by Leon Bailey Green, Consultant for Market Sentinel

By using social media tracking and analysis to gain insight into consumer thought, brands face the challenge of communicating their findings to the agency tasked with getting the most out of their search budget.

Any good search agency will tell you the more they understand the motivations of your customer the more effective the campaign will be. It’s that old phrase of knowing your client’s client. Your paid search account managers are trying to get your customers to engage with you, so they need to know about both of you almost equally.

Taking into account what you have read about monitoring conversations and engaging in online PR, you should be planning how you are going to keep in touch with your customer’s needs, their thoughts on you and their sentiment towards your marketplace. You will then need to pass on this knowledge to your search agency to improve the effectiveness of your campaign.

As a brand, as well as the usual demographics, you should be aiming to use your ongoing tracking, monitoring and research of social media to tell your search marketers:

• Which social utilities your customer base uses i.e. are most of your valuable customers using MySpace rather than Facebook
• are you a travel company who finds a lot of its customers use Flickr to host holiday photos?

• Which message boards/forums do your customers
• and potential customers use?

Remember your search marketing budget can be used across areas other than search engine results pages. By knowing which social networks and utilities your customer base frequents, your account managers will be able to take advantage of any internal search marketing opportunities.

Finding out the discussion areas (message boards and forums) used, could also open the potential for search budget, as many forums include adverts from paid search platforms such as Google AdSense. But be careful and be constantly monitoring, as your adverts could appear within threads that are uncomplimentary to your brand.

Make sure you are engaging whenever conversations like this appear; otherwise your advertising becomes more than redundant. You should be encouraging whoever is in control of your conversation monitoring to alert your search marketing team when an ad is appearing within a negative thread.

Forums will also give you an understanding of the language and phrases used by your customers. You need to know if your market is calling your product by a different name, and you need to be including your words in your search campaign, as keywords and in the creative copy. Why stop there? Pass on this intelligence to your offline marketing team too and use those words in your literature!

Those who embrace online social communities and groups will turn to message boards in times of brand uncertainty. If they want to be sure about a purchase they are about to make they will seek the advice of the community. You need to know what the anxieties about your marketplace and brand are – so you can alleviate their fears in your ad copy – know your customer’s insecurities and increase your click through rates by confronting them from the off.

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