There are many different approaches to search marketing, and so many different levers to pull to cater for different strategies. It’s understandable that people feel overwhelmed when making decisions, or disappointed when looking at results. A lot of the time it comes down to experience and unfortunately there is a cost associated with learning, be it time or money - depending on how you like to learn your lessons. One thing that is often overlooked and/or misunderstood is the keyword matching strategies at your disposal.

The options are “Broad”, “Exact” and “Phrase”. To provide you with a better understanding of these search strategies, our customer insights and search manager Damien Donnelly explains all below.

Broad Match means your keyword is matched with any set of keywords containing that word.
Phrase Match means your keyword phrase is matched with exact combination of words in the same order with any other words.
Exact Match means the keyword phrase exactly matches the keywords you are bidding on.

Each of these has their place in a campaign in terms of the strategic benefits that they can deliver, but, as with most things in life, there is always a trade off.

Broad Match is the best friend of Google – and the lazy marketer.

This will have your keywords matching against anything that remotely resembles your keyword, so long as it will produce a click through. This is fantastic for casting a wide net, which is highly targeted by traditional media standards, but pretty poorly targeted from a digital perspective. It will help you get to scale quickly in terms of volume, but there is a price to pay for this. By keeping Broad Match bids low (in proportion to the actual value of a Broad Match visitor), you can wield this blunt tool of search with far less risk of blowing you budget purely on untargeted clicks in the long tail.

Phrase Match is the slightly more dignified cousin of Broad Match.

It gives you less of the irrelevance issues of Broad Match while still delivering more reach than Exact Match. Obviously, the results from this kind of targeting are more valuable than Broad Match and less than Exact. As a result bid values should reflect this and be somewhere in between Broad and Exact.

Finally we have Exact Match.

This is the logical end-point for the perfect search campaign with optimal spend efficiency (but possibly not build efficiency). Exact Match is often overlooked because building and managing a large campaign that predominantly uses Exact Match is very time consuming. Yet for smaller retailers with small budgets, Exact Matching is the only option – find those terms that you are completely relevant for, craft the perfect ad copy (A/B tested) and bid based on the revenues generated. However, for large campaigns, this thinking often gets thrown away because of scalability.

With the tools available today, it is possible to Exact Match large proportions of well-targeted campaigns to give you much more granular control over what is actually happening within the campaign. Sure, it may look unwieldy when you are essentially seeing data for every single query that you used to be Broad Matched against, however knowing this information allows you to act and control or refine. (Conversely, Broad Matched campaigns can look deceptively neat until you see a raw query report – ie the report that shows the exact phrases that your broad keywords were matched against). By using a highly Broad Matched strategy, data is often obfuscated under raw queries that often never see the light of day in reporting.

How much of each strategy you should use is highly dependent on factors like time, money and objectives. Despite these variable factors, the most important take away is that each match type should be valued appropriately to prevent overvaluation for search, which is quickly becoming an essential marketing service.

Paul Marshall

Lasoo.com.au

Following on from ensuring your retail marketing messages are both Accessible and Available (where and when people are looking), this article deals with the Applicability of that message to the recipient. Applicability, or relevance, is a key ingredient to effective digital marketing.

We all know that our messages are not applicable to everyone who gets them. The blunt instrument of mass media has meant that in order to get to those who we are targeting, we need to get to a lot more. Therefore there are many people out there getting irrelevant messages. It is all part of the famous advertising waste.

In the digital world, to be a successful marketer, you cannot have a mass audience message. It needs to be targeted. And more importantly, behind the veneer of a well-targeted message must be the substance (hereafter called content) to back it up - content that is relevant to each targeted consumer. Starting with search as an example, you can only appear high in search results if your messages and content are relevant to that search. It is even difficult (and more expensive) to pay to get into the search results if you do not have relevant information to take (link) the searcher to. If your advertising is completely relevant, then it magically transforms into information – rather than advertising.

So how do you build relevance into your message and your content for each target customer? It’s not easy, but there are tools and disciplines available today to achieve this. The key to these tools is scalability. If you need an individual message targeted for each consumer, then all of your costs will be eroded creating each of those uniquely crafted messages, unless you crate them dynamically.

Google allows for Dynamic Keyword insertion, which helps with the relevance of your creative, but not so much with your content. Some enterprise email targeting solutions allow for dynamic content insertion into specific email segments. There are advanced site tools to dynamically personalise the pages on your website as a user journeys through; based on what you know about them and how they are behaving.

Once you have a method of automatically generating messages you then need to match that up with how you target them. At your disposal are the current methods of keyword targeting, demographic targeting (network behavioural targeting), onsite behavioural targeting, day-parting (time targeting), technology targeting (eg – ads just for iPhones or Firefox) and geographic targeting. The important thing to understand is that this is now a well understood and mature business practice for online marketers. And it should be for your business also.

Now that I’ve finished with the three As, I’ve thought of a fourth. It’s one that should be close to your heart – Accountability. Next week I shall look at this new (and final) ‘A’ – Accountable marketing. This is something that the digital space makes easier. Until then, happy selling.

Paul Marshall
Executive Director
Salmat Digital
www.lasoo.com.au

Surviving and Thriving in Today’s Retail Climate was the theme for eTail 2009, the largest and longest-running online marketing and commerce conference for retailers. Held in Phoenix, Arizona and in its 10^th year, eTail 2009 delivered three and a half days of key learnings, case studies, research and technology. I was lucky to attend.

Amidst the difficulties facing retailers in the US, online marketing and online commerce have emerged as two channels that continue to perform strongly. Online commerce remains a strong growing sales channel for retailers, providing an exception to other channels. Online marketing offers retailers the opportunity to better understand their customers and in turn provides a cost effective tool to communicate with these customers.

So why do we care about retail technologies and trends from the US? Well, because they are in many ways a prediction of the future for Australian retailers. Certainly the American shopper is very similar to the Australian shopper in regard to their online behaviour. The difference is that Australian retailers are many years behind the US in their marketing and commerce strategies to meet this evolved consumer. And this is where the opportunity lies. Over the past ten years US retailers have made many mistakes in their digital marketing and commerce strategies and technologies have since matured. Learning what works and what does not, and adopting mature technologies and proven strategies with real ROIs is an enormous opportunity for Australian retailers.

eTail 2009 covered the following key themes:

· The power of cross-channel (marketing and commerce). The conference was more about cross-channel retailing than multi-channel retailing. The difference is that a customer should have a unified view of your brand and not a channel specific version of it. The benefits of a unified strategy leveraging the benefits of all channels were well illustrated by many success stories and real returns.

· Understanding your customer. Smart retailers have moved well beyond segmentation and profiling data, even beyond behavioural data, to gain a better understanding of their customers. Understanding intent and context are now a reality with a new third contributor to the customer uber data set.

· ROI. There was an intense focus on continuing to deliver real and attractive returns through the digital channel. There was a great deal of information offered around strategies, technology, programs and processes that had proven to further increase ROI across both marketing and sales.

· Marketing tools. The conference had good coverage of all possible digital tools and strategies. This included search, email, display, affiliates, mobile and more.

· Commerce strategies. There was a big focus on how to better cater for a customer who is on your site rather than focusing on attracting a new customer. Traffic to a site is easy; engagement and conversion were the key topics.

· User generated content (UGC) and social media. There is no denying the increasing power and influence the social consumer has online, not only over their own decision- making and purchasing, but also over others, thousands of others. This was explored from all angles in the context of how can retailers utilise this reality to make more sales.

· Technology. The conference had an associated exhibition, which showcased a large number of technology vendors and service organisations. Here we found the people, companies and technologies that can help provide all of the above.

The presentations, case studies and key learnings at the conference came from some of the world’s leading retailers and suppliers, including eBay, JCPenney, Home Depot, Coca Cola, Sears, Borders and Lego (did you know they are the world’s largest manufacturer of tyres…itty bitty ones though).

Overall the mood was upbeat, with an understanding that digital media as both a marketing and commerce channel presents all retailers with a real opportunity for positive returns, despite the economic climate.

The content and context of the conference was applicable for retailers from around the world. While I found some New Zealand retailers in attendance, I don’t believe there were any Australian retailers in attendance, which is a sign of the times, or a sign of the times to come.

Salmat will be running a series of Webinars over the next six-months focussing on many of the trends and case studies from eTail but bringing a very Australian flavour to it. Look out for information at www.salmatdigitalforce.com.au