(aka a concrete way of explaining the value of social media involvement and marketing to people who don’t want to hear about Building your Social Capital with the Whuffie factor)

 

Most internet visits start with search.  People may have been motivated by an advert, or maybe just by a need (i.e. their phone broke and they need a new one), but their Consideration Phase almost definitely begins with search.

 

If Google is essentially each user’s homepage, one of our jobs as marketers should be to make the best use of that real estate.

 

Brands are getting better at driving traffic from Google to their own corporate pages, but I think many are not considering 50% of the Google real estate with “traditional” SEO and SEM.

 

 

 

 

So  (at least if I am a producer of a high-consideration product like a phone):

 

- SEM is, at absolute best, responsible for 30% of the clicks generated on that page (btw, I wonder if it’s a certain type of person that clicks there, like it is with banners). So I should get my fair share of these clicks by doing good, sales-driven SEM.

 

- Getting top position with great SEO means I capture about another 20% of the interest, clicking through to the “official” brand site.

 

- But the rest of Google is going to be full of social media, e.g. videos on youtube, product reviews, comparison sites etc.

 

Questions to ask myself:

 

What am I doing to fill up my “homepage” with interesting and positive content?

 

How do I measure this? Could I build a Search Engine Share of Voice score?

 

(ps I’m working on the answer to those questions next, but would appreciate opinions of course)