Digital Communications Corner

Hello everyone…!

Welcome to the new article from DitgitCommsCorner. Today let’s have another fun discussion about digital communications and marketing. I have an interesting scenario for this time; imagine we are the digital marketer for an online supermarket, what should we do to influence our manager to use Search Engine Marketing? What should be done afterwards as well?

Personally, I would explain the manager the followings:

1. Search engine and our marketing objectives
2. Link-building
3. Long and short-term improvements plan for the digital marketing

Explain how search engines benefit the digital marketing

In this section, I will just briefly compile some evidence of how the search engine is beneficial for digital marketing.

It is quite undeniable that digital marketers nowadays are using the search engine to boost their customer acquisition focusing more on the first step of the digital marketing funnel, the “visit”. (if you are not sure which marketing funnel is about, please visit the previous link for further explanation)

So if we are not there, our competitors are there. What should we do besides being there too? Otherwise, we will be a step behind our competitors. That’s easy and the first reason our manager should agree to our request in using the search engines for marketing activities.

Imagine if a potential customer is new to online shopping or just wants to search for options to do online shopping, and he/she just types a simple search term such as “groceries delivery” on search engines such as Google and many online supermarkets are there except us or our shop is at the second or third page of search result, will the potential customer keep going on and on until our shop appears on the search result? The answer is simple; it is quite unlikely.

Well, it is not strange as at least 50 per cent of the traffic to any website now is generated from the search engine rather than from any direct links or any other websites (trona and Nissenbaum 2000; Telang et al. 2004 as cited in Dou et al, 2010).

Google as the number 1 search engine today also claims to have “more than 100,000” search requests at any second which account to more than 8.5 billion every day (Kinsta, 2022).

See? Just this information alone, the manager should be convinced. But what if he/she is still not convinced? The manager might say what if the customers do not click on the sponsored search result? Let’s explain this further.

The answer is simple. That’s fine too as many believe that it is still beneficial to our shop’s branding as some see it as a good reputation of the shop since it can appear as the top result of the search engine (Thurow 2006a as cited in Dou et al, 2010).

Furthermore, search engine results can link to the priming effect (Dou et al, 2010) which is beneficial to the branding of our supermarket. If what they are searching for is always resulting in our name/shop appearing in their search, it will for sure embed our shop in their memories and consciousness in the long run.

Nonetheless, the paid search engine is quite simple. It can give us immediate results with cost and result proportion along with easy monitoring tools as well as the freedom in appearance customization in the search result.

If with all of these, the manager still rejects our proposal in utilizing the search engine as the tool for digital marketing, I really do not have any further suggestions. In the case we succeed in persuading the manager to agree to our proposal, let’s proceed to another step, the Link Building.

Link-building – optimisation of our online supermarket

Link building is quite important to support our digital visual strength in search engine algorithms. The stronger our link building is, the higher position we stand in search engine result as the search engine, among the other criterial, will determine the quality of our website accordingly to the number of links to our website directed from other websites (Moogan, 2014).

There are a few link-building styles we can try with our supermarket, but one among those to avoid is the link purchasing as it is strongly against the Google’s guideline. Since Google stands higher than other search engines, we should not risk ourselves in doing so.

No matter which link-building tactics we use, first we should set a clear target for our activities. I would suggest the team choose “increase the number of organic searches” as the objective of our link-building rather than saying the number of links we will create since the final objective of link-building should be the appeal on search results. It also boost our sale and branding.

The first tactic we should use is based on content. We can generate content tailored for the nature of our supermarket or the specialisation of our supermarket. It is quite general, but let’s use this as an example. Our supermarket is famous for fresh groceries at cheaper price compared to the others or so we believe. Then create content with this as the core. The contents can be aligned to:

1. News
2. Funny stories
3. Controversial topics
4. Data visualisation
5. Competition
6. Ego-bait
7. Long-term or detail stories

(Moogan, 2014)

The platforms we can spread the contents can be varied. We can use social media and blogs or even our website (a special section just for this).

The second tactic is to use influencers to share our content or write about us. We can pay them to write a review about us or we can tailor the content focusing on our field of business; for example, we write an article about food security and then raise the topic of our specialisation in fresh groceries at a low price as a part of the article. Many online buyers use product reviews as the main criteria before they make a purchase decision.

We can also use BuzzStream (https://www.buzzstream.com/) as a tool to support our link-building. Using third-party tool can make our work simpler and smoother and save us a lot of time and efforts.

Short-term and long-term improvement

Both search engine and link-building marketing are important for digital marketing in the current era, yet they are also hard to manage to some extent. Search engine marketing can be costly if we purchase popular term such as “best shopping centre”, “cheapest”, etc. as the search engine company charge us by the number of clicks on the link. Link-building also requires a lot of our efforts in making it happens as we need to maintain a lot of links connected to our website to maintain a good stand in the organic search engine results. So what are the suggestions we can make for both long term and short term improvement plan?

The answer is not easy nor hard. First, for short-term improvement, we should scale down our goal to a smaller size. As a supermarket, we have a lot of products to sell, so better focusing on one or two special products so that we have more competitive edges over the competitors. Like the previous example, if we are good at fresh groceries at a low price, we should hit it hard. The other products in different sections will climb higher along the way.

For the long-term plan, we should aim to increase our branding on different platforms. Social media are currently the most popular ones. It can be a good space for our supermarket to engage directly with potential customers. Our appearance on different platforms along with regular and well-maintain content/promotions can also generate links to our website as well as traffic. The higher the links and organic traffic we can get for our main website, the higher we stand in the search engine algorithm.

What is your thought on this topic, everyone? Thanks for your time spent with me on this article. You can also raise some examples of your own case in the comments below. I cannot wait to hear from you.

References

Dou, W., Lim, K.H., Su, C., Zhou, N., & Cui, N. (2010). Brand Positioning Strategy Using Search Engine Marketing. MIS Quarterly, 34(2), 261-279.

Moogan, P. (2014). The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.

Search Engine Market Share: Who’s Leading the Race In 2022 (2022). Kinsta. https://kinsta.com/search-engine-market-share/