It’s the busiest time of year, with 2010 strategies and the holiday season coming on. In either instance, the hope is that budgets will increase to meet an ever-growing digital market.
But that isn’t always the case.
In a client dialogue over the past few days, we were asked by a client to assess possible budget savings for an already underfunded campaign prior to 2010 strategies. Over the years I’ve finally been trained that the client is always right.
Except when they’re wrong.
In assessing the client strategy, one suggestion tabled was that we should look at day-parting as some clicks were potentially more valuable than others. It is my fervent belief that the client strategy was off-point, however, because we have been unable to introduce analytics, it remains only opinion on either side of the table as the analytics can’t bear it out.
In the end, I was left scratching my head because two years in, the issues and ensuing challenges remain the same.
I am, of course, a stalwart fan of PPC and of search and digital in general. And I struggle with understanding how brand managers don’t understand that every click increases brand awareness, thus doing the same job as TV or print. And in fact, every click does more for brand awareness than traditional media in terms of providing insight and action.
This is not to say that traditional media is dead or dying. Traditional media has always been predicated on reach and frequency propositions. And certainly, in Canada, reach is still best accomplished by TV, Twitter and Facebook aside.
That said, search offers response and engagement and post-click, it does so in a vacuum as competitors have no real estate on your site. So the dialogue is necessarily one of brand awareness. Even a seemingly negative or ambivalent search is an opportunity to construct a dialogue to advantage by mitigating risk through acknowledgement and solution.
Morever, a “broad keyword” search that compells a click is a direct marketshare steal from those of your competitors on the same keyword, again moving the dailogue solely to your online poperty.
Every click provides value, even those with constistently high bounces rate inform and suggest that the promise is not living up to the provision, allowing opportunity for a dialogue more in line with consumer or prospect need state.
Search Versus Traditional Budgets
Though consumers spend more than 30% of their time online, digital and search budgets remain less than 10% so for 2011, perhaps the dialogue shouldn’t be one of cutting budget on a campaign that performs to objective daily, thwarted only by budget, but of culling one single magazine or broadcast insertion and adding it to the search budget.
Ask not what your search marketing can do for you. Ask what you can do for your search marketing.
Have a good one.
~ S
