The arrival of the search engine and  search engine analytics tools have brought about the most fundamental shift in marketing practice in the last twenty years.

When compared to media research historically, the medium of the internet is now very different. Gone is the time delay between collection, analysis and decision making relating to research data. Gone is the need to work with a representative sample. For the internet we now have the data available almost in real time and the data covers the total market or nearly the total market.

The implications of this for businesses are huge.

Effective marketing has long been fundamental to business success. Now with search engine optimisation (SEO) playing a key role in the marketing communication and media mix, SEO must be considered a business priority.

Search engine optimisation presents an enormous opportunity to businesses. However, if a company is not competent in this field and its competitors are, then SEO can present a huge threat.

One of the key challenges for established companies is to realise just how significant is the effect that search engines are already having on buyer behaviour. They also need to realise how the importance of SEO is set to grow in the future.

This means that search engines and search engine optimisation are already critical drivers of business performance.

For large well-established business, the impact of the growth in importance of search engine optimisation and search marketing may have been masked to date. Such companies with large established customer bases and well structured sales forces may be retaining customers due to loyalty developed over many years.

The Importance Of SEO To Customer Acquisition.

However, for such large established companies it may be wise to consider how well they are doing with customer acquisition. In many sectors customer acquisition is an expensive and time consuming process. SEO won’t fulfil the whole task of customer acquisition – but it can reduce cost and shorten the process.

We suggest that companies will benefit from assessing how well they are exploiting the opportunity that SEO presents in this area. Just as importantly, how well are their competitors using SEO for customer acquisition?

We’ve always known with retail businesses the importance of ‘location location location.’ Most of us will be aware of stores that have gone out of business because there was insufficient passing traffic. The equivalent in the digital age must be ‘ranking, ranking, ranking’ and for many businesses ‘poor ranking’ will be business-threatening.

The Importance Of Integrating SEO Into Marketing Communication.

However, it is also important to bear in mind that SEO should not become the sole focus of a company’s marketing communication.

Indeed, with the advent of SEO, the challenge of “effective marketing communication” – which always required the careful balancing of a number of factors – just got harder.

Effective marketing communication will now have to reconcile all the following factors – as a minimum requirement

• The need to communicate in a way that effectively draws traffic to your website. These are the search engine optimisation and search marketing aspects.
• The need to communicate the type of information that answers potential customers’ questions once they get to the website. This is the customer service aspect.
• The need for the website to communicate brand positioning and brand values effectively. This is the strategic marketing aspect.
• The need to provide effective routes through the website to achieve your ‘desired customer response’. This is the sales aspect.

Designing and managing web communication that covers all these aspects in a coherent fashion is a significant challenge. In many organisations such a challenge can only be addressed satisfactorily, by the sales and marketing teams working together very closely.

However, some companies, recognising the complexity of this challenge have completely outsourced the search engine optimisation aspects to specialists. This is not ideal.

While there may be a need for specialist help, a website that is being optimised for search engines separately from brand and product communication aspects will ultimately let your business down.

Effective marketing communication as outlined by the four elements above, needs to be viewed as a whole. If your website is optimised for search engines in isolation, there is a real danger that your key marketing messages may be lost and your brand positioning diluted.

Effectivemarketing communication which includes SEO requires that an organisation: -

• ensures that SEO is considered within sales and marketing strategy and sales and marketing planning – along with all the other sales and marketing objectives.
• invests the time and resources on an ongoing basis to ensure that the web presence is optimised continually for SEO success.
• has an open and continuing dialogue between sales and marketing teams so that they can consider how best to incorporate learning from SEO, search marketing and the analytics data into the web strategy.

Business Benefits Of An Integrated Approach To Marketing Communication Including SEO.

• A website that communicates your proposition effectively and delivers sales.
• Reduced cost of customer acquisition.
• Increased profile and visibility for your company.

Why Choose Anatellô To Help You With Integrating SEO Strategy into Marketing Communications?

We can help you innovate to achieve the strategic shift that is required to develop effective marketing communications which are also optimised for search engines.

Specifically, we can provide the processes and facilitation which will enable your sales and marketing representatives to develop new joint sales and marketing strategies that include you SEO and search marketing objectives. This will ensure that you achieve maximum return from your web marketing activities.

We can help you with the implementation of your new sales and marketing strategies for the web, to ensure that you your plans are implemented quickly and that you get the full return on the time and budget that you have invested.