Search, Multi-Channel Marketing & UX

Integrating online and offline marketing campaigns and providing a successful multi-channel user experience is a powerful way to increase profitability and customer loyalty.

Studies have shown that:

• customers who purchase from a store through multiple channels spend 14 percent more annually on average than their single-channel counterparts (JupiterResearch)
• in some sectors these multi-channel customers are 25 to 50 percent more profitable than their single-channel equivalents (McKinsey & Company).

It therefore should be a priority to ensure that all your channels work together, mutually supporting each other with your brand and offering messages, and that these channels provide a seamless path for your users through to an acquisition.

Integrating Channels

Successfully integrating organic and paid search with offline campaigns and other channels requires understanding how a business works across a multi-channel environment – and considering channels as an integrated network, rather than individual delivery mediums.

The User Journey

It is vital to maintain an integrated approach across the entire journey – in order to reach consumers at all levels and various stages of the journey or purchase cycle.

An example of a typical user journey might be:

• A consumer sees a TV advert for a time-limited healthcare insurance discount
• Reminded again later by reading a magazine advert describing the same offer
• Uses a search engine to locate the website and researches the offer
• Researches healthcare competitors in the same market space
• Returns to the original website and locates the contact information
• Rings the healthcare company, discusses his medical requirements and applies for the discounted offer.

Search is the vital connection between offline and online marketing, providing the touch points which allow a seamless transition between the offline and online steps of the user journey.

Without the search element - or if a website has no search visibility - a consumer cannot find the information or online resources they seek. This means that the touch points are lost, and this breaks the user journey. Obviously this makes it difficult (if not impossible) for a consumer to complete their task, having a detrimental effect overall on the numbers of successful conversions and therefore the performance of your multi-channel campaign as a whole.

The uplift often seen after a successful search marketing drive is often merely the improvement from sub-optimal performance to optimal performance - as the barriers to task completion present in the user journey are removed.

This means that for many, sub-optimal performance is the accepted norm..!

The creation of a successful search strategy designed to remove barriers and provide a seamless user journey, requires analysis of the steps required to complete a given task and identification of the points where the different channels intersect. Examples might include:

• a direct mail shot with a unique promotional code delivering extra introductory benefits if presented on registration via the website
• an automated SMS text message sent to a mobile number after initial registration, reminding recipients of current special offers or website downloads.

Both these tasks might prompt searches, but using very different keywords to locate different sections of the same website. eg.

“campaign name registration”
“company name special offers”

Thus, it is very important to understand the users requirements at each touch point, in order to identify likely keywords and create a strategy to maximise search visibility for them.

Target Audience and User Behaviour

Analysis of user behaviour and demographics will help identify and understand the steps within the user journey, and the factors involved at each step. A campaign should identify the role of each channel within that journey, and address the needs of the user at that step.

When considering the mix of media and the messages delivered through each, decisions should be based on the behaviour of your target audience.

For example, in a typical household today, the media consumption of each member may differ:

• a working parent may listen to more radio going to and from work in a car
• a housekeeping parent may read more magazines or watch more daytime TV
• children may watch more TV or use the internet more. They may also use mobile devices extensively.

It is therefore important to match channels to your target personas to maximise resonance with the target audience.

Search - Connection between Online and Offline

Search is the pivotal entry-point on the net, often being the first step in an online journey. Even when a visitor has been given a dedicated URL, they will often still search for a brand or domain. This means that search is the vital connection between your online and offline channels.

Thorough keyword research is vital to ensuring search meets the demands of the user journey – both in capturing search engine queries, but also as a means of understanding evolving user behaviour patterns and vocabulary.

While keyword research tools can provide data from user searches, monitoring social media can provide not only real-time insight but also open dialogue channels with the very audience that your marketing efforts are directed at, and in this respect provide a dimension of communication simply unavailable through any other resource.

Vertical Search Engines

While traditional blended search engines (such as Google universal search) play the major role in search visibility, vertical search engines focussing on niche topics or single media type are an important element within your search visibility strategy. For example, the second largest search engine in the world is YouTube - a video vertical.

YouTube presents opportunities to tie TV advertising campaigns in with an online presence and reach certain persona types where they’re more likely to consume media.

Studies show that online video ads designed specifically for the web achieve greater results than their TV counterparts - possibly due to the ability to use edgier creatives free of the constraints imposed on TV advertising, so consider different but supporting campaigns and messages for online video channels.

YouTube has expanded the number of advertising formats they offer to include a variety of opportunities including overlaying the video clip itself. Initial research would suggest that these new formats deliver higher click-through rates (CTRs) than the older more traditional standard formats as is often seen with new advertising formats and techniques.

Analysing the business marketing strategy from a multi-channel perspective may indicate that vertical search engines can provide a targeted channel through which to operate complementary campaigns.

Amazon and eBay are the two major shopping verticals, and providing an experience that consumers trust. The ability to create a presence by setting up a merchant store provides opportunities to sell to targeted customers.

Some consider Amazon as the buyers default shopping search engine, first search engine they will use when they know they’re in the purchase funnel. So consider a merchant account as a opportune additional sales channel.

Paid Search and the Halo Effect

Complementing organic positions with paid search listings can have a powerful effect on click-through-rates (CTR), by positioning a single brand across multiple placements on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

This produces an phenomenon called the “halo effect”, by which the uplift seen across the board is larger than simply the combined total of the individual click volumes.

If a company also has affiliates bidding on the same keyword, the result can be especially powerful, with branding across 5 or 6 placements on a page, resulting in domination of the SERPs by the brand.

Paid search is ideal for tie-ins with other channels as the message and trigger keywords can be controlled quickly and easily. So if you want people to find a micro-site or campaign page easily paid search will meet this need.

Paid search can be used as an effective means of connecting with fast-moving current events or responding to rapid changes in campaigns, due to the speed with which campaigns can be created and keywords and advertising creative added in response to an event.

Paid search can also be a very useful tool for split A/B or Multi-Variant Testing (MVT) using the the tools the search engines provide to optimise ad creative and website design. With the amount of traffic using the search engines, tests can be organised and run very quickly, with statistically meaningful data produced in a very short time frame. So you can test creative messaging not just for paid search, but utilise this channel as a market-research test bed!

The information gained from this testing can be used to influence the message delivered across other channels.

Multi-Channel Analysis

It is important to remember that in the same way that offline adverts and marketing drives visitors to your website, online marketing will often drive offline conversions - as a proportion of visitors may follow up the search step with offline actions such visiting their local store branch or calling to speak to a representative.

It is therefore vital to gain as much insight from the analytics as possible, monitoring touch points and analysing user journeys and transactions across all channels to track how effectively the campaign is running.

Thorough analysis will show which channels are producing high ROI and which require optimisation, pinpoint any bottlenecks or disconnects, and highlight any steps which require further optimisation or improvement.

Applying the insights gained from this analysis across all channels will maximise the efficiency of the network as a whole, providing an uplift larger than proportional improvements to a single channel might bring, and delivering substantially better results than seen using channels in a disparate manner.

In this way, removing the barriers to task completion present in the user journey will not only improve performance from sub-standard to optimal, but maximise user task-completion figures and actually deliver the true uplift in ROI that should be your goal.

Conclusion

With natural search, paid search, social media, display, online PR, viral and email marketing available to you online and outdoor, direct marketing, press, TV, radio, PR, sales promotion, ambient/guerilla, experiental and cinema available to you offline you need to ensure these channel are working with each other. They need to support each others messaging - marketing communications needs coordination and no channel should operate exclusively if you want to get the most out of your budget.

The user journey requires every touch point to support the message, and their journey will most likely require search as the linchpin for task completion. So no matter how effective your marketing communications and campaign messages are, you need to be mindful of search visibility.