Refine Your Search Engine Marketing Initiatives

Spring clearances and upcoming Mother’s Day promotions offer catalogers a great opportunity to tweak their Internet search-marketing campaigns and cast a wider net for reaching customers.

Rotating copy and thinking more broadly about keyword-search terms are just a few ways in which you can better blanket the online-search market to stretch your advertising dollars, spur brand recognition and attract eyeballs.

Taking a multichannel marketing approach and integrating online strategies with offline promotions also offers more leverage around spring advertising opportunities.

Paid placement Internet search, which enables you to bid for placement at the top of search engines’ results pages, can help you to attract customers beyond your weekly or monthly mail campaigns. Each day, U.S. consumers conduct upwards of 80 million online searches, effectively pre-qualifying themselves as highly targeted leads just by typing keywords such as “khakis,” “sandals” or “roses” into search engine query boxes.

As a result, the online channel is growing rapidly as a percentage of revenue for many catalogers. Indeed, marketers with both a catalog and Web presence saw online sales climb to 29 percent of overall sales in the first quarter of 2002, up from 18 percent a year earlier, according to a report issued in December from Abacus, a research firm focused on the direct-marketing industry.

Additionally, each U.S. Internet user is expected to spend $1,249 online this year and $1,400 in 2004, according to Emarketer.

How can you more effectively tap into this burgeoning market and boost your marketing efficiency? Consider the following six tips.

1. Integrate Peripheral Keywords

For catalogers, keywords are the bread and butter of a paid-placement search used to generate responses from the 200 million-plus consumers shopping online. About 48 percent of Internet users go no further than the first page of search results before clicking on a listing, according to a study from IProspect.

When planning your next catalog drop, don’t forget to turn to your online channel to tighten up your accompanying keywords and write effective ad copy. And to maximize the shelf life of those keywords, use peripheral terms that will supplement the more obvious brand-name terms already in use.

Peripheral keywords include non-branded products, categories and phrases. For example, a peripheral for an athletic shoe retailer might be “men’s running shoes.”

Integrating peripheral terms is a strategy with many built-in advantages. Most importantly, the combination of branded keywords (high conversion with a good ROI) and peripheral keywords (lower conversion, slightly higher ROI and ability to attract new customers) can result in a strong ROI for your entire search-marketing program. Overall, peripheral keywords can be critical to driving traffic and ultimately increasing the value of your brand.

2. Develop a Smooth Landing Page

Once you get consumers to your online storefront, you want to keep them there. Yet catalogers often overlook historical conversion rates and continue to send consumers to landing pages that depress, rather than generate, buying interest.

Consider the following scenario reported by Performics, an online-marketing company. A retailer sent consumers searching under the term “khaki pants” to a page on its site that offered both women’s and men’s khakis.

Men snapped up most of the khakis sold, but overall conversion rates were low. So the company redirected its landing page to men’s khaki pants. The result: Conversion rates increased dramatically.

3. Get Creative With Copy

Internet-search campaigns can be changed frequently — and it’s to your advantage to do so. Rotating online ad copy and experimenting with different titles and descriptions for each category can keep business fresh and ultimately improve relevance over time. Also, test to see which promotions are the most effective.

Leverage certain keywords against current and upcoming promotions. For example, if you offer free shipping or free gifts with purchase, alter titles and descriptions accordingly, providing interested consumers an added incentive to click through as they scan search listings.

And when it comes to clearing out overstocked or discontinued merchandise, your ability to easily re-focus keywords, text links and other promotional copy can be invaluable.

4. Know Your Conversion Rates

Identifying visitors and determining where online traffic comes from is critical to improving conversion rates.

For example, say you discover that most of your site’s traffic is flowing from overseas locations that are outside of your target market. In this case, it’s a good idea to reduce keyword-bid pricing in the evening to incur fewer click-throughs from international users, while strengthening conversion rates for key audiences in the United States, according to Performics.

5. Ramp Up Budgets Ahead of Promotions

Before a catalog drop, increase bids on certain keywords related to a specific offline promotion to better claim the top position on search-result pages. This is a strategy that bodes well for catalogers as online spending continues to climb.

A paid-placement search is a dynamic, open marketplace, so the amount spent on bids will vary dramatically based on what the market will bear at the time. Because catalogers understand direct-response metrics better than anyone, they know exactly what a page in a catalog costs and can apply the same budgeting online. These days, most catalogers determine cost structure by individual category and align it with the varying product margins.

What’s more, many catalogers find they can apply the metrics they’ve learned for Internet-search programs to integrate into other online initiatives such as e-mail, as well as tweak offline customer-acquisition strategies.

6. Maintain Brand Recognition

Policing your brand undoubtedly encompasses a large portion of your search campaign management duties. To be sure, the Internet-search marketplace is dynamic by nature, so actively controlling words that appear in text links and messaging, rotating copy and updating landing pages is critical to maintaining brand recognition.

These tactics are especially important for traditional catalogers now that many niche Web sites selling similar products may be buying identical search terms to drive traffic to their sites. The message: Own your brand, and identify what separates you from the competition.

As you can see, by planning ahead and fine-tuning your search-marketing campaign, you can put yourself in a better position to turn browsers into buyers.

David Karnstedt is senior vice president and general manager of direct business at Overture, an Internet marketing firm. Previously, he was vice president and general manager of AltaVista’s Internet search group. Contact David at (626) 685-5600; or e-mail him at salesgroup@overture.com