Bill Muller CMO iProspect

Naïve. That’s how I’d describe them. I’m talking about CMOs and search.

Despite search marketing’s role as a highly effective channel for most leading brands today, many CMOs are making mistakes that could translate into an advantage for their competitors.

But don’t get me wrong. As a CMO myself, I’m not suggesting we need to be involved at the “bits and bytes” level of search campaigns. Rather, we need to have a fundamental understanding of search marketing’s basic tenets. Only then can we set realistic expectations for what this channel can and cannot do for our organizations.

Following are the five most common mistakes CMOs make with search and how to avoid them:

>> Mistake 1. Using your internal jargon on your Web site rather than the language used by your prospects.
Lots of examples exist of companies that target terms like “notebook computer” when the world is looking for “laptop computer,” or “senior living facility” when the world is looking for “nursing home.” Don’t fall prey to this mistake. Instead, utilize your Web logs, as well as your site search logs, to identify the words your prospects are using to find your site. Use research from comScore, Hitwise, or the search engines themselves to identify keywords that are used most by searchers who are seeking your products or services.

>> Mistake 2. Focusing your search marketing efforts on “big” keywords and ignoring the “long tail.”
The Internet has been around for a while now, and in most industries companies have been performing search engine marketing for a long time, too. As a result, they have a considerable head-start on their competitors. So if you hope to rank highly in the search results on “big” terms like “car,” “insurance,” or “loans,” know now that you have about as much chance of doing so as I do of getting a job as a CTO. Instead, consider the hundreds or thousands of keywords your research uncovers that offer you a more realistic chance of ranking highly, like “used Dodge cars in Boston.” Such terms also reflect a more specific intent than the bigger, more ambiguous terms.

>> Mistake 3. Limiting the amount of “shelf space” you occupy on the search results page.
Just because you have achieved a top ranking within the natural (or “organic”) search results on a given keyword term doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also buy that keyword in the paid search auction on that particular search engine. Study after study has shown that by occupying more “shelf space” on the search results page--through multiple occurrences of your Web site--you increase the performance of both of those occurrences versus what they would achieve individually. When it comes to this phenomenon, in most cases, 1+1=3.

>> Mistake 4. Ignoring the relationship between search and offline conversions.
By failing to track the extent to which your prospects perform research online but then ultimately buy offline – be it via phone, a catalog, or in a physical store--you can dramatically undervalue the extent to which search marketing plays a role in generating ROI. In fact, one infamous study actually showed that in the consumer electronics marketplace, more than 90% of those who bought after researching online bought offline. So by measuring only online conversions, the value of search engine marketing to these companies would be undervalued by around 900%. To avoid this mistake, you need to put mechanisms in place to track purchases that were researched online, such as coupons that can be printed and brought to the store, asking customers at the checkout line if they researched their purchase online, or investing in a call-tracking solution that ties phone calls to search engine use.

>> Mistake 5. Managing your search marketing campaigns in a vacuum.
Today, no marketing channel operates in a vacuum. Messaging seen via one channel causes actions to be taken on another, and nowhere is this truer than with search. In a study iProspect conducted with Jupiter Research, 67% of searchers were driven to perform a search as a result of exposure to some form of offline marketing--TV, print, outdoor, direct mail, etc. That’s why it’s incumbent on marketers to make sure the keywords and messaging they use in their offline channels (as well as other online channels) is the same messaging they target with their paid and organic search engine marketing campaigns. That way when someone sees your print ad, TV ad, or direct mail piece and then performs a search, he will find your Web site, not your competitors’.

Avoiding these search marketing mistakes will help CMOs stay ahead of the competition and achieve success with this challenging and ever-evolving discipline.