*edited on 21.00 on 14/09/09 as some information was not correct
On the weekend I spotted something that I have not before. Perhaps this has been happening for a while however I saw two adverts on the television that placed emphasis on searching for a phrase to get to their website over prompting people to visit directly.
The first advert I spotted was for Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC) national recruitment campaign to attract high calibre social workers for vulnerable children and families. They are prompting people to search for ‘Be The Difference’ in order to find the website instead of listing the website directly (you can see the advert here). Later on I spotted another advert for the new Dyson Ball vacuum cleaner that does the same thing. The advert for the new Dyson Ball finishes by prompting people to search online for ‘Dyson Ball’ instead of referencing any website.
This highlights how important search is to the whole marketing package and more importantly that organizations such as these are recognizing it as so. On top of this I also think it is a very intelligent way of promoting your organisation. Take the CWDC for instance, through prompting people to search name ‘Be The Difference’ instead of the organisations name or the website directly CWDC are able to gage how effective the adverting campaign is. As traditional media such as television advertising can be difficult to measure CWDC are able to obtain data on how many people are searching ‘Be The Difference’ to access their website and so can see spikes in this traffic in correlation to when the advertising campaign commenced.
This strategy is also effective as more people are using search engines rather than typing a URL directly and so this would appear as a much more effective and memorable way of getting people to find out more information about your product or service.
These have been only two examples I have seen however there is likely to be more. With search becoming increasingly pushed to the forefront of marketing it will be interesting to see if more businesses follow suit…
September 14th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I seem to remember the BBC did this for strictly come dancing, displaying a search box at the bottom of the advert with the word “strictly” in it.
It is a very interesting strategy.
September 14th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
The Army are another good example. If they cover off different terms across different media, then the advertiser will be able to measure the effectiveness of different media or channels.
July 4th, 2010 at 10:49 pm
I have seen the “Dyson ball” one a few times and one or two others but I have just seen another one now.
Subway are prompting people to search “Eat Fresh” as apposed to visit subway.co.uk