Chris Boggs
Rosetta and SEMPO President
Getting Stuff Done – How to Increase Implementation Rates and Grow ROI in 2011
Implementation = Success
+ Greater rate of implementation yields greater successes (as defined by stated goals).
+ Measurement methods must be trusted and backed up, strategy requires full understanding of goals, delay of implementation yields diminishing returns, not refreshing strategy can be costly.
+ Need to be nimble!
+ Performance is best measured over time for large scale strategy and more rapidly for granular changes.
Establishing Connections
+ Networking never ends, especially in complex organizations.
+ Small business has an advantage over large orgs due to centrality of leadership and consistent oversight of most tasks
+ Knowing someones and sharing the same goals with them increases implementation rates
+ Truly integrated marketing requires consistency across all channels
+ The state of many current organizations – although things are getting better, many orgs still have fragmented communities and lack harmony between marketing campaigns
Training for Executives and Teams
+ Training is NOT one size fits all
+ Business owners shouldn’t be involved in the granular tactics but they should understand the importance of these activities
+ Establish the key elements required to run on all cylinders
+ Empower influencers to become decision makers for the granular tactics and learn the most important ways to measure success
+ Influence reporting dashboards
+ Establish ongoing training opportunities for all levels – executive track (goals and KPIs), content track (ad copy, press releases, keyword research, managing social media accounts), promotion track (leveraging PR, display retargeting, leveraging social media for PR, monitoring tools & strategies).
Utilizing Customer Intelligence
+ Leverage all target market research used to develop offline marketing and website
+ Use the demographics, psychological profiles and segementation/personas in developing and testing search
+ Use PPC to test for organic and display and mix/match A/B with multivariate efforts
+ Leverage internal search and bounce rate by page/keyword entrance
+ Use surveys and monitor reviews/social sentiment
+ Finding the “hidden keyword” is key throughout the funnel – for example people needing “personal loans” may more likely be searching on “home improvement loans” vs. a generic query such as “personal loans”
Leveraging the Environment
+ Know your SERP!
+ Most keywords will yield different styles of universal search results, which vary greatly when environmental changes occur
+ Understanding both the SERP and the autocomplete (formerly “Google Suggest”) for primary brand and non branded keywords
+ Protect your turf using Local, PPC, News and DAO
+ The other environment: Performance Management (tie implementation to responsible sources, all the way up the ladder)
+ Digital asset optimization – a must for most industries and paid search opportunities exist as well.
Acting on Analytics
+ Use your data, don’t let it use you
+ Don’t be driven by rash judgments based on incomplete data BUT don’t be afraid to test with smaller samples
+ Never expect analytics systems to match up closely
+ Don’t over trust competitive intelligence tools, but don’t ignore the RELATIVE differences they report
+ Test and test again, using all your marketing vehicles
Wrap Up
+ The book of laws is always unique to each business
+ Acceptable level of implementation only occurs when team work together towards a common goal and within a reasonable time frame
Rachel Andersen works for the Portland based SEM agency Anvil Media, Inc. She has expertise in all aspects of search engine marketing and specializes in SEO for large sites. Andersen has been responsible for the development and execution of dozens of search and social marketing campaigns over her time spent with Anvil. She also is a regular contributor to SearchEngineJournal.com
