sticks.

For anyone who thinks “advertising cannot be measured,” I would recommend reading this book. It covers concepts that online marketers should hold close to their hearts: Test, Learn, Deploy, Repeat. Many traditional marketers are used to deploying large budgets on print and TV advertising with no plan or budget to measure the effectiveness of the ad spend. They excel at developing the creative, but fail miserably when it comes to answering the simple question of “Did it work?” 

In the online world, measuring ad spend becomes somewhat easier with the various tracking technologies (particularly if you sell online). If you can definitively prove how advertising positively impacts sales (directly or indirectly), then you’ll most likely see your ad budgets remain flat in a tough economy, but not entirely eliminated like some marketers are experiencing this year.

I came across this article yesterday which presents very interesting findings relating to branding and search engine results. The proper combination of paid results and organic results has a positive impact on brand affinity, brand recall, and purchase intent.

This presents an interesting dilemma for those keywords that don’t convert well (i.e. “blinds”) but are high-volume in nature. Some terms are so generic that for folks in the market for the product, it can actually make sense to play in these areas for branding-related purposes.

A proper SEM strategy with channel partners and an SEO strategy for your own site now theoretically will not only help conversion rate, but the influence of your brand. Sometimes you can’t show up for every possible keyword that relates to your products, but through a combination of leveraging the breadth of sites that sell your products online (i.e. your channel partners) and your own SEM/SEO strategy, search has a significant potential to influence buyer preferences.

In essence, the more they see your brand for all keywords related to your product, the higher the probability they will associate your brand with those terms — and hopefully convert/purchase your products.

Initiatives like these make me a happy advertiser. Google has performed another wave of crack-downs on MFA (Made For Adsense) sites. These are sites which offer little-to-no content value and are specifically designed to lure uneducated web surfers into their sites to only get them to click on a sponsored link. The typical trick is to bid on low-volume keywords in an effort to turn around and get surfers to click on higher-priced keywords in the Adsense ads placed on these sites.

A quick search for “levolor blinds” produces a search result for a site called http://www.all-window-blinds.net and http://www.wholesaleblind.org.

These sites present a problem for advertisers and brands for the following 3 reasons:

1.) MFA sites derail the consumer
For the consumer looking for real information on a product, this creates an unnecessary step. For a product category already as confusing as blinds and shades, the last thing our industry needs is another speed bump in the research process.

2.) They drive up pricing of keywords for legitimate customers (as well as brand advertisers)
As we know, search advertising is based on “highest bidder wins.” The bidding will go as high as the competition is willing to pay — MFA sites force legitimate advertisers to increase their bids to gain higher positions in sponsored search results. Furthermore, if an advertiser is not careful, they may be placing sponsored links on MFA sites and be getting charged for ad impressions/clicks on these sites.

3.) They dilute a brand name
For manufacturers of brand names that mean something to the public, any tasks associated with the research of your brand name can reflect positively or negatively. A brand who does not have sponsored links under control both with their partners and by eliminating MFA sites altogether will suffer from having a product that becomes difficult to find credible/relevant information about online.

How would you like to be competing for advertising space amidst other companies who had nothing to offer in regards to your products? Who wants to dial a phone number from a classified ad found online only to be met with a recording that provides other phone numbers to call to find the product you’re looking for? I hope Google makes it easier for the community to report MFA sites in the future. This will help them create a sweeping algorithm to eliminate more MFA sites from their list of Adsense publishers.

While Friday still remains at SES NY ‘07, it feels like today (Thursday) was the last day. I sat in on several sessions all of which were focused around retail, search, advertising, and social media. The underlying theme of the day was looking at advertising from multiple angles and how it can help build/elevate your brand. My notes from the day are very scattered so I’ll do a recap with my own thoughts as well.

Online SEM Channel Strategy - What to do?
As I evaluate our online channel and the fact that it is like the Wild West right now, I am presented with the following dilemma:

1. As a manufacturer, we want to protect our brand name. In fact, leveraging our brand is a corporate initiative, and it should be a differentiator when people shop for blinds and shades online or offline.
2. Our products are sold in different channels: Big Box, Independent, and Online. Online presents the biggest challenge because our brand name is used to drive traffic to competitor websites. This is an easy problem to fix thanks to our legal department. However, the more interesting and complex issue is how to work with our online retail partners to get a win-win situation: we want to “own” our brand name, yet our retail partners need to advertise our brand name. What’s a consumer to do?

I don’t have all of the answers yet, but have some ideas (which I will not discuss here). The more important point is that we have retail partners who are advertising our brand name, essentially free of charge. In the blind and shade industry, brand names are either very well known, or completely nonexistent. It’s really a hit-or-miss vertical. With that said, once you start rolling in banner advertising, offline advertising, PR, social media marketing, etc. to create that brand awareness, then the online retailer SEM takes a whole different role.

Where does SEM live in the sales/conversion funnel?
There are essentially two types of searchers:

1. Consumer searches for a specific product name (sometimes including a brand name)
2. Consumer searches for generic product name

Consumers who fall into bucket #1 are further along in the sales funnel. They have been pre-disposed to your product and are more or less “in the market” now and ready to spend their money. I would argue that these consumers represent an “easier” conversion to a sale and that your SEM budget should focus heavily in this area.
Is SEM a marketing tool or a sales tool?
Consumers who fall into bucket #2 are the people who blur the lines of SEM. Is SEM a marketing tool or a sales tool? Or is it both? People using generic search terms may not have a brand top-of-mind, but if they see advertisements relating to their search that mention a brand name, they may be more likely to resonate with those ads. This is particularly true if you have other advertising and marketing in place such as banners, offline ads, PR, good social media penetration, etc. Now, combine the power of the “stickiness” of brand advertising with the online retailers who also sell our products and we’ve got an interesting situation.

Generic terms may not immediately convert, but they may be attributed to future conversions
The problem is that it’s hard to tie sales to generic search terms. They may not immediately convert, simply because the consumer falls a little higher in the sales conversion funnel and may not be ready to purchase right then and there. Unfortunately for us, too, the sales cycle is much longer for custom blinds and shades (due to ordering samples online, waiting for them to arrive, and also because of the higher price point of custom products).

Who’s to say, though, that a generic term didn’t ultimately drive the consumer towards purchasing your product at a later date. What if they came back to the search engine, looked for another term or even used your brand name this time in their search phrase, and ended up purchasing on your site (or retail partner site)? It’s certainly doable to keep track of the initial click or keyword/phrase that drove the consumer to your website for the first time. But it’s also very hard to measure the effectiveness of SEM with other “outside’ influencers such as more traditional advertising.

Fortunately, I will be able to run a baseline test of SEM for 1 to 2 quarters without any other external advertising (other than normal monthly promotions, etc. that we would normally run). I anticipate a lift when SEM begins to clicks to our website (and hopefully sales through retail partners), but even more so do I expect this when we start advertising via more traditional means. I will really be interested to see if it drives a higher conversion rate on the same SEM campaigns I had been running.

It’s hard to say, but fortunately I have tools like Omniture SiteCatalyst and WebTrends Dynamic Search to help me manage it all.

Creating the right blend of advertising - avoiding advertising silos
The ultimate goal is to create the right blend of advertising so SEM is converting at its highest possible rate when balanced with the correct amount of banner advertising, offline advertising, PR, social media, etc. I think the main problem with advertisers today is that they are looking at everything in silos. PR is measured in impressions — but how is it correlated with sales? Banner ads are measured in impressions, click-throughs, and conversions — but how do banners influence search? How does leverage social media influence customer satisfaction and repeat business?

There are so many variables that go into the marketing, management, and maintenance of a brand. Pile this responsibility on top of having to actually creating, produce, and maintain new product development and you’ve got your hands full.  Do it well and you’ve got a well-oiled machine with new product development and marketing playing off each other. Do it poorly, and you’ll find yourself in a very disconnected business with poorly performing sales funnels and weak innovation and new product development.

I attended the “Creating Compelling Ads” session this afternoon. This is what these sessions should be about — actual examples were given to attendees on what to do and what not to do. Some of the sessions I’ve attended so far have been very high-level and overly vague presentations about topics with little-to-no substance. Thanks to Vic Drabicky of Rangeonlinemedia.com, attendees were treated with some very helpful tips for SEM campaigns. Here are the key takeaways from this session:

5 Rules to live by when creating ad copy

1. Include the keyword in the title and description
2. Write tailored, clear, factual creative (avoid vague and non-descript phrases like “best deal,” etc.).
3. Avoid symbols, exclamation points, numbers, and general “cutesiness” (i.e. we sell dog toys & cat treats & other things — use and instead of &, etc. avoid exclamation points)
4. Avoid non-specific calls to action (i.e. “book now,” “save now,” *** now)
5. Don’t be “salesy.” Nobody likes the used car dealer, so don’t act like one. The best thing you can do is write a description and sound informative. Act like you are selling to a trusted friend or family member and talk (write) normally.

Bottom line: Make the creative informative. It will differentiate you from the other competitors who are claiming the best deal on earth with the lowest prices and largest selection of products.

SEM Title Strategy
Titles are the most important part of the paid results creative. Use keywords in your title, use dynamic keyword insertion, use param2 and alt text to further customize (Yahoo! and MSN only), and always be grammatically correct. Differentiate yourself from your competition wherever possible. A sea of sameness will only confuse the potential buyer.

Bottom line: The goal is to get every profitable click, not every click.

SEM Description Strategy
Descriptions are just as important as titles. People read them. Customization per keyword is key — setup adgroups by creative, not by keyword. Tell your story, include your brand, and clearly indicate your unique value proposition (price, selection, etc.). Price points are hit and miss — pick and choose your battles wisely.

SEM Display URL Strategy
Slight changes to a display URL can drastically change your CTR. Always test! Here are some examples:

1. www.Travelocity.com = 5.82% CTR
2. www.travelocity.com = 5.27% CTR
3. Travelocity.com = 4.84% CTR
4. travelocity.com = 4.36% CTR

SEM Creative Rotation Strategy
The Good: The engines will automatically optimize your creative.

1. Use no fewer than 3 and no more than 4 pieces of creative per adgroup
2. Make each piece definitively different
3. Test tracking conversion at the crative level (assign different landing pages to it)

The Bad: Engines punish you for any change you make to your creative.

1. Quality score drops even on insignificant changes (even removing a “.” can drop your quality score)
2. Try keeping one piece of creative constant while you sprinkle in additional test creatives

Three Rules and Three Theories to Live your SEM Life by

• Rule #1: Use alt text and param2 for MSN and Yahoo!
• Rule #2: Test often, but not often enough to hurt your quality score. Test your creative, but don’t test it every day.
• Rule #3: Get a second opinion, then a third opinion, then implement.

• Theory #1: The goal is not to get every click, but get every profitable click.
• Theory #2: Remember that searches may think differently from you and thus need different creative than you need.
• Theory #3: Be aware of competitors — don’t chase them.

Bottom line: Figure out your value proposition, what you offer, where you are better than the competition, and tailor creative accordingly.

Session #2 of the training courses on Monday of SES NY ‘07 was called “Getting your site found.” This session really had few takeaways for me as it dealt with the concept of getting your site found by using things like Flickr, YouTube, PR services, and optimizing press releases for online services. Here are some of the highlights:

More Products + More Choices = Lower Customer Satisfaction
The point was made that consumers are being bombarded by all forms of media and advertising, the Internet makes it easier for them to find products, but with all of these products and choices, customer satisfaction is arguably at an all-time low. So, how does one address this problem? Read on.

Resolve Buyer’s Remorse Before the Purchase
Truer words have never been spoken and it was the “ah ha” moment for me during the session. When you think in these terms, it just makes sense. This is particularly true for my day job where we have historically (for the past 90 years) been a manufacturing company whose business has 100% relied on big box and independent retail channels selling our products to consumers. Too often companies (manufacturers, retailers, service providers, etc.) focus on the newest features of their products and offerings that they fail to answer the most basic questions a buyer wants to know.

This ultimately leads to buyer’s remorse after the buyer has shelled out their hard-earned dollars only to be completely dissatisfied with their purchase. We’ve all been there, and to add insult to injury, many of us never bother to return the product because of the hassle in dealing with customer service in the process. What a horrible situation to be in for a retailer or manufacturer!

Buyer’s remorse has lead to the success of social media and blogging for consumers
This is why social media and blogging have become such powerful tools for consumers to vent frustrations and to seek out help and assistance from other consumers who feel their pain. Even being a marketer, I still dread dealing with customer service because it is a considerable time investment. It’s much easier for me to hop online, post a question, and deal with the resolution on my own terms and on my own time (companies who monitor blogs will win these consumers back!).

This is my first Search Engine Strategies conference I’ve attended, and SES NY ‘07 promises several new sessions. I attended the Monday training sessions (extra $$$) to brush up on SEM and SEO. Here’s my review and key takeaways:

Session 1: Search Engine Optimization Workshop
This session was hosted by Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs. Prior to this session, I had not heard of Shari before, but she made every effort to point out her knowledge of the subject by mentioning how lawyered up she was over the sharing of content of her new and upcoming SEO book. Aside from being overly opinionated at times and acting like a classic “tech person” does in the face of newbies, her session was very good at driving home this underlying theme: Keep it simple, and don’t take any short cuts.

So, what exactly does this mean? Web design is about the end-user, building an experience that is easy to use and to-the-point — allowing the user to get the information they need quickly.

What to optimize on your site for natural search
Additionally, optimizing your product pages for keywords and phrases is an important component to search engine optimization. Key areas to keep optimized are as follows:

• title tag
• meta description
• breadcrumbs (home > products > my product name)
• Initial h1, h2, h3, etc. tags
• Initial paragraph content

If you look at your web analytics software package, you’ll see that the top keywords and phrases that drive search traffic to your site will most often appear in one or more of the above 5 bullets. If you are looking to improve your natural search results with other keywords and/or terms, you’ll want to make sure these terms are sprinkled into your copy in the above 5 bullets.

One of Shari’s clients, medicinenet.com, trumps WebMD in virtually all natural search for topics relating to medicine (do a keyword search for “medicine” and you’ll see medicinenet.com show up #2 — and no sign of WebMD). She also claimed that medicinenet.com has never done any paid search simply because natural search has been a high priority and has been optimized over several years.

Breadcrumbs serve 2 important purposes
1.) Breadcrumbs are a great visual reference for site visitors to get a sense of where they have landed on your site. Too any web developers and designers leave out this important navigational element because they think it is obvious that the user knows where they are when they navigate a site. This may be true, but what they fail to take into consideration is the fact that many visitors will stumble upon a page within a site (from an external link, search engine, or some other means). This means the user is dumped right into the middle of your site, with no introduction and no immediate understanding to the organization hierarchy of your site. This is where breadcrumbs come into play. Jakob Nielson loves them, too (I thought it was interesting how this article came out a day after Shari’s session).

2.) Cross-linking was referred to by Shari as the most under-utilized and incorrectly-implemented component of search engine optimization. Breadcrumbs are an excellent resource for improving natural search. They take up such a small foot print in your site’s design, but they can serve a critical role in providing search engine friendly copy very high up in the code of a webpage. Use this area to alternately label sections — remember, users search in many different ways. For example, we have products called “Premium Hardwood Blinds” but users are searching for “wood blinds.” We can put “wood blinds” in the breadcrumbs and leave the page title as the official product name — or vice versa.

Cross-linking is good. Here’s how:
Cross-links are links to other related areas of the site. Cross-linking will help search engines index related content on your site. Link to product pages in more than one place on your site for a good cross-linking strategy. Don’t force users to go back to the homepage or products page to get to products. Provide cross-links to other related products and services (like Amazon.com). Search engines loves this and will gobble up your content even more. The takeaway here is that you don’t want to dead-end critical pages by not providing related links to other sections on your site.

Archival links are good to have
Press releases, articles, old product information, etc. are all OK to keep on your website. Not only do they help increase the number of indexed pages of your site in search engines, but you can simply cross-link from old/outdated product data/information to the newer information. Nothing is worse than finding search results and linking to a site where they have changed the navigational structure or discontinued a product and show no more information or related links on it. You’ve just lost that visitor!

After a recent post about Clickshift being acquired by WebTrends and voicing my concerns, and a previous experience with Omniture monitoring blog posts, I did get a call (voicemail) and e-mail follow-up from Clickshift. Let me go on a slight tangent by saying how much I love how powerful blogs can be and how easily accessible the information is for research and brand protection. I think there’s a definite future in this way of servicing new and existing customers and really allows companies to obtain candid feedback from real-world users, and not just people who are so fed up that they call customer service to complain — and quite frankly, I don’t have the time to do this as it’s typically easy enough to go to a competitor. Here I am now, championing their efforts and feeling important to them.

I digress. Back to the WebTrends aquisition of Clickshift. Not to worry says Clickshift: same service, just a new logo. So I’m back to looking at their very attractive SEM model again. With 2007 budgets nearing finalization, whichever route I choose can’t begin until January, so I have some time to look over it in a little more detail and learn how exactly they will integrate with our site — and how it can co-exist with Omniture. I realize that technically speaking, the code easily co-exists on each page. It’s the data analysis and path-to-conversion process that is going to be somewhat of an overlap.

On one side, I will have Omniture reporting data on non-SEM conversions and then through Clickshift, I will have SEM-based conversions. Not having this data centrally managed requires me to consolidate both sets of data either in a spreadsheet or by some other means. This was the beauty with the Omniture model is that all SEM data and web analytics data could be rolled into a single report. While they haven’t exactly made that process painless (and I’m considering going to Omniture University to learn how to get the most out of their application), I take comfort in knowing that it’s all there if and when I need it. Time will tell. If Clickshift truely works, then the time savings alone in bid management rules and the day-to-day babysitting of SEM will far outweigh the temporary inconvenience of rolling data from 2 sources into 1 report/spreadsheet.