Posted by: Guest Editor - Pascale Perry on January 27th, 2009

Following up from her previous well-received guest post, we asked Pascale, friend of Arena and online marketing guru, if there was another topic she fancied sharing her thoughts on.  Sure enough, there was.  So here’s a very interesting discussion of how the web and TV and other media are getting increasingly intertwined and changing the way clever marketers get us to buy from them.  It’s certainly given us some food for thought for various partnerships we’re currently negotiating.

Search doesn’t occur in a vacuum

It’s a very familiar concept for marketers that no marketing channel (offline or online) works independently from another.  Exposure to advertising in print, television and radio commonly results in online traffic and of course, online search.  Offline push, online pull.  A survey by iProspect, 2007 showed that 67% of respondents searched online as a direct result of exposure to an offline marketing channel.

Whilst the concept is familiar, the potential benefit of the search demand created by offline advertising isn’t always harnessed effectively online by marketing departments or agencies and it is worth considering search behaviour when engaging in any offline marketing.

Using search prompts in offline campaigns

Increasingly, companies and organisations recognise this relationship and attempt to guide the consumer by encouraging them to “search online for [brand/company/campaign]” within the advertising campaign, rather than listing a long and often forgettable URL or telephone number.  Government campaigns have been doing this for some time – for example, Direct.gov’s Act on Co2 campaign in 2007, in which consumers were prompted to “search online for ‘act on co2’” in all the offline media.

The public duly responded, and there was a large increase in searches for the term “act on co2” (below is a screen shot from ‘Google Insights for Search” showing search interest for ‘act for co2’ between October 2006 to Jan 2009).

The offline push was very clear, and the search demand it created was caught by presence of the direct.gov content in both the natural and paid search channels.

More recently, a new government initiative promoting healthier lifestyles “change4life” also has a search prompt in the offline campaigns “search online for ‘change4life’”.

This campaign, which will cost the UK tax payer £75m over the next three years, so far has less than optimised search engine results listings on Google, with no paid search ad shown at the time of writing (although competitors are showing for the term), and press articles ranking above the campaign content on the NHS.uk domain (content which looks unoptimised for natural search).

Furthermore, ambiguity has been introduced by the use of ‘4’ instead of ‘for’ in the search prompt.  Searching Google for ‘change for life’ (which has shown as great an increase as searches for ‘change4life’ according to Google trends), shows first results which look relevant but are actually entirely different websites, unrelated to the Department of Health campaign.

It is clearly worth ensuring that the search results shown for a search prompt reflect the messages and websites you want consumers to see, and that the PPC budget assigned stretches far enough.  Earlier this year, confusion abounded when Orange launched a huge re-branding campaign with “search for ‘i am’” featuring on TV, radio, print and outdoor ad copy – despite the site not ranking in the natural search space at all for such a generic term (8 months on, the site currently ranks 2nd in Google); quite a few negative press articles also surface for search variations such as “orange i am” and “i am orange”.  Additionally, there were many competitors bidding on the ‘i am’ search term hoping to piggyback onto Orange’s campaign and driving up Orange’s PPC costs significantly.

Searchers don’t necessarily search for product/ brand

Some advertising creates an online search response without necessarily prompting it as with the examples above.  The infamous drumming gorilla Cadbury’s advert can be seen to have prompted a massive search response in Google.  Interestingly, there appeared to be a greater increase in searches for the generic term ‘gorilla’ than there was for the ‘cadbury’s’.

We can’t necessarily assume the terms and words people will search for when finding out more about something they’ve seen in offline marketing.  Sometimes a consumer may recall a tag line, image or theme rather than a product, brand or company.  This is worth considering when bidding on terms or optimising content for search campaigns related to offline advertising – it is worth broadening target words related to the advert or campaign rather than specific products or names alone.

Another example is the British Heart Foundation’s 2 minute ad “Watch your own heart attack”.  It aired on the 10th of August with much publicity prior to launch, and the search response to this publicity on Google is evident below:

Again, a greater response can be seen for the more generic term ‘heart attack’ than ‘british heart foundation’.  The BHF website doesn’t rank in the top 10 for ‘heart attack’ in the natural listings, so with luck they had PPC advertising with very targeted ad copy ensuring that they caught all of the search demand they generated.

Increase search spend/efforts during times of offline activity

Search prompted by strategic offline advertising can put companies at a competitive advantage.  You may have noticed that in the UK, Famous Grouse whisky is only advertised around Christmas time, when sales of spirits increase.  This type of reminder may create more brand searches for Famous Grouse compared to competitors.  Below shows ‘ardbeg’ whisky search interest vs. ‘famous grouse’.  We can see that the search difference between ‘famous grouse’ at Christmas versus other times of the year relates closely to the TV advertising – Ardbeg whisky on the other hand remains more stable in terms of search over the same time period.  It is conceivable that the offline advertising is generating this search footfall and giving Famous Grouse a competitive advantage, at least online.

It would be wise to up-weight PPC or natural search push to correspond with the timing of strategic offline campaigns to catch all the extra search demand generated.  Although this seems a logical and intuitive way to operate, with many larger companies using different agencies and different departments to run their ad campaigns, often communication is lost or is weak.  A study by iProspect, 2008 shows that 45% of companies surveyed do not integrate offline with online marketing citing having different departments managing the different channels or not having considered it as some of the most common reasons for lack of integration.

7 Top Tips to Integrate Offline Marketing with Search:

Some of these examples allow us to draw up a list of guidelines to ensure you make the most of search demand you are generating offline:

1. Integrate campaigns by ensuring that the search marketing team are kept up to date about offline campaigns.  Offline advertising campaigns should ideally budget for PPC spend, especially if they are prompting online search.  For natural search, where visibility can take a long time to achieve, terms and language used in the offline campaign should be known well in advance of the start of the campaign.
2. Ensure that when prompting consumers to “search for [product/name/brand]” online, a) you have targeted PPC ad copy related to the offline campaign b) you rank in the natural search space for the term.  The more generic the term, the pricier the PPC will be and the harder it will be to rank naturally.
3. Broaden the search terms targeted to include tag lines, themes or characters used in the offline campaign.  Don’t assume consumers will remember the brand name or product name.
4. Minimise potential misspellings or ambiguity of search prompts in offline campaigns by choosing something simple (but not too generic) and ensure that you rank for keyword variations naturally as well as bidding on them with PPC.
5. Up-weight search spend and natural visibility focus for times when offline campaigns are live to ensure that you catch as much of the search demand you generate as possible.
6. Bear in mind that competition for the PPC cost may increase as opportunistic competitors may start bidding on prompted search terms.
7. Beware of wasteful PPC cost in response to an offline campaign.  A campaign which drives interest online could be costly in terms of PPC especially if the offline teasers don’t specify what the marketing is for.  An example would be Posterscope’s Prism Search Tool, a product for marketing professionals.  The marketing campaign – brightly coloured posters on the tube and billboards around London – showed the word “Ooghle” within a search bar with no further information to indicate what the product did or the target market. With such widespread marketing and a lack of consumer discrimination (and relatively low natural search visibility) the campaign would have drawn many non-marketing searchers; clicking on their PPC ads with no chance of converting.  Having the ads only run in marketing trade press would have been much more targeted without losing the strength of the point being made.

 

Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on January 27th, 2009

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