“Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.” (David Ogilvy)

Search engine marketing (SEM) is usually measured along direct-response lines - conversions, purchases, signups, outcomes, page views, and so on. But a new school of thought is emerging - that branding and SEM are not mutually exclusive.

Branding work is cool. Its intangible makes it difficult to measure campaign success, it requires deep strategic thinking, budgets tend to be larger, and there’s no responsibility to directly drive sales. People involved in branding rarely consider SEM as an option.

Maybe they should:
- 41% of users gain awareness from online search results (DoubleClick, 2005)
- 27% of respondents are more likely to name a brand if it’s in the top spot on Google (IAB, 2006)
- Top listings have a significant upward lift on branding metrics, particularly with unaided awareness (IAB/Nielsen NetRatings, 2006)
- 60% of 3,000 respondents’ brand opinions were changed or enhanced as a result of searching (Dieringer Resource Group, 2005)

Proof that effective SEM builds brand. For those of you who still judge your campaigns by return on investment (ROI) metrics, it may be time to judge campaign effectiveness by different metrics.

“And who raves these days? Who raves at a party,
‘You should have seen our tax return – it was brilliant!’”
Harry Beckwith, What Clients Love

Harry Beckwith, in his excellent book What Clients Love, makes the point that word-of-mouth advertising is dead. He cites three reasons for this:

1. Mobility: we all move around so much now that there is little sense of community.
2. Complexity: increased specialisation by business means that you don’t know whether or not a recommendation will be relevant.
3. Conversation: nobody raves about companies these days. Who ever goes to a dinner party and sing the praises of their accountant?

And to an extent this is true. The above three factors have had an adverse effect on “You should give such-and-such a call”.

What’s filling the vacuum? Beckwith suggests that good old-fashioned public relations and advertising are the means by which smart companies get their word out. But do people really trust advertisements and publicity junkets in the same way they’d trust a recommendation from a friend?

No, Harry, it’s the Internet that has replaced old-skool word of mouth. In the absence of real community and face-to-face conversation, people are turning to the Web for suggestions and recommendations.

Witness Amazon, a smart company if ever there was one. By giving visitors the opportunity to write reviews about the products on offer, Amazon has created a true community that many people use when making a purchase decision. On the Amazon page for my favourite album, Tom Waits Swordfishtrombones, you’ll see the following:

Scrolling further down the page, you’ll see a list of reviews. There are a lot of people like me who take notice of strong reviews, and Amazon lets people rate the actual reviews written by other users.

There are lots of other examples of online word-of-mouth. The Internet Movie Database’s Top 250 Films is used by millions of people who want to ‘culture’ themselves in cinema. TripAdvisor lets users rate hotels from one to five, and is one of the most popular sites on the Internet. The popularity of MetaCritic.com just keeps growing. And if you go onto Boards.ie, people from all over Ireland are looking for recommendations for books, dentists, MP3 players, software, and so on. On an industry-specific level, Irish forums such as the one on WeddingsOnline.ie can get over 300 posts a day and many times that viewing the debate.

Positive word of mouth online is great for two reasons. One, you don’t need to be friends with the people recommending a product or service.

Negative word-of-mouth online is just as prevalent. The age-old bank debate on Boards.ie is viewed by lots of Irish Internet users.

But if word of mouth has moved online, how do we harness it? Seth Godin, in his Unleashing the Ideavirus, opines that your business needs to be remarkable if you are to get positive word-of-mouth online. Pity that. Surely there’s an easier way? Well, we’ll get to that part. But, of course, if your business isn’t remarkable, outstanding, world-class, then everyone in your company needs to back up a bit and start at the beginning.

Of course, you can cheat. Before we start, there are good reasons for not cheating. For a start, it’s morally reprehensible. For another thing, it cheapens the value that online word of mouth provides to millions of users. That said, there are ways to cheat, obviously. A new book can be promoted on Amazon by registering multiple accounts and giving lots of 5 star ratings. You can respond to questions asked on forums and tout your business there. Or you can go on TripAdvisor and say lovely things about your hotel. But of course that’s cheating, and it’s wrong.

The most effective way to guarantee positive word of mouth online is to be outstanding; to have a world-class product or an unbeatable service. Whether it’s a book, a piece of software, a hotel room, a package holiday, a mortgage or whatever, consistently good service will work online as well as it used to do offline.

Google have launched a new tool, Google Trends. This cool tool tells you how many searches have been done on Google for the terms you enter. The graph format is very nice, but it would be good to have a value on the Y-axis.

Google Trends is really effective for comparing one search term against another, or to see how interest in a person or subject has changed over time. Some good examples:

- People like dogs more than cats in most English-speaking countries, including Ireland, the UK, the US and Australia.
- Ronaldinho has overtaken David Beckham as most talked-about footballer.
- London and Paris are more popular cities than Madrid, Berlin and Rome.
- Heineken is currently the most popular beer, with Budweiser, Carlsberg and Coors trailing.
An excellent feature of the Google Trends tool is that you can drill down to specific countries - and Ireland’s included in the list. So, we can tell that Irish users of Google search for Dublin a lot more than Cork and Galway. But in a marketing sense, we can get some really good information. Some examples:

- “house” has consistently been searched for more than “property”.
- “bmw” is being searched for more than “toyota” - evidence of our current upwardly-mobile nature.
- “blog” is searched for much more than “rss” or “podcast”, showing it’s being accepted more and more by the mainstream.
- Searches for “bulmers” peak in the summer months, the only time of year they number more than searches for “guinness”.
- Searches for the three main broadsheet newspapers in Ireland makes for interesting viewing.

You could spend hours trying different searches on this, and it’s a really good gauge of search habits that can be drilled down to a country level. For popular topics, Google puts markers next to major news events, which is a really good way of seeing how web users react to news stories.
If you’re in marketing, Google Trends is something you need to add to your bookmarks.

This is an article of mine that was published in this month’s Irish Marketing Journal:

All of this talk about the internet having revolutionised the way we do (and get) business has, mercifully, calmed down a bit. Superlatives were clouding the issue, making the Web appear to be an unfathomable quagmire of buzzwords where traditional business rules no longer applied.Not so. Marketers are finding that a lot of conventional techniques work perfectly online. As a result, more and more are digging out the time-honoured direct marketing manuals. Armed with the techniques that traditional direct marketing espouses, we are discovering the truth about the Internet: that most businesses, in most industries, can be successful online. It’s just a matter of listening to your forefathers.

In fact, the Web and direct marketing make the perfect couple. Let’s look at a couple of real-life examples that prove this point.
The first lesson learned by budding direct marketers is that the offer is all-important. Giving away a free trial, sample, or complimentary report can increase the response rate exponentially. A discount works as a good incentive too. Visit a few of the better-known travel and hospitality websites – they’re all doing it. With a bit of creative thinking, you can adapt it do your industry.

Then you’ve got to get your offer, and your product, across with your copy. Headlines, subheads, indented paragraphs, the PostScript (P.S.), and so on. Internet users are used to scanning pages quickly – no-one likes reading too much on a monitor, so copy needs to be written for users who glance over it. Headings, bold text for emphasis, and different colours make it more likely that visitors will get your key selling points. Headlines to work on include the main heading of your homepage, the subject line of outgoing emails, and the headlines in your pay per click campaigns. Another factor to consider is that, just as with the headline, almost 100% of Google users will see the top three results – and will probably click on the one with the best headline. If your site isn’t in front of them when they search for it, you’ve got work to do.

The advent of the customer database revolutionised direct marketing. Customers and prospects can be targeted by gender, area code, previous purchases, and demographics. Treat email marketing with care – for a start, you have to work with a database of users that have given permission to receive your emails. Within this framework, smart email marketers segment their databases. Amazon send me emails with offers on Pacino films and Paul Weller CDs because they know that I’ve bought these in the past. Audible.com send me offers on business books, because they know I’m more likely to buy those than Dan Brown’s latest novel.

And you can be sure that Amazon and Audible’s success is based on solid testing. All direct marketers know the value of testing, while realising that it’s potentially the most difficult part of the process. The Internet makes this process very easy. Tracking visitors through campaigns to purchase can be done cost-effectively, and you can easily run A/B split tests on different ad creatives, email subject lines, landing pages and pay per click campaigns. In fact, high-end tracking software can automatically optimise your campaigns in real-time, ensuring you get maximum ROI from your online spend.

Most importantly of all, Web marketers need to learn the simplicity of direct marketing. Direct marketers are obsessed with return. They want to see sales, orders, enquiries, trials, new customers. For them, it’s more about acquisition and retention, less about brand awareness. The dotcom meltdown taught us that, while branding is necessary in marketing, actually increasing your sales and market share can be quite nice too if you want to stay in business. So try some of these suggestions – they may not be sexy, but they’ll work.

1. Know Your Objective
Do you want to sell through your website? Do you want to develop a reputation for being a knowledgeable service provider? Do you want to inform and educate? When you understand what the objective of your site is, your content will reflect that objective. This applies to different section of the site. For example, if you wish to get people to download your brochures, your content should qualify visitors and incite action.

2. Make it Scannable
People scan web pages and pick out highlighted keywords, links, sub-headings and bullet points. Paragraphs should deal with one idea, and it’s a good idea to use the “Tell them what you’re going to say, say it, tell them what you’ve said” structure to pages and paragraphs. Alternatively, the “inverted pyramid” style of writing (starting with the conclusion) is a good idea for the Web. A call to action early in the content works better, as most users will not read all of the content on a page.

3. Keep it Short
In line with the above point, short copy always works best. Use (at most) half the word count that you’d use in offline writing. Edit out buffer words and phrases. Aim for economy and immediacy when writing. For a good primer on this, see “The Elements of Style” (Strunk & White) - it’s a short book, and well worth a read.

4. Direct Marketing
Certain techniques from traditional direct marketing translate well to the online arena. A good headline will guarantee a higher readership. Sub-headings, bullet points (see point 1), and bold text for emphasis is also recommended. Talking personally (”I”, “You”) is recommended - that goes for B2B as well as B2C marketing. In addition, font is important. Research has shown that a sans-serif font (such as Arial, Verdana or Tahoma) reads better on a monitor than does serif fonts such as Times New Roman.

5. Avoid Marketing-Speak
While certain terms may be bandied about regularly in your office, they may not be understood by your target market. Don’t talk about your “turnkey solution”, your “valued customers”, your “paradigm-shifting” consultancy, or how your service can “achieve our client’s objectives”. Don’t start your home page with “Welcome”. And don’t say “We believe”. Remember, you’re marketing to humans here. And most of these humans are too busy to sift through blurb and filler. Get to the point.

6. Provide Real-Life Examples
I’m on your website to book a hotel. Or get a mortgage. Or buy your software. Or enquire about your services. I’m a human being. And I want to see what you’re doing for other human beings! So hit me with the testimonials. Hit me with the case studies. The more specific, the better. I want to know how your hotel inspired people, how your mortgage helped make dreams come true, how your software increased revenues by 22%. This is what matters to your target market. Credibility is important on the Web, so testimonials and case studies are a really good way of strengthening your position.

7. Use the Call To Action
I’ve read your copy, and I’m impressed. But…what should I do? Sometimes, it helps to spell out the next step to users. What is the next step?

- For a free brochure, send an email to freebrochure@ourcompany.com.
- To speak with one of our travel consultants, call 1800-XXX-XXXX now.
- Clicking this link will take you directly to our order page.
- To read the rest of this article, click here to become a subscriber.

It’s the call to action that will cause users to make a conscious decision. Do I want to email/call/click? Some will, and some won’t. But excluding a call to action will mean that most of these users will leave your site, never to return. Ask for the order.

Ultimately, copywriting for the Web is not all that different from offline copywriting. Good copy need not be floral and boastful, but it does need to do the job of selling.