Coming Together: Uniting Traditional Online Advertising with Paid Search

It’s yet another instance of how smart people do stupid things. In this case, because of how our organization developed organically, traditional online advertising and paid search were being planned, executed and reported on completely separately, with nary a connection point.

Interestingly, our initial forays into paid search were seen as awareness generating only, and now have morphed into key lead generators. Conversely, traditional online ad units, once seen as lead generating, are now viewed mostly as awareness generators. Most of our “leads” or “responses” generated from traditional online advertising, are reaped from whitepaper placements and newsletter sponsorships, not from creative ad units.

(I should state here, that I’m talking about BtoB marketing and that my company is all about nurturing folks through the sales cycle, which can be anywhere from nine to more than 12 months. So a response from one of our online campaigns triggers a “nurturing stream” that consists of follow-up touches via email or direct mail, depending on their opt-in status.)

Anyway, that brings me back to what was happening with online and search. As part of a larger effort to consolidate activities and vendors, we looked into streamlining our online response generation efforts. It seemed logical to us, given our situation. Of course, I couldn’t find out anything about it in any of the blogs or chat rooms I looked at. So I don’t know if that means we are behind or ahead of the curve, but here’s what happened.

Like a lot of companies our size ($1.5B) and larger, we are made up of a number if separate but related business units, each with their own budgets, goals and idiosyncrasies. Up to this point, each group had been separately taking their budget for online to one agency, telling them what they wanted, and then separately taking their budget for paid search to another agency and telling them what they wanted. In neither case were we getting the full benefit of our agency’s experience, and on the backend, all the reporting was different and difficult to compare.

So when we consolidated with one agency, we also centralized this process. We took everyone’s unique goals – how many responses they wanted to achieve for both online and search combined – and then took all of the money and put it in one budket for the agency (no small feat since it meant we might have to pull from one group’s budget to augment another group’s budget to get the net best performance for my company as a whole) and told the agency to figure out the best way to spend it between search and online for each campaign. To add to the fun, we asked them to negotiate value adds we received from the large online buys in the form of traditional online units, to help us improve awareness while still enabling us to meet our response goals.

The results so far have been fantastic. Everything is being planned in concert, our agency is helping us get the most out of our paltry budgets, we are getting the most benefit from their expertise, and when the campaigns launch and the metrics start flowing in, we can look at them side by side, and make optimization decisions based on performance.

Another fantastic outcome is that the creative across all the disparate groups now has a unifying theme, so we look more like the single company with a single voice that we want to be, helping us make more impact and generate more awareness across all of our product lines.

I’m not sure how other companies approach this. I’d be interested in your comments. For us, this has been a huge step forward and one that we hope will improve the ROI of our online investments.