If you haven’t thought about search engine marketing (SEM) or search engine optimization (SEO) yet, it’s time to jump onboard the search train. Think about some of the goals of your marketing campaigns – building awareness, boosting ROI, and increasing conversions. What do you think your company’s website is for?

Reach

One of the most important goals of marketing is to increase brand awareness. The great thing about online advertising is that marketers can target consumers at any time during the buying cycle. Social media allows us to reach our consumers in a timely, efficient and measureable manner.

ROI

Analytics help you make decisions about your brand. When we optimize new insights and data, we optimize our marketing budgets. This is why it is important to select relevant keywords for your SEO campaigns. Your consumers (potential and current) use search engines like Google, Bing and YouTube to find information regarding your products/services.

Whether you’re an ad agency looking for new business or a supplier serving the marketing needs of businesses, you need to be aware of the challenges CMOs are facing today. A new IBM study of 1,700 chief marketing officers reveals that respondents are feeling stretched, but are also excited about the future of marketing.

The study reveals that top marketing executives recognize a critical and permanent shift occurring in the way they engage with customers, but are not sure their marketing organizations are ready to manage the change.

Expectations of CMOs are greater today than ever. They have to understand and engage with more empowered customers, adopt and adapt to more sophisticated technologies and tools, manage data from disparate sources and be more financially accountable to their organizations.

The study’s findings point to four key challenges that CMOs everywhere must address:

1. The explosion of data – 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years alone.
2. The rise of social media – 56 percent of CMOs view social media as a key engagement channel.
3. Channel and device choices – The growing number of new marketing channels and devices, from smart phones to tablets, is quickly becoming a priority for CMOs.
4. Shifting demographics – New global markets and the influx of younger generations with different patterns of information access and consumption are changing the face of the marketplace.

The rise of social media is of particular interest for agencies. Currently there are very few global or regional agencies that are leaders in this space. Agencies need to improve their social I.Q. and become leaders to assist CMOs in understanding, measuring and growing revenue from the social space.

Carolyn Heller Baird, CRM research lead for the IBM Institute for Business Value and the global director of the study states, “The inflection point created by social media represents a permanent change in the nature of customer relationships. Approximately 90 percent of all the real-time information being created today is unstructured data. CMOs who successfully harness this new source of insight will be in a strong position to increase revenues, reinvent their customer relationships and build new brand value.” 

The customer relationship is one of the top priorities identified by CMOs, yet most marketing organizations are stuck in traditional approaches to CRM, not taking advantage of real time data and social media. The sooner marketers adopt social media and the insight it provides, the better they will be prepared to anticipate future shifts in markets and technology.

IBM 2011 Global CMO Study Compilation

To access the full 2011 IBM Global CMO Study, visit http://ibm.com/cmostudy.

Mark Hollingsworth is the Vice President of Consumer and Interactive Divisions at LoSasso Advertising Inc., a Chicago based interactive agency specializing in content marketing strategies and customer acquisition for leading B2B and consumer brands. (See more posts by Mark)

In last week’s issue of BtoB Magazine, Christopher Hosford notes that “[w]hile digital increasingly dominates marketing tactics, the rate of adoption for Web analytics solutions has been comparatively slow, according to new study by BtoB.”

B2B Meet Analytics

Despite the slow adoption rate in the B2B community, the use of web analytics is becoming increasingly important as marketers come to understand the impact of analytics on ROI. Google Analytics (a free service) gives B2B marketers the ability to track and analyze web traffic data for their clients. An important feature of the Google Analytics dashboard is that users are able to view statistics about online visitors from mobile devices – which is a great way to monitor and build mobile marketing campaigns.

Keyword Search

Keyword search is extremely important when it comes to leveraging SEO. By building links and creating searchable content, marketers are able to improve their websites and rankings in search engines. Research your keywords – try using the keyword tool from Google AdWords and see which searches are already ranked at the top. When researching keywords keep in mind the following:

• Relevance
• Volume
• Competition

By optimizing high volume and low competition keywords, marketers can maximize results for their efforts.

Social Media Segmentation

Through Google Analytics, marketers can see web traffic data based on sources like Search Engines, Direct Traffic, and Referring Sites. By creating custom segments we can review detailed data and see traffic based on specific social media websites and projects. The top social networks contribute to SEO because of their high rankings in search engines.

Now is the time to start using analytical tools to develop, define, and drive SEO solutions. Continuously share and link your content so that it is distributed beyond your standard demographic.  As Chris Abraham says “[…] if you cannot target your dream customer directly, you can target everyone around him.” …and her…

In December, our company developed a fun holiday greeting featuring a video of our staff singing “The 12 Things Our Clients Want This Holiday Season.” The campaign included a printed holiday card with a message to drive recipients online to view the video.

In the past, we have discussed the importance of video and its obvious increase in popularity and use. Key to success when using online video is the ability to make your campaigns measurable. A strong analytics platform will allow you to track general activity such as page views, as well as more granular information such as where visitors came from, how long they stayed and where they went when they left.

A campaign with this level of measurability allows you to better gauge success, and more accurately understand user behavior to achieve better results in future campaigns.

We snail-mailed 321 holiday cards (18 bounce backs) on December 15 with a message inviting the recipients to view the digital version on our website. Here are some very telling numbers from our little ditty.

Pageviews for www.losasso.com/happy-holidays.php

December 15 – 0 views (the page was launched on this day)
December 16 – 36 views
December 17 – 178 views
December 18 – 108 views
December 19 – 64 views
December 20 – 14 views

We began to see traffic to the video the day after the page went live (Dec 16), coming directly from the friends and family of the LoSasso team.

Wednesday, December 17 is when recipients of the snail-mail piece began to view the video. 42% of our views on 12/17 and 53% of the views on 12/18 came directly from the holiday card recipients. That is a total of 111 unique pageviews in just 2 days. 12/19 and 12/20 added 44 more unique pageviews from the mailing.

Our staff also shared this page on social networks, bringing in substantial traffic (12/17 through 12/20) from StumbleUpon (16%), Facebook (15%), Twitter (8%), LinkedIn (3%) and others.

The length of the holiday greeting video is just shy of two minutes at 1:57. Users who came from the mailing stayed on the page for an average of 2:36. Users from social networks stayed on the page for an average of 1:18. Obviously our clients and friends who received the holiday card were more “qualified” visitors with a bit more interest in the content of the video than the users from social networks, making their average duration on the page longer.

Some more interesting statistics: 27% of the users who watched the video went to the ‘our people’ page to read more about the employees in the video, while only 6% from social networks did the same. This signifies that our primary audience was genuinely interested in seeing/learning more about their favorite LoSasso employees.

We also posted the video on YouTube. Though we do not have access to the analytics to find out where traffic came from, we do know there were 191 plays on YouTube and that this version has been re-tweeted on Twitter by non-LoSasso employees twice. We still collect an average of 4 views a day in the month of January for the holiday video.

Through today, we have received 193 visitors from the mailout. That is a 60% rate of return from the direct mail piece!

We were very happy with our increase in traffic and interest in December. As a result of this campaign, we received a call from a prospect on our mailing list who has requested help with her website and a more extensive interactive marketing strategy. Who knew a holiday card would be such a nice case study?

With a strong analytics platform, you can better understand your customers’ behavior, boosting the performance of your programs while cutting out the fat. Push for stronger results. Make 2009 the year when you make your campaigns measurable.

Mike Hernalsteen is the Senior Interactive Marketing Specialist at LoSasso Advertising Inc., a Chicago based interactive agency where he develops comprehensive online marketing strategies for leading B2B and consumer brands. (See more posts by Mike)