One day last March, Liz Murphy sat watching Oprah, listening to every word her guest, actress Meg Ryan, said. Murphy, who runs a search engine marketing firm called Red- Boots Consulting LLC in McLean, Va., was making rapid-fire, critical decisions, and she was spending thousands of dollars a minute doing so.
As she watched the show, she was working for her client, the international development nonprofit CARE. As a search engine-marketing expert, Murphy was the linchpin in a multichannel rebranding campaign for the 60-year-old humanitarian organization, which CARE Internet strategist Tobias Smith said was perceived as “an agency that responds during emergencies.”
To help sharpen its message, CARE chose to refocus its efforts specifically on women in developing countries, where women are often the breadwinners and caretakers. Centered around the slogan “I am powerful,” the campaign inspires Western women to help impoverished women around the globe.
CARE, under the leadership of Vice President for Marketing and Communications Adam Hicks, used every channel it could afford, employing Meg Ryan and other celebrity spokespeople, online advertising, airport kiosks, billboards, direct response, direct mail and public service ads.
Tying all those channels together were the search techniques – search engine optimization, pay-per-click search engine ads and contextual ads – that pulled visitors to CARE’s Web site from whatever media they happened to see.
Search engine marketing (SEM) has come a long way from its roots: Successful execution today takes a lot more than bidding for keywords. It’s a sophisticated blend of techniques that build on the strengths of on- and offline advertising and public relations, while helping measure the return on investment of that advertising and PR as well.
In an age where Web sites are the purchase gateways for so many customers, using a wide range of SEM techniques seems like common sense. That’s because search can do something that no other single channel can: It can reach consumers and customers no matter where they are in the buying cycle.
Steven Kaufman is senior vice president and media director for the digital advertising agency Digitas, in Boston. “We say you should be thinking about search all the time, no matter what,” he says.
“There’s no more qualified lead than somebody who is actively seeking information that you can provide.”
That means being savvy enough to anticipate what people will search for. For instance, as Meg Ryan talked about CARE, Murphy rapidly jotted down key words from her interview – words that Murphy presumed interested viewers would search for following the show. When it ended, she immediately purchased them on major search engines.
Murphy’s hunt for the perfect search terms didn’t end there. She and her colleagues then turned to major online news sites to see what the press was saying about Ryan’s first interview in two years. Murphy bought terms that appeared in headlines, because they have a greater chance of showing up in an Internet search. “If the New York Times or Reuters leads with something about our client, we want to buy those same terms, because we know that people are reading it online and they will search for information,” she says. “Search is real-time, constant monitoring, reacting instantaneously to everything.”
In addition, CARE boosted the exposure of ads it was already running on Oprah.com anticipating Ryan’s appearance on the show. “We bought at least a million impressions that day. Our ads were ‘road-blocked’ around the editorial story about the show,” Murphy says. Timing those ads with Ryan’s appearance created the search world’s version of a home run: “We saw a gigantic increase in clicks to the CARE site.”
In the world of search engine marketing, what Murphy did is known as search engine-optimized (SEO) public relations. The principle is, if you’re publicizing something, watch how people talk about it and write about it, then capture those keywords fast and use them to lead your targets to your Web site.
It’s one tactic search experts are using to blend offline and online marketing campaigns. In CARE’s case, using SEO, SEO PR and search engine advertising (SEA) to capture interest generated by the offline campaign worked beautifully. The campaign drove approximately half a million new visitors to its Web site. The campaign’s goal was brand awareness; however, within three months, those new visitors donated an extra half a million dollars to help fund CARE’s efforts.
