Search Engine Marketing Essentials

Google Adwords is something with which I was vaguely familiar, but it is not something about which I had learnt about or with which I had had any real experience. The three basic courses, 101, 201 and 301, together provide a comprehensive introduction to Adwords and the ways in which a business can maximise its return on investment.

After completing the three courses, I can appreciate that one of the biggest challenges for any business, or organisation such as Tourism Ireland (TI), in using Adwords is to understand exactly what their target customers really want. Of course this is a central feature of any type of marketing: advertisers must know what their audience wants if they are to attempt to sell something. However, in order to implement a successful Google Adwords campaign, a business must really attempt to get into the heads of their target customers and try to predict what search terms they will use when looking for a specific product or service. A business must also try to predict what will make a customer click on their ad over all the other similar ads or the organic search results. Businesses face the challenge of achieving the balance between promoting what makes them unique and better than the competition, and ensuring that their ads remain general enough so that they appear regularly.

Adwords is a particularly advantageous service for small businesses. With no minimum spend, small businesses can enter the marketing environment for relatively little money and still compete against larger companies. Businesses also maintain full control over how much money they spend over a given period of time and yet they maintain the flexibility to adjust these values at any time. With businesses only paying per click rather than per impression, they can avoid having to make large financial commitments to an advertising campaign at the beginning. After reviewing the results of its initial campaign, a business can then make the necessary adjustments to its Adwords ads before investing more money. This also means that smaller business, which may lack technical expertise or a dedicated marketing department, can first gain some experience and build up some knowledge before committing resources to their digital marketing campaign.

A good marketing campaign through Google Adwords also requires thorough use of digital web analytics and it is very practical for business that these two tools are automatically linked. If a business wishes to invest in directing traffic towards its website, it must also work to ensure that potential customers find what they were promised when they get there. If the company is hoping that customers will convert and buy directly from the website, it must ensure that they can proceed to that step easily from the landing page. Thus, it is vital that businesses using Google Adwords also pay attention to what people do once they get to the companies' websites.   

Digital Analytics Fundamentals

Before I began this placement I had come across the concept of digital analytics while completing an earlier volunteering service in Germany. As part of that programme, I kept a blog of my activities and used the Blogspot analytics tool to track how many people were reading the posts, which posts were the most popular and where the readers were based. While this is analytics at its most basic, it provided me with an introduction to the principles behind how it works.

Analytics for volunteeringinbuchenwald.blogspot.com

Since beginning my placement with Tourism Ireland (TI), I have been introduced to the far more sophisticated methods of analysis used in the marketing industry. I can now better appreciate the importance of measuring the various elements involved in how a brand presents itself digitally and its effectiveness at encouraging consumers to 'convert', ie. to make a purchase.

Though the Google Analytic course focuses on the technical aspects of setting up digital analytics tools for websites and apps, it also sets out a more general plan of action for a business to employ in developing its digital strategy. The content of the course stresses the need for a business to first pinpoint exactly what it wants to achieve with its website before it proceeds to put a strategy into effect. This is echoed within the literature: Bhandari, Singer and van der Scheer assert that 'a company's overarching strategy should ground its choice of analytical options' (1).

The course thus sets out a five-stage process it recommends businesses go through when developing their digital strategy. Firstly, as discussed, it should define the overall business objectives. Secondly, it must agree strategies for achieving these before, thirdly, setting specific KPI targets to measure success. Only then should a business proceed to the final two stages, segmenting the market and setting clear quantifiable targets for the website.

For TI, measuring the effectiveness of its marketing strategies can be difficult. While the overall success of its marketing activities can be determined by consulting the official tourism statistics published by the CSO in the Republic and the NISRA in Northern Ireland, TI cannot measure macro conversion, ie. a person's final decision to visit the island of Ireland, as visitors do not make their bookings through the website or through Tourism Ireland at all. TI relies therefore, on analysing micro conversions, such as how long a person spends on the website, how many pages they visit, how many people sign up for newsletter and how many people either order brochures from the website or download them directly as PDFs. Link tagging is used extensively across all marketing platforms including social media in order to register the source of traffic to the website and thus to measure the effectiveness of individual campaigns.

I found completing the Google Analytics course more challenging than I had expected. It got quite technical at times and some of the tasks related throughout were difficult. However, I have learnt a lot from it and believe I have acquired a good basic grounding in web analytics, which will be beneficial for me in my role. Below is the result of my assessment.          

 
Sources:
(1) Bahndari, Singer & van der Scheer, 2014. 'Using marketing analytics to drive superior growth', McKinsey Insights and Publications: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/using_marketing_analytics_to_drive_superior_growth

Links:
Volunteering in Buchenwald blog: http://volunteeringinbuchenwald.blogspot.ie/
Central Statistics Office (ROI): http://www.cso.ie/en/statistics/tourismandtravel/
Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency: http://www.detini.gov.uk/tourism-statistics
Tourism Ireland consumer website: www.ireland.com 

Use of Social Media

Social media plays a key role in Tourism Ireland's (TI) marketing activities. As a tourist board, it was an early adapter to social media as a tool for reaching consumers and building relationships with them. With a combined 2.65 million likes across the various individual market pages, Tourism Ireland is the fourth most popular tourist board in the world on Facebook and with 162,000 followers it is the third most popular on Twitter (1). As a relatively small tourist board with limited resources, Tourism Ireland can use social media to reach large numbers of people a lot more cheaply than it can through traditional methods of advertising. Fans of the agency's different accounts help to spread the message about Ireland as a tourist destination by liking, sharing, commenting on and re-tweeting posts.

Tourism Ireland's social media presence.
Source: Tourism Ireland Marketing Plans 2015

While I am not directly involved in managing the Facebook page for Germany, through my work I have gained a better insight into how it can be used as a marketing tool. Very specific groups of people can be targeted with advertising and posts can be timed in order to maximise their reach. By interacting with fans on the page (for example, by replying to individual comments (see picture)), TI is able to build up relationships with people in the hope that they will help to spread the word among their friends and family too.

I have played a larger role in TI's use of Twitter in the German market. Twitter is not as popular a social media platform in Germany as in many other countries and, though a TI account has existed since 2011, it has only been active since February of this year. I took part in an online course about how to maximise the use of Twitter with some colleagues in December and we then began to plan our approach. We considered having two separate accounts, one aimed at consumers and one at members of the media, as is practise in many other markets, but we decided to start off with one account.

We chose to maintain the 'Entdecke Irland' ('Discover Ireland') brand already used for the Facebook page and YouTube account. The number of followers has remained low, but, in line with much of the advice from the literature, we have been cautious about simply following as many people as possible as a tool for gaining new followers ourselves (2). Instead we have been targeting opinion-shapers such as journalists and bloggers. We now ask journalists we are sending on press trips to Ireland to share their Twitter handles with us and interact with them during their visits. The account is in its infancy and we are still trying different strategies and working out the best rhythm for the frequency and timing of tweets. The consensus from the literature I have consulted and the advice we have received within the organisation is to keep tweeting and to a relatively regular schedule (3).

One brand which I believe has developed a very successful Twitter strategy is Bank of Ireland. Their account is monitored 24/7 and acts as form of quick customer service for everyday banking queries, which saves both the customer and the bank itself time and money. I have used the service several times myself already and find it particularly useful while I am living abroad.  

    

Sources:
(1) Tourism Ireland, 2014. 'Marketing Plans 2015': https://www.tourismireland.com/img/2014/DublinPresentation.pdf
(2) Social Media Examiner, 2013. 'How to Use Twitter for Business and Marketing': http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-use-twitter-for-business-and-marketing/
(3) Jennifer Lonoff Schiff, 2013. '14 Ways to Use Twitter to Market your Business', CIO: http://www.cio.com/article/2380667/twitter/14-ways-to-use-twitter-to-market-your-business.html

Links:
Tourism Ireland 'Entdecke Irland' Facebook Germany: https://www.facebook.com/entdeckeirland
Tourism Ireland 'Entdecke Irland' Twitter Germany: https://twitter.com/EntdeckeIrland
Tourism Ireland 'Entdecke Irland' YouTube Germany: https://www.youtube.com/user/entdeckeirland
Bank of Ireland Twitter account: https://twitter.com/talktoBOI
My personal Twitter account: https://twitter.com/danjfar

Building my Professional Profile Online

I have been active on social media for several years, but have only recently begun to think of it as a tool for helping to further my career. I have chosen to keep my Facebook account private, using a pseudonym and maintaining high privacy settings. While this may change in the future, for the moment I am using LinkedIn, Xing and Twitter to develop my professional digital footprint.

LinkedIn

In contrast to the cluttered layout of many other social media platforms, I like the simple, authoritative CV-like style of LinkedIn. While you can choose to write longer descriptions about a particular job or experience, I have chosen to keep my profile simple and fact-based, like a traditional CV. In this way, I hope that a business contact or prospective employer would be able to glean a basic outline of my experience and qualifications quickly and easily. I did however, face some difficulties in deciding how best to explain my current role as it involves both a professional placement element linked directly to the Postgraduate Diploma programme in DIT. In the end, I chose to briefly explain the EOP in the Summary section and then separate the two elements into Experience and Education. I faced a similar challenge in deciding how best to present my Masters, as it was an international programme involving semesters at three different universities. This inflexibility is a disadvantage of LinkedIn, but I feel it is important to be able to demonstrate clearly to prospective employers in Germany that I have studied at a German university through German. I therefore decided to separate each semester and give each university its own entry.

My LinkedIn profile: http://de.linkedin.com/pub/daniel-farrell/78/8a9/271

Xing    

Completing this assignment gave me the perfect opportunity to set up my profile on Xing, a website very similar to LinkedIn which is hugely popular in Germany. While LinkedIn is also widely used here, Xing is also a huge player and I have been asked by several contacts if I have a profile on it in the six months since I started my placement. As I may choose to stay in Germany after my placement, I felt it would be worthwhile to set up my Xing profile now. When I went to register, I did not initially expect to be able to connect with many people, but I have been surprised at the amount of names and faces I have come across in such a short time. This has demonstrated to me the power and influence of networking and the usefulness of sites such as Xing and LinkedIn in maintaining contact with people. Xing operates on much the same principles as LinkedIn and the basic layout and content of my profile are much the same.

My Xing profile: https://www.xing.com/profile/Daniel_Farrell2?sc_o=mxb_p

Twitter

I have had a profile on Twitter for a few years, but have never been an active poster. However, now that I am helping to manage the Tourism Ireland Twitter feed for the German market, I have become more active and aware of its potential impact on people's perceptions of me. While I do not use it solely for work purposes, I am particularly careful about the content that I post or re-tweet as my profile is public.

My Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/danjfar