Direct mail and search engine marketing are a lot more similar than you might think. If you understand the similarities between them and where the two channels part ways, you're well on your way to grasping the makings of a good search campaign.
I'll go through five comparison points to explain what I mean.
1. Be on target
Much of the strength of direct mail comes from targeting. With the right list and analytics, you can find shoppers who match your perfect customer's geography, income bracket, age group, stage in the buy cycle, shoe size, hair consistency, musical taste and/or height. When you reach out to those people, they're likely to buy from you.
Targeting is equally central to search. Smart search targeting allows marketers to reach searchers based on geography (including designated market area), time of day, day of week, IP address, browser type and more. As in direct mail, the first secret of success comes from making the best use of the data for a highly targeted, calculated marketing campaign.
2. Envelopes and letters
For a direct mail piece to truly work, the recipient needs to open the envelope and read the contents. If he doesn't, the letter is worthless.
Search isn't so different. Ad copy takes the place of the direct mail envelope: It's the point at which a customer decides whether he wants to interact with you. Your landing page is the "letter," where the customer moves past the "opening" toward a deeper engagement. You need to get both right for either to have any real value. The landing page is only effective if a searcher clicks to arrive there; but it also needs to engage the searcher and drive him to the next action for the search campaign to be effective.
To make the perfect envelope/letter package, both the letter and the envelope need to carry an enticing underlying message, conveyed with just the right content, design and feel. But the 95-character text ad - or search "envelope" -- doesn't leave much room for creative genius, and searchers, trying to zoom their way to their online destinations, aren't always in the mood for warm fuzzies. Because that's so, it's often best to use the search ads to focus on the incentive -- like price, selection, convenience or quality. Creative elements like color, font and layout often are best left for the landing page (coupled with incentives, of course).
3. Test, analyze, refine
In direct marketing, how do you know if your list, envelope and letter are all working properly? You run tests and analyses, and refine your campaign based on what you learn.
These same concepts are true in search. Plus, the test and analysis methods are similar -- since, in both search and direct mail, the key questions you're exploring are, in fact, the same. In both channels, you want to know who converted and how, and which messages and creative elements your customers responded to most favorably.
But search analytics do have some advantages over direct mail analytics. First, search data shows you a much clearer picture of your customers' reactions to your ad. You can see if searchers clicked on it, when they clicked, how long they spent on your landing page and how they interacted with that page. By contrast, there's no way to know for certain how many letter recipients opened the envelope and how much of your letter was actually read.
Another SEM analytics advantage is the element of speed. A direct mail piece easily can take two weeks to produce and another week to arrive in mailboxes. It might take an equally long time to implement changes based on new learnings from campaign analytics.
