• by Roger Barnette , March 5, 2013

All the marketers in your organization should strive for the same thing: closing more sales and driving more revenue. As search marketers, we do our part contributing toward this goal, focusing a ton of money and brainpower to test and optimize our medium and make sure we drive the best results.

Most of us do our job (and do it well) and then count on other teams to take the ball to the end zone.  In turn, we take what we learned from those wins and then optimize against insights from those conversions reactively.  Our focus is on the advertising itself, getting the right message in front of the right person.  And while we may leverage landing pages and where users go after they click, the full experience is often out of our hands.

So how do we work more efficiently to make the most out of every person who clicks on one of our ads?

Closer cross-team relationships: I might go as far to say that the search (as well as display, social, etc) and Web groups need to be one integrated team -- but barring that, you need to become best friends with the people in your company who control, improve and optimize the user experience on your site.  Your performance as a search marketer can be drastically improved by an increase in conversion rates.  By working hand in hand with the user experience team, you can partner to optimize the full experience, making it seamless from search to sale. Both sides need to communicate regarding what’s working and what’s not and discover new holistic solutions that combine media and user experience to improve the overall results.  CMOs everywhere should be ordering this interaction, so get ahead of the curve.

Tailor experiences: Search marketers should leverage tools that customize the user’s journey based on her interests and behavior, and then use those insights to improve search campaigns.  We should look at users holistically.  They are the same users whom we understand from a search perspective, so why do we start from scratch every time they cross team lines?

Optimize for engagement: By understanding the user experience on the site and which ads drive desired behavior, you can optimize based on middle-of-the-funnel behavior, too, and nurture leads throughout their experience. When you understand how different media affect engagement through time on site, page visits and frequency, you can link your media and your colleague’s onsite experience to optimize both.

Digital marketing is a team effort: one team, not multiple teams. When media teams and user experience teams work together, everyone wins.