An IMC approach to SEM, SEO and SMM
Apologies for the acronym soup I’ve served up today. Before we indulge in the main course, here’s the menu in brief:
IMC
IMC stands for Integrated Marketing Communication. According to Wikipedia, IMC is a “holistic approach to marketing” that “aims to ensure consistency of message and the complementary use of media” (IMC, Wikipedia, 2010).
SEM
SEM is short for Search Engine Marketing. In many cases, search marketing includes a wide variety of disciplines but for the sake of this article, when we refer to SEM we will be referring to pay-per-click search advertising. This includes sponsored advertising on the Google, Yahoo and Bing search and display networks.
SEO
If you are an avid reader of this blog, you will likely already have some idea of what SEO is. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation (or, for the Americans reading this, Search Engine Optimization!). This involves the process of optimising your website in a bid to improve your search engine rankings on the keywords that are most valuable to you. SEO is achieved through a multitude of visible website changes (on-page SEO) and non-website (off-page SEO) strategies.
SMM
A relatively new acronym in the online marketing field, SMM simply stands for Social Media Marketing. This involves harnessing the communication and viral power of social media platforms in order to achieve a particular marketing objective.
The Main Course
Ok. Now that we know the dishes, it’s now time for the special – a combination of the four!
Consistency. This the main ingredient in a quality IMC campaign. IMC involves creating a consistent tone, character, appearance, personality and message across your entire marketing mix. IMC has been widely accepted as the most effective way to cut through media clutter and deliver a single minded brand proposition to your target market.
You have probably already experienced a quality Integrated Marketing Campaign without realising it. Consider Optus. The way Optus have developed their IMC campaign is through the use of a consistent brand theme throughout all of their visible customer touch points. This theme of course, revolves around the brand colours yellow and turquoise and the use of wild animals in all of their marketing discourse (open a new browser/tab and check out their website now – you’ll see what I mean).
So how can SEM, SEO and SMM be integrated into an IMC campaign? Here are a few tips:
SEM
- Ensure that you develop your PPC advertising campaigns to include keywords that are utlised in your offline marketing efforts (for example brand slogans, tvc messages, etc)
- If your brand has a recognisable and distinctive brand personality, try to incorporate this personality into the writing of your ads.
- If you have a special offer or promotion running offline, replicate and reinforce this offer though your ad copy in the search engines.
- Let users know they have landed in the right place by integrating your landing page/website design with offline marketing themes.
SEO
- Like with SEM, make sure you have optimised your website for keywords and phrases that a potential customer might type in after ingesting your offline marketing material.
- Increase your search engine real estate by dominating the most valuable keyword groups relating to your industry. This will increase your branding and will allow you to reinforce your integrated marketing message every time a user searches for a relevant term in your industry.
- Make sure that, in making on-page SEO changes to your website, that you are able to create a balance between SEO and readability so as to maintain a clear and consistent marketing message.
SMM
- If you have an actual brand character, consider integrating this character across all of your social media channels. Brand characters are very powerful marketing tools and work well to create instant brand recognition and connection.
- Once again, if you have offline promotions running, you can boost the profile of this promotion through a creative social media marketing strategy.
- If you have decided on the brand tone and personality you would like to convey to your audience (are you young with attitude or conservative and corporate?), make sure to convey this personality in your social media interactions. A great example of a brand with a consistent brand personality and theme is Virgin (cheeky, red and white, casual, innovative, slightly (and ironically) anti-corporate)).
Mmm delicious…
I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick taste test on some ways you can incorporate SEO, SEM and SMM into your integrated marketing campaigns.
Please feel free to add a comment below if you:
- Did or didn’t agree on any of the points,
- Know of another good IMC example?
- Or simply have a question about this post!
Popularity: 9%
Read MoreHow to Improve Your Conversion Rate in Under 5 Minutes…
…by Excluding Internal Traffic from your Google Analytics Reports!
Forgive the hyped up title, the following is simply a quick description of how to block your own IP address from being counted towards your Google Analytics traffic.
Do this and watch your conversion rates rise!
By the end of these ten steps you will know everything you need to know in order to exclude internal traffic from your reports.
The steps are as follows:
- Login to Google Analytics
- Click the name of the account you wish to create a filter for
- Click the link to the “Filter Manager” (bottom right of your account dashboard)
- Click “Add Filter” (top right corner of the grey box)
- Give the filter a name
- Select the “Predefined Filter” option
- From the drop-down menus you will want to select “Exclude” “traffic from the IP addresses” “that are equal to”
- Visit IP Chicken and make a note of the numbers that appear beneath “Current IP Address” – your IP address will appear in the following format: 74.125.74.129
- You will now need to enter your IP address into the fields provided. If you see four boxes separated by dots simply enter the numbers in the corresponding box. If, however, there’s just the one box then you will need to enter your IP address using regular expressions. Don’t freak out – all this means is you have to put a backslash in front of all the decimal points, eg: 74\.125\.74\.129
- The final step is to select the website “profiles” you wish to apply this filter to. Simply select your profile(s) and click “Add >>”. Once you’ve done this just hit “Save Changes” and you’re done!
How will this improve your conversion rate as promised in the title of this post? It’s simple – since you probably visit your own site regularly and never buy anything (you tyrekicker) you are unconsciously bloating your visitor numbers. Since conversion rate are essentially the number of visits required to make a sale, taking your own visits out of the equation will instantly improve your conversion rate!
Popularity: 14%
Read MoreHow to do SEO: Keyword Research Considerations
One of the foundational elements of any Search Engine Optimisation campaign is the selection of keywords to optimise your webpages for. As such, it is of critical importance to understand a number of factors in order to lay the groundwork for success and to avoid optimising for the wrong keywords.
Keyword Phrases vs Generic Keywords
Search engine users type in keyword phrases in order to return results that will hopefully satisfy the intent of their query. It is important to differentiate between a keyword phrase and a generic keyword. Examples of generic keywords include singular words like “accountant”, “hotels” or “marketing”. A keyword phrase would be something along the lines of “accountant Brisbane”, “luxury hotels” or “marketing conference”. Generic keywords tend to have higher volumes of traffic associated with them but in most cases have a far lower conversion rate than more specific keyword phrases.
Keyword Search Volume
How often is the keyword being searched? There are various free and paid tools available for approximating keyword volume, such as Wordtracker, Wordze and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It is important to emphasise that the numbers these tools report are approximate and by no means a concrete measure of how many times a keyword will be searched. Additionally, most of these tools report only on US search volumes and may be a poor representation of the Australian market. A further point to note is the seasonality and/or spikiness (unusual spike in volume due to the term becoming a hot topic) of a given keyword which will skew the reported number of searches.
Keyword Competitiveness
A keyword phrase with a higher level of competition will be more difficult to rank for. How many other webpages are competing for the keyword phrase you want to optimise for? An easy way to get an overview of this is to search for your keyword phrase on Google. You will notice above the results something along the lines of “Results 1 – 10 of about 343,000 for [KEYWORD PHRASE]. (0.33 seconds)”. This means there are approximately 343,000 pages in Google’s index that are somehow relevant to [KEYWORD PHRASE]. Keep in mind that not all of these pages will be explicitly optimised for [KEYWORD PHRASE]. More often than not the keyword will merely appear on the page or within the anchor text of a link pointing to the page.
You can narrow down the number of real competitors in a number of ways:
- Include the phrase in quotes i.e. “keyword phrase”;
- Use the “intitle:” or “allintitle:” operator – see which pages have the phrase in their title tag;
- Use the “inanchor:” or “allinanchor:” operator – see which pages have links pointing to their site with those keywords as anchor text.
Commercial Intent of Keywords
Consumers will use different language depending on where they are in the buying cycle. Information seekers tend to use broader terms before narrowing their search to more specific keywords as they move closer to making a purchase.
Also, two searchers with different needs may use the same keyword phrase to find what they’re after. Generally, the shorter the keyword phrase, the broader the intent and the greater the potential for ambiguity. Traffic from longer, more specific keyword phrases (commonly referred to as “long tail keywords”) tend to convert better than generic keywords because the visitor has qualified themselves.
Furthermore, some words take on a different meaning through common usage or branding. Take for example the word “caterpillar”, with at least two very distinct meanings, i.e. the larval stage of butterflies and moths, or “the world’s largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, and industrial gas turbines.”
Relevance of Keywords
Just because a keyword has a relatively high volume, low competitiveness and high commercial intent doesn’t mean it has anything to do with the goods and services you sell. Additionally, it may be completely relevant to your business but the content of your website might fail to adequately communicate this.
Striking a Balance
Keyword research, like many aspects of SEO, is a balancing act which requires the researcher to go beyond merely looking at the metrics. In tandem with cold hard numerical analysis, sucessful keyword selection requires an understanding of pyschology, marketing, language patterns and general knowledge in order to discover the right keywords for your business.
Popularity: 12%
Read MoreSEO Tip – How to Make Your Google Search Result Attractive to Users
SEO Tip #3
If there’s one catch-22 in the SEO game, then having a high-ranking, fully optimised search result that is right at the top of Google but is not getting any clicks is it.
This problem normally comes about because a business has spent so much time optimising their page full of keywords that when their listing appears in Google or one of the other search engines, their result is just a mash of keywords.
Having your website ranking highly is one thing, but actually getting users to click on it is another.
The trick then is to optimise your site well whilst still keeping your listing as an attractive result for the user.
One of the first ways to do this is to include your business name at the start of your listing. So instead of having ‘Neon Lighting Brisbane, Neon Lights, etc’ as your listing heading, you want to modify it so it reads ‘Search Strategy – Neon Lighting Brisbane, Neon Lights, etc.’ This allows your business’ listing to still remain attractive to the user.
This logic is also followed through to the second and third lines of search engine listings, where it is important again to ensure your description is attractive to the user. Once again, simple things like capitalising appropriately and punctuation makes a big difference, whilst avoiding those unsightly keyword mashes.
And finally, having a primary domain name, rather than a free subdomain, makes a big difference to the appearance of your listing as it gives your business a professional look.
Popularity: 5%
Read MoreSEO Tip – The importance of keyword tags
SEO Tip #01
One of the most important factors when it comes to your website’s performance in search engine results is the keywords meta tag.
The keyword meta tag is embedded in the HTML code of your web page and is read by search engines during their indexing process. The keyword tag allows you to specify what search keywords you would like to appear for in search results.
But don’t think that you can just add whatever keywords you like and appear in every search results page from then on. Google (and other search engines) have systems in place to deal with excessive keyword meta tags.
The practice of filling your meta tags with large numbers of keywords is called keyword spamming and is a very quick way of being booted out of a search engine for spamming. The jury is still out on exactly how many keywords is too many. Some “experts” argue for no more than 50 while others are as conservative as five.
There are also some pundits out there who claim that 13 is the magic number. Recent results from our SEO campaigns suggest that keeping to 25 keywords and below is optimal. However, keyword relevance is also important. If you have 32 keywords for instance, but all of them appear in your web page copy numerous times (in context and not just stuffed in there for the sake of it), then that will most likely be perfectly acceptable. However the reverse is also true. You might only have 12 keyword meta tags but if none of those keywords are relevant to your content then you may be blacklisted for spamming.
But still you can write good content, fill your keyword meta tags properly and submit your site to search engines and still not get any traffic. In this case the reason is most probably your choice of keywords. Keyword meta tags should not be too specific to the point where no-one would ever search that term or too broad to the point where there is way too much competition to appear. Getting the right keywords into your site is critical to search engine performance. An SEO company can help you determine what keywords are being used to search your industry and provide advice on how to change your content to match.
But don’t expect to just go ahead and optimise your keyword meta tags and suddenly appear #1 in Google. SEO is made up of more than just keyword tags, and for this reason SEO is an on-going process that is very time consuming. For the average business, it is not cost-efficient to employ someone to look solely after your company’s SEO and at the same time not time-efficient to get someone already in your business to take up the responsibility.
Fortunately, web strategists, such as Reload Media specialise in SEO programs, which manage your keyword meta tags in the context of your overall SEO program. These programs are cost effective, last for at least 12 months, and ensure that your site is getting top-of-the-line optimisation from specialists who are paid to know everything there is to know about search engines.
So while keyword meta tags are important to a website’s search engine performance, they are just one slice of the overall SEO pie.
Popularity: 2%
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