When search marketing speaks to you

The key point: are you listening?

Search marketing is the fastest, most affordable way to stay on top of market trends.  In order to make the most out of every search marketing dollar that you spend, we’ve outlined some important data you should review regularly to inform other, parallel marketing efforts and to insure optimal performance across all your marketing channels.

Data From PPC / Search Network Results…

To SEO:

Keywords that are Popular and Bring in the Most Relevant Traffic. This will help you know not only what keywords to target, but, can also save you money if you optimize your SEO for the highest traffic PPC keywords.

To PPC:

Negative Keywords from Actual Search Queries that Triggered PPC Ads. When clicks occur on search queries that are irrelevant you are throwing money out the window- so monitor the search queries that are bringing in the clicks and be sure to add any irrelevant terms to your negatives keywords list.

New Keywords from Actual Search Queries that Triggered PPC Ads. There are so many different ways of saying the same things, so it’s important to monitor the terms your audience is actually using to search for your products.  This list of actual search queries can especially be a gold mine of new keyword opportunities if you are using broad match – it can be one of the easiest ways to move into longer-tail terms with lower CPCs and better conversions.

To Marketing Strategy:

Hot Geographies, and also geographies to not focus on.  Monitor your PPC activity and results by geography.  This will give you indications of where to focus your marketing dollars and where to avoid additional spend.

Hot Offers.  Monitor your PPC ad CTRs to see which offers generate the most interest and which offers searchers don’t seem very interested in.  This will help you know what offers to emphasize in your other more expense marketing channels.

Product Popularity.  PCC traffic trends are a great way to see which product areas are hot and deserve more marketing dollars and which product areas have little interest and might even be candidates for sun setting.

To Website:

Hot Taglines & Calls to Action.  If you want to know the best content especially around calls to action to include on your website – your PPC ads can be the best indicators.  See what calls to action get the highest CTRs and which ones are ignored and you’ll have a great head start on the content to use in your website itself to garner action.

To Social Media:

Hot Product Areas.  Where should you be emphasizing your social voice – through blogs and social sites?  PPC keyword and search query trends can be a great indicator of hot areas of interest vs. areas which won’t garner much interest in social activity.

Market Feelings.   Searchers frequently include their feelings in their search queries.  Mining these feeling keywords can be a gold mine for relating to your potential audience and the current issues they are facing.  These feeling keywords can be a great way to grab a searchers attention through a blog title or other social post.

Data From PPC / Content Network Results…

To Marketing Strategy:

If you are running an automatic placement or re-targeting campaign these are a great way to identify popular websites that potential and past customers frequent.  You can use these to determine associations that might be valuable to join or thought leaders that you might want to incorporate into future events.

To SEO:

With the automatic and re-targeting campaigns, you can also generate a great list of popular websites which are complementary and relevant to your site and fantastic link building opportunities.  Showing a website the stats of visitors who take interest in both of your sites is a very compelling way to conduct manual link building.

Data From Natural Search Results…

To PPC:

New Keywords from Actual Search Queries. Monitor your logs to see how people are searching for your products.  Be sure to include all these different flavors in your ppc campaigns.  It has been shown that having a ppc and seo listing on the same page greatly improves the overall CTR for those keyword terms.

To SocialMedia:

Blog Keywords and Topics. Your natural search query list is also a goldmine for finding out hot topics to write blog and other social media entries for.

To Marketing Strategy:

Hot Geographies.  Natural search traffic data by geography is another great source for identifying geographies to place more emphasis on and those to ignore.  The natural search geographies can frequently carry surprises about areas you didn’t expect to get great traffic from, since they are not restricted like they are in PPC.

Data from Google Alerts / Social Monitoring…

To PPC:

Negative Keywords. Monitoring alerts for hot current topics for which you don’t want your ad to appear.

New Keywords. Monitoring alerts for hot current topics for which you do want your PPC ads to appear.

To SEO:

Websites for Link Opportunities. Monitoring current blogs postings, news articles and other social posts can provide great indicators of potential complementary websites for link building opportunities.

Link-bait Content. Monitoring trends can give you great ideas for what type of content is most likely to be successful link bait.

To Social:

Be the News Source for Your Clients. Being on top of breaking news and the latest trends will enable you to be the first one to push out new news information to your social followers and enable you to have the blog postings on the hottest topics.

To Marketing Strategy:

Thought Leaders. Monitoring the news, social and blog worlds is a great way to identify thought leaders for you to develop relations hips with and to leverage in marketing events.

Newsletters, Blogs to Regularly Monitor. To make sure that your staff is always up to date, monitoring thought leaders is a great way to identify what blogs and news feeds your staff should be regularly reading updates from to ensure everyone is always up to date on the current market pulse.

Many larger, more matrixed marketing organizations manage many of these functions in separate silos, and understanding the impacts of one tactic on other, related tactics can be difficult due to organizational structure or dysfunction.  It would be in the best interests of these kinds of organizations, however, to improve interdisciplinary communication and cross-pollination in order to achieve a more effective marketing strategy.  Try sharing your portion of the data first with teams across different organizations in order to start opening up the communication lines and collaboration.

Marketing data from every aspect of your overall effort can positively impact a whole range of related and unrelated marketing and sales tactics.  It’s important to listen to that data, and to appropriately apply what you learn to every aspect of your marketing program.