• Search Engine Guide , Friday, November 30, 2007 4:21 PM

Simon Heseltine attended the Search Marketing for Financial Services panel at SMX London and came back with a mantra that applies across the board with search: Plan, test and review your campaigns. Then wash, rinse and repeat.

According to BigMouthMedia's Chris Cathcart ,the state of the online ad market for financial services is healthy and quite competitive. To stay atop the heap, Cathcart advocated adhering to a 3-stage campaign management process -- starting with developing a solid plan.

For financial services this plan includes getting answers to questions like "Who are the key stakeholders?" in addition to the usual discussion about success metrics, timeline and realistic goals.

SEOmoz' Gillian Muessig admitted that the search firm had made some mistakes when it came to the campaign for Avatar Financial Group. So company strategists decided to get more personal with the client's data -- speaking with prospective customers directly to understand the conversion barriers and how to better position the brand.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Beeston of Efficient Frontier said that extensive testing of everything from keywords and ad copy, to landing page and content network optimization helped establish effective campaigns for Motleyfool.co.uk. And Interactive Return's Aisling Blake noted that dynamic keyword insertion worked quite well for RaboDirect.

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