Integrate search engine marketing (SEM) across all channels

By Alan Osetek

With the down economy a continuing issue, marketers must make integration a top priority. By fully integrating search engine marketing (SEM) with all other marketing channels, you can squeeze the most out of your media and marketing spend.

Integrated marketing is far from new. Integrating SEM with your other marketing channels, however, offers a unique benefit: Search has the power to boost the efficacy of each channel. In essence, it’s the ultimate capture vehicle, adept at capturing the demand created by all of your other channels. By leveraging search, marketers can increase their returns on investment.

Incorporate With TV Spot
Take the case of a Fortune 500 retail company that recently ran a TV spot promoting a new product line. The company strategically included its search agency in the overall media mix. To capitalize on the incremental demand generated by this campaign, the company formulated a search and social media plan specific to the TV spot.

Execution included tailoring specific SEM phrases to match ad keywords in all the search engines, substantially increasing the daily paid search budgets, and adding the TV spot to various social networking sites. The results: a substantial increase in search-related traffic on days following the TV spots, translating to better overall results.

Missed Opportunity?
Integrating search with other channels can translate into a competitive advantage. Sixty-seven percent of online searchers are driven to initiate that search by offline marketing, according to a recent study from JupiterResearch and iProspect. Moreover, 39 percent of these convert/purchase from the very company that prompted the search in the first place.

Despite such user behavior, just 55 percent of the marketers surveyed are integrating search with at least one other offline channel. The rest essentially allow competitors to capitalize on their media and marketing spends.

Remember the Pontiac Super Bowl commercial for its Solstice model a few years ago that instructed viewers to Google Pontiac? While that did drive people to search for Pontiac’s site, one of its top competitors — Mazda — capitalized on that by launching paid search ads to run on those searches that compared the Solstice to its competing model, the Miata.

Rather than letting this happen, smart marketers should integrate SEM with other marketing channels to capture the demand they create. Below are three tips to do it right:

1. Define integrated campaign metrics. Align your company’s marketing resources and external agencies to ensure campaign metrics are speaking the same language. Integrated metrics allow marketers to evaluate overall campaign performance — not just any one component of a campaign.

All elements also must have the same metrics so everyone understands the true goals of a campaign, not just the specific metrics of their marketing channels. If a shoe retailer’s search group focuses on return-on-advertising-spend metrics, for example, and its catalog group focuses on the most profitable customers, it’s difficult for the organization to understand how the different advertising channels contribute to the overall goal.

2. Set up integrated reporting and analysis measurement platforms. Prior to launching any new marketing campaign, build the proper integrated campaign reporting platform to integrate all your marketing campaign channels — including SEM. Within each campaign channel, ask these questions about your reporting capabilities:

Have you identified all data sources and validated availability for tracking and reporting?
Have you determined the key metrics of each campaign element?
Have you considered how all reporting will be interrelated from siloed channel reporting to integrated reporting?
Does your reporting analysis quantify the business impact of your overall marketing investment?
Will you be able to determine which channels generate the most customer interest, engagement and sales?

Implement proper tracking codes on your Web site and various media and marketing channels. Proper tracking code management and precampaign testing will ensure issues are resolved prior to going live with the actual campaign. Refine this approach with a higher-level analysis that includes assigning partial credit to different elements of the overall integrated marketing campaign. If a consumer responds to an e-mail, then later responds to the same offer via a search engine and ultimately makes a purchase, for example, which channel gets credit for the sale?

3. Collaborate and share data. A common problem within marketing organizations is their failure to share media and marketing plans with their search practitioners. Marketers need to ensure their search colleagues are aware of the overall media campaign plan so they can be prepared to capture the incremental consumer demand generated from the media campaign strategy. Given that, companies should regularly inform their search groups about upcoming initiatives.

Likewise, search marketers should share data with their offline counterparts on information such as keywords, offers and calls to action within their campaigns that drive the most traffic, generate the most conversions and produce the most revenue. Sharing this information goes a long way in improving the efficacy of each marketing channel.

In these trying economic times, every advertising dollar counts. To maximize every opportunity to connect with consumers, marketers need to integrate — from initial exposure to response to action — and define the right mix of media channels to drive consumers down the marketing funnel to the desired action. To improve the efficacy of each of your marketing channels, integrate SEM to capture the demand those other channels will surely generate.

Alan Osetek is managing director of SEM firm iProspect (a.osetek@iprospect.com).