Luxury Brands are Spending Big Bucks on Paid Search

By now it should be no secret that when consumers start thinking about buying personal luxuries (and virtually everything else), their shopping journeys tend to include two phases: the research phase and the purchasing phase. It is important to be in the eyes of consumers as they travel both aspects of this journey. Luxury shopping journeys commonly begin online, often with search engine inquiries either on a specific brand or with a more specific search that focuses on one particular item the brand manufactures. From there, consumers search where they can buy these items.

Big brands with bigger budgets are not shying away from Google AdWords. In fact, five of the top luxury brands in today’s retail world spend a cumulative $22 million on paid keyword campaigns in the US market last year, according to data compiled by AdGooRoo. The traditional paid search across all of their brands, not including mobile search or Product Listing Ads (PLAs) breaks down by brand as follows:

Chanel: $2,306,000

Kering (such as Gucci, Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney, Brioni, and more): $1,650,000

LVMH (such as Louis Vuitton, Celine, Givenchy, Marc Jacobs, and more), : $9,286,000

Prada: $34,000

Richemont (such as Jaeger-LeCoultre, Piaget, NET-A-PORTER, and more): $8,330,000

Luxury shopping budgets were spread out by apparel, beauty & cosmetics, shoes, handbags, and watches. According to the study, paid search is a very valuable asset for these brands when it comes to reaching consumers. It states that, “in fact, it [paid search] is considered by many brands to be one of the most effective mediums for influencing consumers while they are making crucial buying decisions.”

While your company might not sell Chanel boots, there is still a market of consumers on the web that you need to be in front of to maximize business. If you have specific questions on what you can do to boost your paid search campaign, our team at Tandem is glad to help.

3 Ways to Prioritize Your SEO Efforts

Prioritizing is a difficult part of life seen in all aspects of your day; at home, work, socially, etc. We see priorities are a crucial part of our SEO efforts and must make decisions to really PRIORITIZE what is most important goal. The key to a successful SEO strategy (when I say successful I mean those who receive the most links, traffics and really reap the benefits from search engines algorithm updates) are those that have mastered the art of prioritizing.

Here are three ways to help you prioritize your SEO content for your marketing campaign: 

1. Define Your Goals

Understand the purpose of your marketing campaign and what you want to accomplish. Focus on your business’s overall goals rather than SEO goals. Shift your focus from the highest traffic driving keyword to your company’s best-selling product (or highest profit margin) and/or service.  Here are some examples of good and bad goals:

•  Bad Goal: The increase ranking and organic traffic for “movers”
• Good Goal:  To see a 15% increase in traffic for “movers in Fort Lauderdale”

Remember, the key to your SEO goal has to contain a qualitative aspect; this is the only way you can measure your efforts. By having a dependent variable, you can measure, report and analyze the process and/or success of the goal you set.

2. Audit Your Site

Evaluate your site and determine what you want your website goal to be; drive phone calls, lead form generation, product purchases, newsletter subscriptions, etc. Once you know what you expect from your site, create a course of action to make it happen. When creating this course of action use some of these questions to help map out your progress:

·         What optimizations have been done?

·         What opportunities do you see to improve?

·         What is your current ranking for elevated keywords?

·         Who are your competitors that outrank you?

·         What are these competitors doing differently? 

For those that have never used Moz (used to be SEOMoz), they have an amazing guide on how to do a site audit with a step-by-step guide on what to do. If your business is too busy with other to-do, you can always ask our Tandem Team to do a site audit and/or site review for you.

Prioritize your site’s audit. Create a timeline of based on these 4 factors:

1.       How much time and resources will these changes take?

2.       Will these changes impact your SEO and overall business?

3.       What is the expected time frame to see the impact?

4.       Can I, or someone on the team, actually make this change?

3. Small Scale Implementation : Test, Rinse, Repeat

We all know that SEO is a priority but there is no guarantee to the fruits of our labor. SEO is based on best practices rewarded by search engines and previous experience. There is no way to predict a date for our efforts this is why we recommend small scale implementation.

Rather than making drastic changes to the entire site, make changes on smaller scale. In example, add title tags, optimize different pages, and add rich keywords. By creating small project implemented individually you may get a stronger sense of where the site is really benefiting.

An important best practice people forget is testing. You should always test against your original to see what your audience interacts with best. If your test shows no results, diagnose the problem, determine why, and test again. This can be very beneficial if you’re working on huge websites with thousands of URLs. 

Shocking Facts about Content Marketing

Contemplating whether content marketing is still at the top of the pyramid? The statistics speak for themselves, with more than 27 million people are sharing content on the web every day, content marketing is just beginning to blossom.

Content marketing has developed into a new way for businesses to advertise. With many social hotspots, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, it’s a faster and more effective way to spread the word on what your business has to offer and what services you provide. Many would say that content marketing has taken on as a new ‘art form’ in itself.

Here are 10 shocking facts about content marketing:

1. Businesses with active blogs produce 67% more leads per month. This observation proves what SEO marketers have been saying all along: people LOVE blogs! Consumers love to have a connection from a brand they love, hence why company blogs can quickly become a “go-to” source for people in the industry. By utilizing your blog as another approach to capture leads, you could engage your audience with subconscious call-to-actions and ultimately drive conversions.
2.  Most content marketers are using 12 different tactics to acquire their demographic.  Statistics from the Content Marketing Institute show that the introduction of new social channels have opened more paths of communication to your audience. Marketing teams have to integrate the most important channels into their marketing strategy in order to be successful. Digital marketing is constantly changing with new trends, apps, and more, it is important that your team keep up to date and take advantage of new opportunities for growth.
3. 86% of B2C companies use a content marketing approach. Normally statistic show that B2B is the largest participants of content marketing, but in the Content Marketing Institute shows that B2C is matching their efforts! With more people turning to social media as their ‘influence’ for decisions, B2C companies are taking advantage.
4. One-third of budgets for B2B Marketing Teams are spent on content marketing. Content marketing is valuable, but B2B marketing companies know the true value to dedicate such a large portion of their budgets on this one practice. Although content management systems and email marketing software’s are not free, there are low cost options if you look for them.
5. Social media and blogs reach 8 out of 10 internet users in the U.S. 80% of internet surfers is a large number, and that doesn’t even including the consumers who are utilizing these sites to make purchases. Marketers need maintain a presence on all social media platforms and their blog in order to develop an outreach strategy.
6. Email is STILL the preferred method of online communication. Contrary to believe, email takes the lead against all social networks and relevant content marketing. This is an important statistic because many companies do not place a strong emphasis on the importance of an email campaign.  Email automation comes with analytics to make tracking easy; Mail Chimp is a low cost option for email marketing and is very user friendly.
7. Nearly half of B2B marketers regularly use LinkedIn. Your audience maybe on Facebook or Twitter but your business connections are on LinkedIn. It is important to utilize LinkedIn as a marketer to build your network. Top salesman of companies spend 6 hours a week (on average) on LinkedIn.
8. 87% of B2B companies use social media to distribute content. Publishing content on your site is important, but sharing this content is part of the process. Use different social channels to publish your content to help reach a large audience. Google +, Facebook and Twitter are the most influential channels but don’t forget about the overlooked avenues such as LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest. These are equally important if not MORE important depending on your industry.
9. Companies that post 15 blogs a month get 5x more traffic than those who don’t. Over 27 Million pieces of content are shared every day and 64% of B2B marketers say their biggest challenge is producing enough content. If these statistics don’t put it in prospective how important content marketing is, you may never learn. More than 329 Million people read blogs every month. Not only do blogs give your site more indexed pages and links but 37% of marketers agree that blogs are the most valuable content type for marketing.
10. 44% of companies outsource their content marketing efforts. Many companies choose to keep their content creation in house. The benefit of an in-house content team is the access to statics and the extensive knowledge your company’s voice would be, however outsource content is generally less expensive. The preference is to keep the content in-house but the easiest option would be to outsource. Weight out the pros and cons to this decision before making it, find out what is best for your company and if the savings are worth it, find a reliable copywriter that will meet your company’s standards.

With time we have continued to see the growth and shift in content marketing importance. Content marketing is a strong channel of communication to reach your audience, start to learn the best practices to “jump on the bandwagon” before it takes off!