Search Integration : Searching for the Perfect Mix?

3 tips to help you integrate search across all channels

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.

• MORE ON
• E-COMMERCE