Are You Squeezing the Most Out of Your Marketing Campaigns?

I’ve decided not to open my monthly investment statements. To be honest, I just don’t want to know how much of a hit our retirement and kids’ college savings accounts have taken over the last month. But even without the concrete dollar figures, it seems hard to escape the global economic pity party. Despite any real change to our income or expenses, my household is tightening its belt. We’re paying far more attention to our spending. Even with declining gas prices, we’ve talked ourselves out of holiday trips to see family across the country. Of course, corporations have fallen into this mindset as well. There’s no shortage of business news reporting layoffs, hiring freezes and budget cuts.

But as any coupon-cutting mom knows, it’s not always about spending less. It’s about getting more for your money. Savvy shoppers know where the bargains are and are methodical about planning any shopping campaign. I think companies should take a cue from these shopping champs and ask “how can we spend smarter?”

Search is known as a highly effective marketing channel, but far too many companies are leaving opportunities on the table. Just like your mom would tell you to squeeze all the toothpaste out of the tube, marketers should be asking whether they have squeezed all the value out of their campaigns. Here are three areas where marketers can spend smarter:

Consistent SEO across all web properties. Most companies have an extensive network of sites including a corporate portal, branded sites and campaign micro sites. These assets should be working hard for you in Organic Search by generating free traffic, expanding your brand’s visibility and creating efficiencies in your overall search campaign. The non-sponsored or organic search listings are clicked on 7 out of 10 times, so frankly, it’s a space you cannot afford to overlook. However, the reality is that most brand sites that I review have major problems just getting the engines to crawl their content and are therefore non-competitive in organic results. A smart start is to apply SEO best practices and optimization to all your web properties. The next level is to effectively leverage your collective web properties together to expand your presence and direct visitors to the landing page which matches best with their intent or position in the buying cycle.
Video. Video has seen explosive growth. The demographic breakout of YouTube users mirrors the demographics of all online Americans. While I’ve seen some advertisers take video created for TV and upload it online to YouTube, few are maximizing their potential in video search. A frequent misstep is adding video to the site in a player that cannot be crawled and indexed by the engines. The smart spend here is to create short, focused videos specifically for your online audience around targeted topics. Use SEO best practices to achieve 100% indexing and optimize video both on your site and on third-party video sharing sites. Finally, harness the power of your users and make it one-click easy for them to share, bookmark and discuss your video.
Social Media Optimization. Brands are beginning to buy in to the concept of social media. Many social media campaigns produce compelling content, but fail to align it with existing search campaign goals. Are you supporting your social media efforts through search? If your campaign goal is to drive awareness, why not support it through paid and organic search? And to flip that, do your social media efforts support your search campaigns? If given proper SEO attention, campaign assets such as video, blogs, social profile pages and images can develop into long-term assets for your brand in the search engines.

So go ahead and take a good hard look at your current campaigns. Ask yourself if you’ve squeezed the last drop of toothpaste out of the tube.