What’s behind this lack of coordination between online and offline marketing strategies? There are a variety of factors at play, such as a lack of buy-in from senior management and a lack of human resources, but the group that is hardest to understand is the 19% who cite lack of budget. How can a company justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions of dollars, on traditional marketing vehicles and not allocate 1%-10% of that budget towards closing the loop to reach current and potential customers when they are actively looking for their product or service? Integrating search into your marketing mix not only completes the user experience, but also provides valuable metrics for improving (and proving) overall ROI. And, especially in these recessionary times, that is the kind of analysis CEOs and CFOs should look for from their marketing departments.

Integrating Search With... Search
Our September newsletter highlighted the full range of tactics available to marketers looking to integrate search marketing with their offline efforts. While these can be implemented independently of each other with demonstrable results, our experience and that of the industry is that the synergy of deploying multiple search tactics can dramatically improve overall performance metrics.

Consider these Google findings presented at SMX East this past October. Brand recall for generic queries was 16% in the control group. When the brand had top ranking organic positions (SEO), recall jumped up to 51%. When the brand had top organic and top sponsored positions (SEA), brand recall jumped up to 86% while reducing competitive recall by 5%. Plus other studies show that when presented with both organic and paid listings from the same company, the majority of people choose to click on the organic listing versus the paid ad listing. Search marketers who integrate SEO with paid search get the value of the paid impression in the form of clicks without paying for most of them.

Integrating Search With... Social Media
DBE is also seeing significant results in terms of visibility for our search marketing clients who choose to integrate SEO with Social Media Management. On a search results page, the search engines will show a maximum of two listings for each website that appears. With only your website optimized, the best you can hope for is a 20% share of the organic listings on the results page. By integrating SEO tactics with social media marketing (blogs), press release optimization, and the creation of digital outposts (Facebook and LinkedIn), DBE has been able to achieve 60% to 80% coverage on the first page of results for our clients on searches for their company name. The benefits of this are twofold: increased click-through traffic and decreased competitive visibility.

Just as integrated brand marketing became the rallying cry for traditional advertisers in the 90’s, look for integrated search marketing to really take off in the coming year. Closing the loop between online and offline marketing tactics isn’t a huge leap to make, but the marketers who do so will find themselves light-years ahead of their competitors.