Discoverability Marketing: The Latest Buzz Phrase and What it Means.
There are many types of marketing out there for us to focus on as professionals: inbound, outbound, content, engagement, etc. If you’re lucky, you’re able to specialize in one or two of them in your career, but for many CMOs and Directors of Marketing for national brands, it’s expected that you stay on the cutting edge of techniques and channels. By in large, consumer behavior drives which categories of marketing are most successful at which times and for which product verticals.
Take Interrupt Marketing for example: This category of marketing, most notably consisting of TV, billboards, radio, and print, is a term used to describe campaigns that interrupt the consumer's daily actions without relevance. These mediums, in general, cannot respond to a consumer’s needs at the moment they realize them, and are therefore considered inferior by some digital marketers.
In the opposite vein is Discoverability Marketing, which is picking up steam as the new buzz phrase du jour. You’re probably asking yourself: What exactly is discoverability marketing? Am I already doing it?
According to TechTarget, Discoverability Marketing is the practice of making it easier for customers or potential customers to find products when they are actively looking for them or have demonstrated a need for them. Essentially, it’s finding the sweet spot of marketing to the right person at the right time.
The two major components of Discoverability Marketing are:
SEO - ensuring that when a consumer searches for your type of product or service, they are served up locally-relevant results for your distributors/outlets ABOVE those of your competitors. It’s Balihoo’s stance that this is the moment when many national brands lose potential customers to their competitors. Local SEO is often called The Last Mile of Marketing for this reason. National brands can spend millions of dollars on branding and messaging, successfully convincing the consumer to invest in their product category, but when the consumers, 90% of whom research online and then buy locally, perform a search, they may be greeted with localized messages from your competitors instead, essentially cutting off the customer journey at the last moment and redirecting it elsewhere.
Leading companies are wising up to this consumer trend and ensuring their local dealers and agents are search optimized by building data-driven Local Websites on their behalf, and furthermore, launching paid search (SEM) campaigns directed at driving additional traffic.
Contextual Marketing - offering up digital paid advertising based on the exact search history, website usage, and topic preferences of the user. Although big brands have been doing this for years on a national scale, it has been cost and time prohibitive to scale it to hundreds or thousands of locations. That’s where Local Marketing Automation comes in to play - leading companies can launch tens of thousands of individual paid search or display campaigns driving traffic to individual retailers. Each campaign is radius-based, activated by the brand, and uses the national data as a whole to optimize over time. This accomplishes results that the local partner would never be able to accomplish on their own.
Contextual Marketing, tackled on the local level as well as the national, solves the age-old problem of not being able to target the right person at the right time. In fact, these localized ads see click-through rates up to 315% higher than their broad national counterparts*.
*xAd/Doubleclick
