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The Doors to
Conversion – Today’s SEM June 8, 2006 |
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The Unlocked Doors to Conversion A few days ago I was talking with a client, one with a Madison and Vine address and a seemingly complete understanding of consumerism and suggestive marketing, who couldn’t quite understand why I was so interested in target profiling as a baseline for our SEM efforts. After all, to him, and many like him, SEM is synonymous with improving rankings – “the keyword is the qualifier itself,” so the click is already relevant, and the user is already either familiar with the brand (if a branding query has been launched) or intimately in need of the product (why else would they be searching). To this client, SEM was really just something out of the Pied Piper’s handbag, a form of traffic control so to speak – something more akin to constructing a seven lane viaduct through the downtown corridor than any real meaty driver of conversions. I shouldn’t have been offended, and to be honest, I wasn’t. What I was in fact, was affirmed that my perception of SEM, relationship marketing, and audience specific messaging as one intertwined e-business practice (a mutant “e-commerce string theory” if you will) was not a universally accepted norm. And it made me think: “why not?”… All other traditional marketers acknowledge that their job involves more than just the four Ps; it also includes one part awareness, one part branding, and one part relationship building and maintenance. Sure you can lump these subsequent areas into Promotion, like all the textbooks do, but not giving them a priority focus in today’s consumer driven economy will always keep you out of the Manhattan leagues. However, when it comes to Search, the business community looks at our role as a logistical coordinator (akin to the Place P), delegating all other interests to their internal marketers or their traditional Madison and Vine firms. Firms that had they had a thumb on the broadband pulse would have been successful at the get go; and I wouldn’t have been hired. So why the misperception? Good SEM firms spend a lot of time on research and profiling to create effective sponsored campaigns. Maybe it’s because the creative is so few characters, but “Just do it” is fewer and nobody can dispute the value of that messaging. I think the reason for the misperception is mostly my fault. I wasn’t entirely clear that my primary goal was not to increase traffic, but to increase conversions by manipulating the online marketing mix. That is my real job, and that is the job that everyone should know SEM is focused on achieving. For too long, as an industry, we have looked at our roles as traffic drivers, and only recently have we tried to refocus our roles into “qualified” traffic drivers – opting for the perspective of increasing conversions more so than click-thrus. Today, consumers have an unprecedented number of venues for information and entertainment - from the 300+ channels on their TVs to trillions of webpages; and all the while, they are also exploring new media, from nontraditional sources such as social networks, Podcasts, and online video in their quest for relevant content. As a result of this continued audience fragmentation and the increasingly elusive 18- to 34-year-olds shifting preferences for everything from news to sitcoms to the online platform, traditional advertising is becoming more and more ineffective. Which means that SEM will start getting even more and more of that total marketing budget pie, because it is both quantifiable and able to be highly targeted? In the past, we focused on increasing visibility, playing the odds that with more traffic would come more sales – and by and large we had been successful. But to build beyond that saturation point, we need to focus on increasing market retention and conversion rates. This is what SEM should be. It should be about identifying your specific audience and tailoring your messaging and venue to motivate not only a sale, but a long-term relationship that eventually drives that sponsored click into a direct and frequent customer. This means that all of us online marketers need to organize our work around audience niches to be effective. Clients that are focused on narrow audience segments will naturally give rise to deeper audience relationships and more cost-effective connections. By focusing on niche audiences, we can create richer content that resonates with a topic that the consumers within that niche actually care about. This is the necessary evolution of SEM - to encapsulate everything from search to sale – and change the mistaken doors of perception into the unlocked doors to conversion. Stay tuned for future articles that delve into some of the key components of the online marketing mix, and how SEM should be leveraging each component within the sales cycle:
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Rick Tobin |
