Seerfest 2022 Session Recap:
The Future of Your Digital Career Isn't Search
In today’s fast paced world, it’s easy to get siloed into your own division, especially in digital marketing.
Most marketers stay within their lane and rarely lend their skills to teams or divisions outside their own, but as Court Wakefield pointed out at Seerfest 2022, when marketers collaborate with other divisions, we can uncover our best kept secrets.
Court breaks down how we as marketers can use our search insights, including how Seer and their team at Children’s Health have already used search insights, to not only change the future of our companies, but the future of our careers as well.
Paid Media
Paid Media is one of the easiest ways to expand search insights to other areas of a business. The Seer Paid and Data Strategy Team worked with Court and the Children's Health Team to look into three different traditional marketing strategies to better target their audience and measure their impact.
- Billboards: Seer’s Paid and DS teams used search and conversion data broken down by zip code to find areas where Children’s wasn’t capitalizing on opportunities and place billboards in those areas to help drive patient volume. They could also layer in insurance information or demographics for those zip codes to get further information on their audience.
This helped remove Children's reliance on media buyer’s data for their billboards and use their own data to find where Children’s could get the most return on investment for their billboards. It also allowed Seer and the Children's team to use search data to check on performance and see if there was a lift from the billboards, how long it took to see the lift, and how much that lift cost.
- Commercials: To evaluate the impact and measure the value of TV advertisements, the Children’s and Seer teams used paid search data to see if there was an immediate lift to branded traffic following a TV ad playing. Seer wrote a script for Google Ads that referenced the schedule of the commercials, to turn on search ads when the commercial was running and turn off the search ads when the commercial stopped running.
Although there wasn't an immediate impact from the TV commercials, Children's will be able to continue to use this tactic as they create new ad campaigns and strategies in the future.
- Sponsorships: Children’s Health has a partnership with Star Center ice rinks, but in order to vet potential sponsorships, they’re reliant on their partners to share information on how much foot traffic they are getting. While they trust their partners, in order to be the best financial stewards for the organization, Children’s plans on looking at Google My Business data, as well as branded search traffic to give them another data point to measure the potential impact of these sponsorships.
Not only does this give the Children’s team more data, but helps them to strengthen their partner relations as well.
Reputation Management
Working with your Communications division is another easy opportunity to bring in search data to other departments.
When candidates for office in Texas began to politicize the endocrinology clinic for trans youth at Children’s, the Comms team wanted to come up with a way to watch what was being said in the media space so they could prepare. Court knew they tracked things in search all the time and was able to work with Seer to set up tracking to monitor media outlets for mentions of the department or misinformation about the department, and protect the kids they were serving there.
This relationship can work both ways! Your Comms team can keep SEO practices in mind when building stories and getting coverage, and make sure outlets are linking back to your site. 💡
Court also worked with the Comms team to build up reviews. With so many review sites out there, it can be difficult to decide which ones to focus on. Seer was able to look at the organic search results for keywords that converted in paid search and see what review sites showed up for those keywords. The Comms team then focused on building up reviews on the top 2 sites to make a higher impact.
Product Innovation
Traditional marketing and communications are a small step outside of the digital marketing bubble. But to really make an impact, try working with teams even farther, like your Product teams.
“One thing that we also have are all of the extra words that are around that core search term and those are full of insights about product opportunities.”
By sharing related keywords around core terms in search data, we can help drive product innovation. For example, if your business sells pants in brown and red, but there's a high search volume for green pants, take that to the innovation team as a recommendation to expand the line.
Or if your business sells 14 inch laptops but 14 inch tablets are always showing up in your broad match search terms, it could be a hint where the market is going and become a new business opportunity.
Mergers & Acquisitions
You can also support your Chief Strategy Office by using search data to evaluate potential acquisitions. To support their CSO, Court and the Children’s team looked at search volume for a particular practice or doctor and looked into their competitive landscape to evaluate potential opportunities for acquisitions. They also looked at terms people were searching for in their area to determine if those doctors’ specialties were in demand.
Although search data is rarely the whole story, it can be another data point to help your Mergers & Acquisitions team decide whether or not an opportunity is worth it.
“It’s not the whole story, but it is a data point to make those decisions.”
In addition to helping your CSO, you’re also helping your own marketing division by getting a head start on driving traffic to these sites and practices in the future.
Pro Forma is the minimum cost to do business with an acquisition. And marketing costs often are minimized or left out entirely from those conversations. Having the marketing team in the room earlier can make sure these costs are taken into account, and having a relationship with the CSO can get you in the room.
Recruiting
Finally, search data can help your Human Resources team with recruiting and hiring. When looking up review sites for the Comms team, Court’s team saw review sites for careers, like Glassdoor, were also showing up but the Recruiting department hadn’t spent much time or effort on them.
With the Great Resignation, your HR team can use all the help they can get. Consider looking at the career review sites and sending that data to your recruiting team to help them focus on increasing positive reviews to help with hiring efforts.
Key Takeaways
Search and Digital Marketing sites are Audience Insights.
“What I’m trying to get at is that search insights and digital marketing insights are really just audience insights.”
- Introduce your search agency to your strategy and insights team
- Build relationships with leaders in any department with a need for audience insights
- Consider a career change outside digital or marketing entirely
- Staying within marketing is a false limit on your career
- It’s a disservice to your customers, your colleagues and your career to hoard your skills in marketing
Sign up to receive information about future events and webinars:
