Search engine marketing in a recession

Taken from Technology Weekly - March 2009

With marketing budgets being pared back to the barest minimum, where is the best place to spend the few pounds you have left?  Judith Lewis argues that right now search marketing is the best place to spend that precious shrinking budget.

When consumers think about purchasing a product or engaging a service, the first place 80% of them finds a new business is a search engine (Forrester Research).  This makes ranking in the search listings not only important, but effectively essential.  When a customer searches for your business, without a strong call to action or even without a message at all such as this result for Gucci will not bring as many customers, or foster as much trust, in your brand as looking like this Fendi search result.

Currently in the UK search is the number 1 online activity (excluding email & instant messaging).  Within the category of search activities, the largest potential audience online currently comes from Google with almost 90% of the search volume being driven by its algorithm (Hitwise, 2009).  With over 20 million searches conducted on search engines everyday (NetRatings 2006) the power of search has never been greater.

News and press as well as events and seasonality all play their role in generating search traffic.  Events in the media especially tend to lead to an increase in searcher activity.  Around the time of the election in the US, “Google trends” was used to predict (successfully) the outcome of the election based on the volume of search queries for each candidate.

By pre-empting some of the triggers for search you can be in a position to capitalise when searchers go looking.  Awareness of seasonality, natural search patterns, searcher behaviour and other factors which directly affect your business is therefore essential.

Search marketing can be split in to two distinct categories – paid search (also called PPC) and natural search (also called organic optimisation).  These two marketing techniques are often approached separately but work best together.  Organic optimisation can drive down the cost of paid search by increasing relevancy and quality score.

The search engine results page (SERP) often displays a number of elements including paid search, paid placement (in Yahoo) video, images, blog search, shopping comparisons, answers, news and websites.  Of these most are driven to inclusion by a math formula called the algorithm.  Understanding which elements on your web pages contribute to that ranking will help you capture the 80% of people who click on natural results (Google, 2007 at the B2B Debate).  Of the remaining 20% who click on paid search, it is important to ensure you are delivering the right creative on the right search and landing them on the right page.

There is a high degree of trust and relevance placed on the organic search results, with people tending to trust natural search results as more relevant than paid results according to Tamar/Tickbox.net in March 2007.  That said, Google, Ask, Yahoo and Live/MSN search almost always place some paid results above the natural ones.  This could be the result of eye tracking studies published which show the eye is naturally drawn to the top left of the page.  By placing adverts here, the searcher is more likely to notice and click on them.  For business, this makes appearing in the first slot to capture traffic and attention important.

The budget split on projects involving both paid and natural search is usually 60/40 with paid search getting the greater share of the budget.   This is not always the case as some projects benefit more from organic optimisation, especially when universal search elements can be incorporated.  Paid search though can drive traffic while SEO (organic/natural search) changes are being made, and can continue to drive traffic through targeted messaging which is much more difficult to control in organic listings.  Both paid and organic search have important roles to play in capturing clicks.

Investing a healthy portion of your marketing budget in paid and natural search can reap benefits far beyond this financial year.  From increasing consumer trust through to generating online sales, search engine marketing (SEM) is an increasing trend which will benefit your business whether it is B2B or B2C.

Click here to read the article and others like it on Technology Weekly

Posted March 5th, 2009 by acansick | In category Masterpiece News, Online | No Comments yet

Customer Service: Attention to e-tail

Taken from Retail Week - February 2009

Retailers’ websites are increasingly offering consumers advice before they buy. But how good are retailers at replicating in-store product advice online?

When you want to choose a product to buy on a website and the product description doesn’t answer all your questions, where do you turn? Retail Week tested the product information and customer service tools available on eight popular sites to see whether they could transform undecided shoppers into converted customers.

The results show that some retailers are putting a huge amount of time and effort into creating content to help customers make informed purchasing decisions. Others have implemented more interactive systems, with mixed results.

However, in the case of the highest scoring retailers we discovered that it’s now possible to get as good, if not better, product advice online than you would get in many stores.

Highlights from the research involved in this report include a sensible discussion via instant messaging with a customer services assistant at Comet and a much less sensible discussion – if you can call it that – with an automated agent on Ikea’s website.

Another interesting area was retailers’ responses to emails. Despite the industry’s reputation for not serving customers very well this way, retailers provided helpful and timely responses.

Click here to read the rest of the article, and see how Retail Week scored Boots, Comet, Figleaves, Net-A-Porter, Ikea, Mothercare, DIY.com and Tesco Direct for their customer service tools.

Posted February 25th, 2009 by acansick | In category Online | No Comments yet

Multi Channel Innovation in 2009

I was interested to read the views of Frank Lord (VP EMEA at ATG) on the eCommerce landscape in 2009. Here are a few of our shared thoughts on the subject:

With retail having such a bad time at the moment, which direction should the industry be heading in? A great pricing policy is not enough to guarantee customers head towards your store. Service is important, but even this is not enough. In today’s environment, customers demand both price and service in the channel of their choice.

Multi Channel
Often used to summarise bricks and clicks, the multi channel reality is far deeper and more difficult to achieve. Retailers have been quick to adopt innovations like “click and collect” but this is only one small step of a long multi-channel journey. A consistent and continuous customer approach is the end game whether it be in-store, online, mobile, phone or chat. To be able to provide a personalised, one-to-one relationship with your customer is something many organisations will be striving for over the course of the year.

Social Networking
Last year we saw social networking have a real impact on the eCommerce world. The ability to tap in to like-minded customers who are all potential brand advocates is a compelling story. Whilst there are a wide range of tools and possibilities available, commercial and economic pressures will dictate that retailers will have to think long and hard as to where they will see the maximum return on their investment. However, those that do embrace a more likely to enhance their relationship with existing customers but equally importantly, also attract new ones.

The Future
While 2009 will continue to see retailers struggle, those that manage the customer lifecycle most effectively and embrace new technology such as social networking are most likely to stand out.

Posted February 24th, 2009 by acansick | In category Online | No Comments yet

Victorinox Case Study Published

You will have noticed we have been doing a lot of cool stuff for the super brand Victorinox. Well last month we had an article published about the service we delivered to this awesome client.

Here’s a snippet:

“For the launch of Victorinox’s flagship European store, the Swiss Army knife producer required a creative and production agency that could create marketing messages across a variety of media, both print and digital. Laura Blows finds out how Masterpiece achieved this, with the help of 3D modelling.“

Read the full article on Print Media Management:
Marketing a Masterpiece for Victorinox store

We are currently working on some new campaigns for Victorinox at the moment. Keep your eyes peeled!

Posted January 23rd, 2009 by acansick | In category Colour Management, Design, Masterpiece News | No Comments yet