MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Marketers use market research as a tool to find their way into customers’ heads. They want to find out exactly who their customers are, what they are thinking and how they identify with the brands in question. One way to gain insight into the way that customers use language is to use search data or search behaviour data, which enables marketers to better formulate their advertising and brand positioning from the customer’s perspective.

According to Robert J Murray (http://searchengineland.com/071017-091707.php), president of iProspect, an SEM firm, smart marketers should firstly mine keyword data at a detailed level. He writes that marketers should look for patterns in the conversion rates of different keywords and remember that words that are not found in the data can be just as informative as the words that are found. It is important to question possible reasons why words are not found. Could it be that customers don’t identify with them, or do customers not remember them? The answers to these questions are necessary to help marketers create more successful customer focused campaigns in the future.

Secondly, Robert J Murray writes that you need to map which key words lead to which product conversions i.e. is it possible to group words together into product categories? Thirdly and finally he writes that you must make sure that the searched key words match the language used in your messaging. If they don’t then you aren’t using the customers’ language, you are using yours. You need to stick to the language that the customers use and relate to, to ensure more successful marketing.

Another important point to remember is that offline marketing has a dramatic impact on online search behaviour; it is therefore necessary to maintain the consistency of your language throughout all your marketing activities.

Customers don’t like to be spoken down to or patronised, neither do they like to feel that they are in over their heads and the language being used is too technical or too full of jargon for them to understand. They will feel like they are being misled on purpose or that they are being made to feel like fools. Customers are regular people and they like to be addressed as regular people. Depending on your site, they are regular people with an interest and you should adapt the language used to suit them and keep them interested and reading. Only by relating directly to them and not talking at them will you be able to successfully achieve the aims of your marketing activities.