Being the use of internet for daily activities like reading news, doing research, communicating with others and shopping, people forget to make paid search a priority while planning a new campaign. Failing to effectively use paid search when creating and planning marketing initiatives holds more risk than poor campaign performance. In fact, failing to incorporate paid search into your marketing efforts has the potential to alienate current or future brand followers. Following are the some methods by which paid search can be integrated with marketing.
- Invite your search team to the initial initiative planning meetings. Doing so will not only help ensure that paid search is a part of the overall campaign, but it will also allow you to tap into the team’s knowledge on elements that could impact the success of the campaign. For instance, if your proposed plan includes a made-up word, or a word that people often spell differently, your search team would be able to counsel you on how this could affect the volume of people coming to your site on terms related to the campaign.
- Spend as much time planning the website content as you would other media so that your messaging is consistent and complete wherever your consumers see it.
- Research your paid search keyword set thoroughly so you have the right mix of branded and unbranded terms. You want to make sure that you’re getting a large volume of traffic, but also that the traffic lies within your target market.
- Write ad copy to support your initiative’s messaging. This copy should mirror the language used in other media, but also contain call-to-action wording to entice users to click on your ads.
- Timing is everything, so make sure you have content on the website before the offline marketing launches. If website content is launched late in the game, you risk not being able to turn on your paid search campaigns in time to catch people searching for terms related to offline messaging they’ve seen. This is crucial as this first wave of interest can make up a large part of your search volume.
- Track, track, track. Create success metrics for your paid campaign before it launches and track your results as the campaign runs. Doing so will help you to target your optimization efforts. It will also help you better plan future paid search campaigns.
- Use insights gained from campaign performance to educate your brand on how certain terms perform. Let them know how many people are actually searching on their marketing language. This education will serve you well the next time a new initiative is launched.