On Thursday 8 June, Figaro Digital returned to The Hospital Club, Covent Garden, for our latest seminar, focussing on the intricacies of search marketing. Covering a variety of topics from Dynamic Search Ads, to audience targeting and enhancing your data understanding. We take a look at the day’s key takeaways.
Paid Search, Paid Social and Video Within The Customer Lifecycle
Luca Senatore, Director of Strategy at Genie Goals, explained the “musts” and must nots” which define the way agencies should be growing their online revenue. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results, “digital marketing is just the same,” explains Senatore. To make headway and drive growth, marketers must look for gaps in which they can establish themselves. “Ask yourself what you can do that no one else is doing. It might fail nine times out of ten, but if it doesn’t fail it could create a massive increase.” Marketers must take risks to achieve cut through in the overcrowded marketplace. “Yesterday there was very little reach. It was hard to do TV because it was expensive, but attention was plentiful. Today there is a lot of reach, but attention is scarce. People are on multiple screens, and they are distracted,” Senatore continues. “You need to play the game in a more exciting way.” With 64 per cent of shoppers admitting that YouTube plays a large role in influencing their purchasing decisions, and 40 per cent of smartphone users having visited a brand’s site as a direct result of seeing a YouTube video, the answer seems to be clear. “If you’re creative, you can achieve loads by doing what no one else is doing.” If not, brands are relying on their competitors to make mistakes, and who knows how long that might be? By running consistent and rigorous tests, marketers can keep up with their changing user needs and keep up that edge over the competition.
With automation now being synonymous with many areas of digital marketing, Rumyana Miteva, Head of Search at Secret Escapes, talked about the most recent developments regarding Dynamic Search Ads, and what marketers need to know in order to successfully implement this tool within their search strategy. Based on the content of a website rather than keywords, DSAs enable Google to provide users with new levels of relevance, as well as reducing workload and time. With mobile search increasing, search terms are more likely to contain abbreviations and miss-spelt words, as people type on the go. And as voice search gains momentum, search habits change with it. “Every language is unique, you use different ways of expressing yourself- queries are becoming more conversational, long-tail, and you can’t figure out all the different combinations- it’s inhuman and impossible,” says Miteva. With 15-20 per cent of Google searches being completely unique each day, being able to cut out the keyword step enables marketers to extend their reach, and connect with consumers they might otherwise miss. The metrics of DSAs also enable marketers to see the success of particular content, and supplement their campaigns with keywords where appropriate. “It’s a future-proof technology; we all keep hearing about machine learning, being efficient, saving time and resources. This is the future of search, making sure we don’t have to spend all of our time on spreadsheets calculating keywords. In five years’ time we won’t be talking about keywords, we’ll be talking about users, the user journey, and relevance.”
Gareth Morgan, Managing Director at Liberty Marketing, gave a concentrated burst of insight into an area which, by his own admission, could be told over several hours: the opportunities for marketers to enhance their search offering through advanced audience targeting. Using the example of the fictional Liberty IPA beer, Morgan took us through the potential tools and practices available for marketers to understand, reach and win audiences in various different segments. “No one knows about my brewery yet, but there are people searching for what I offer,” says Morgan. “Start looking around to find where you’ll get the best ROI, test some keywords, and begin to craft an audience strategy.” Some of the tools Morgan unpacked include bid modifiers, which allow marketers to adjust their bids for different audiences or demographics; the Google Display Network, which consists of over 2 million websites reaching 90 per cent of the world’s internet users; and Affinity Audiences, which connects brands to consumers in broad audience segments, with an impressive degree of accuracy. “But we have to deal with the ‘sober’ reality that most of these audiences won’t do what you want. 96 per cent of people leave your website without converting. 70 per cent of people will abandon their shopping cart. And typically someone has to visit a website 2-3 times before they do what you want them to.” So having spent the money on gaining these new leads, what steps can marketers take to reduce these unpleasant stats? Remarketing is one option which is full of different methods to reengage a lapsed customer, based on the communication you’ve already had with them. Whether it’s inviting a customer to join a loyalty scheme, displaying a return offer or an incentive to complete an abandoned purchase, marketers should take advantage of the variety of tools available and reap the rewards of a well-segmented audience.
Travelex’s Head of aid Media, Fanny Dolo-Kersale, told the story of Travelex’s digital transformation, the foreign exchange company’s recent success through the implementation of a data-led marketing functions created from within their existing resources. “If you think about the FX market, the main players are banks, supermarkets and the post office. These are much larger players than [us], with budgets and resources that [we] just can’t compete with. So we have to compete in other ways,” says Dolo-Kersale. “For me, it meant looking at how we manage our agencies, creating a structure that could be managed by one person; looking at how to implement test and learn, in order to know where results are coming from; and getting those results extremely fast.” Agility would prove to be the solution for Travelex, which drove the innovation necessary to achieve cut through among these big players. Being able to contextualise the data was also important. “When you look at things in a silo, some channels are really hard to evaluate. So by using a data led model, you can see the real value of every customer touchpoint. You can rearrange the value of every single thing you are doing based on the real value of every single touch point.” Travelex focussed on gaining a better understanding of their customer, in order to be able to communicate with them, and understand their various touchpoints more accurately. “Always try to understand, not on an aggregated level what your CPA on paid search is, but if you spend an extra £1000, how much will it bring?” Brands should assign value to those customer touchpoints, and then use these figures to build trust around the wider transformation of their business.
Search is just one of the many topics which will be covered by our expert speakers at the flagship Figaro Digital Marketing Conference on 20 July. It’s not too late to get early bird tickets, so click here to find out more!
Continue the conversation on Twitter at @Figaro_Digital