With content, there is an opportunity to be proactive and expand the net to reach people who have not yet considered your brand or product (people at the top of the funnel) and quickly move them through the funnel to drive conversions.
When building out your content strategy for SEM, keep these things in mind:
- Use the content to target the superlative keywords like “The Best” “Top Rated”, etc.
- Be explicit on how your brand is different (and better?!) than your competitors.
- Align ad messaging and content based on a targeted keyword to provide each user with the exact search result they’re looking for.
By leveraging content smartly, you have an expanded opportunity for top of the funnel marketing with search. With this in your back pocket, you have the ability to reach consumers during their research process, but you also have an opportunity to convert people away from the brand that originally stirred their interest in a specific product or service.
Moving a consumer from engagement to purchase is not a one-click value chain nor is it linear. This is why an omni-channel advertising strategy is paramount. If you create a linear media plan, you limit your opportunities. Just think about how you engage in content yourself.
We are always interested to watch the various paths consumers take. Our proprietary market intelligence platform, Blackfire, allows us to better understand the customer’s journey. Applying these analytics to our content strategy makes us smarter about how to drive a qualified customer to our client’s product or service.
Here are a few journey’s we’ve discovered that highlight the concept:
In this scenario, the consumer engaged in the brand’s content for quite a while before leaving, only to check out another piece of content a few days later before eventually making the purchase. Multiple pieces of content and marketing channels drove intent and ultimately conversion.
Here you’ll see a creative use of Google Discovery was deployed and interested the consumer so much they ended up engaging in the content for four minutes – on mobile! This strategy is significant as it incentivized the consumer to add something to their cart within the first six minutes of engaging with the brand. However, humans are forgetful so reminding them through another advertising platform ultimately completed the sale, even if it was 24 hours later.
When it comes to search, content is a very valuable tool if you use it correctly. By understanding who your audience is, and keywords that trigger interest and impactive visuals, you are able to leverage search at the top of the funnel in order to generate interest from the right audience. But search shouldn’t be used in a vacuum. Combining these strategies with multiple advertising platforms and content formats, is the most impactful approach.
Want to understand more about connecting the dots with search? Get in Touch