360DigitalInfluence

I am  traveling back to D.C after an information packed day at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo in New York.    The day was filled with expert panels, keynote speakers, and  vendors who perked up when they saw  Ogilvy on my ID badge.   I had the option to  attend a number of educational sessions that fell into  one of the following  search related categories: Fundamentals, Stats & Research, Social Search, and  Vertical & Retail.   Hailing from the  360 Digital Influence practice  my initial plan was to  stick to the social search track for fear of missing out on some cutting-edge social media optimization tactics, but as the day wore on I  began to realize that  Word of Mouth Marketing  has a lot to learn from “traditional” search engine  marketing if it is to become the quantifiable, ROI  based discipline  of our dreams.

Search Engine Marketing and the pay-per-click model  are tremendously successful  because of their  ability to  easily track  a campaign’s cost per sale, and how the  money spent on search directly impacts the bottom line.   What happens when the goal of a campaign is not a  sale, per se, but  simply awareness or buzz?   How do we get companies to invest the same dollars?   Even though a  monetary transaction is not taking place, search engines still provide a tracking-friendly environment for us marketers to  influence behavior.   It is our responsibility to work with clients  to  define actions that will  measure the success of a campaign.   Pageviews or time spent on  a site is not enough.   If a  Word of Mouth Marketing  campaign is  going to use paid search to drive consumer engagement, a  Web site or  other online destination must be  designed from day one to  allow for a deeper level of interaction with the content.    Some actions that come to mind are video views, widget downloads, tagging of content on social networks, joining a  community,  posting a blog comment, or subscribing to an RSS feed.   Whatever it is, once the action is defined,  SEM campaigns must be optimized  regularly  to maximize engagement.   Optimization should take place on the ad level, but more importantly on the  landing page level with multiple creative, call to action,  and copy.

On one particular panel at SES today, Eduardo Llach, CMO and founder of SearchRev, presented search strategies and optimization techniques for brand companies.    He went into specific detail on how SEM campaigns can be most cost-effective and deliver the highest ROI.   SearchRev’s ability to interchange multiple variations of a landing page, and serve search ads  during  different  times of day, days of the week, and  geographical location all based on historical performance of the campaign,  allows  companies to  increasingly discover the best  way to engage their audience.   Word of Mouth campaigns can capitilize on this finite level of optimization.   The trick  is to create,  define, and track  the right goals to measure the success achieved from such efforts.  

What actions can you think of that will facilitate a Word of Mouth Marketing campaign  that  can also  be used as a goal to optimize towards when  using paid search?