Check your SEM strategy for marketing + PR or miss the sale
- Posted by Ephraim Cohen on November 5th, 2007 filed in Online PR, Search Engine PR, Social Media, marketing
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Comscore released data that should make packaged goods public relations teams and marketing teams work a little more closely on Web strategy. What did Comscore find? That people were doing online searches and going to web sites for product information. The study found a majority of U.S. consumers visited at least one package-goods web site during the three months ended in April, with search driving a substantial proportion of those visits. Shocking? Not really. But you wouldn’t know it from most Web search engine marketing and PR strategies.
Go online and search for baby safety products and what will you see? A lot of ads for the sale of baby good products and a few for information on those products. According to the data, people are more likely to 1) search when they are about to purchase products; and 2) click on the information links as opposed to the sales oriented links.
Marketing and public relations teams interested in leveraging this behavior should be conducting a few checks on their search engine strategy:
- Is information oriented content being optimized in a way that complements the sales oriented information (good)? Or is the sales oriented information taking the priority (bad)?
- Are keyword advertisements being placed for both information as well as sales oriented literature? The Comscore information indicates people may be more likely to click on the information ad over the sales ad.
- Is the information content being looked at from purely a marketing point of view (usually meaning mostly company literature)? Or is it being looked at from a public relations point of view (third party testimony, links to other third party blogs, discussion groups etc)?
- Are media results being leveraged in terms of reprints and links appearing on the site? This can raise the value of media results exponentially over the value of the initial placement (as more people can view it through your site than might have seen it on the publication date).
This is just a few starting points but asking these questions should highlight if and how a company is either capturing or missing those many eyeballs (and lucrative ones, according to Comscore) looking for pre-purchase product information.
