Search is "unhard" if you start at the beginning

Posted by: gnissim

Search marketing can fill numerous functions: customer acquisition, branding and awareness, to measure and track other marketing, as a complementary activity with halo messaging and branding, as a pure capture channel or as a planning tool. However, the results produced when a range of these techniques are used in conjunction is staggering.

The first and most important part of any marketing campaign is the planning process and in this article we will discuss the importance of search in that planning phase.

It’s amazing the feats of prediction that search engines can perform – search engines are predicting flu epidemics even before the World Health Organisation. Search engines can accurately forecast box office figures based on search volumes prior to the launch of a new movie. These predictions are produced off of the back of search volumes around certain terms.

Smart marketers are using search in the initial planning stages of a campaign, for its ability to test messaging, to feed in geo-locations and demographic information before the expense of a TV campaign, and to predict interest levels in new product launches, with truly insightful results.

One recent example of what not to do is the NRMA “unworry” campaign. I can’t think of a better example of where search was clearly not a part of the planning process.

When I first saw NRMA’s “unworry” campaign I was impressed. They had clearly designed this campaign for search! “Unworry” was a keyword that their competitors wouldn’t be bidding on, a word that they could brand protect on Google. With “unworry”, NRMA could drive people to search for a term that was easy to remember, that would be cheap to buy via Pay Per Click and that would enable them to measure the effectiveness of their offline advertising as well.

So I conducted a search for the term “unworry” expecting to see NRMA sitting in position one in the organic rankings and the only one to be bidding on the search in the paid search results.

To my surprise, they appeared in neither.

Their competitors, however, had already reacted and were bidding on the term as it wasn’t brand protected.

This is a case where search was not factored into the campaign from the outset. NRMA was generating search volumes and in fact paying for them, but they were failing to capture those potential customers.

From the Google Insights for Search graph, we can see the search spike around this term with the main spike occurring in the opening fortnight.

Source: Google Insights for Search 21.10.09

By the time they had rectified this by brand protecting the keyword, including it in their PPC campaign and organically optimising their site for it, the horse had already bolted. NRMA’s advertising dollar had fuelled their competitors’ conversions.

Since then, NRMA has resolved these issues in their subsequent campaigns, but search volumes around their other branded keywords such as “unhard” and “uncomplicated” are so low that Google doesn’t have enough search volume to compile a graph.

On the other hand have you seen Allianz’s new TVCs, using ‘Go to Google and search for Allianz’ as a call to action?

This is driving traffic to Google using a term where they own both the paid and organic listings. This was a campaign where we worked closely with the client, their agency and Google. Here search clearly featured in the planning process. The search and TVC campaigns were augmented to maximise their combined returns and to enable Allianz to measure the effectiveness of the TVCs. This can actually be achieved on a minute by minute basis.

I’ve only touched on why search must be factored into the planning process early on, but surely it’s obvious to any true direct marketer. Planning all facets together whether for a holiday, party, meal or a marketing campaign is the key, but not a guarantee to success.

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