Google is your Sales Associate: How Retail Marketers can Compete and Succeed Using Search Engines

A Whitepaper by Geary Interactive

Retail marketers need to attract the right consumers from search engines to drive online sales. With unrelenting competition, tightened budgets and high expectations, retail marketers need the assurance that their advertisements are reaching targeted users and that their website is poised to capture and convert consumers. Executing strategic search marketing campaigns will direct qualified consumers to relevant website content-encouraging longer engagements, conversions and sales.

Are you wasting budget and clicks on users who aren't converting?

Is your competition diverting consumers away from your website with their paid search campaigns? Cannot stop consumers from bouncing off your site or abandoning their shopping carts?

The keywords and phrases consumers type into search engines contain valuable insights that retail marketers can use to enhance their entire marketing program, but only if they know what to look for. This whitepaper will guide strategies and tactics retail marketers can employ to elevate their search engine marketing campaigns. To increase online revenue, while eliminating spending on unqualified traffic, retail marketers can turn search engines into their best sales associate.

Evolving with User Behavior, a Never Ending Process

Eighty-three million consumers use search engines to research products, making it the third most popular online activity behind email and sharing photos (eMarketer 1).

This is a marked contrast from the eras when consumers turned to their local sales team to provide answers and product/ service recommendations.

As of 2008, 80 percent of consumers make purchases online, where marketers cannot rely on a sales associate to ask pertinent questions and determine the goals of each consumer (The Nielsen Company). Now, as search engines have overtaken this concierge role, it's up to marketers-via their search engine marketing campaigns-to decipher want consumers are looking for.

The risks of not employing a search engine marketing campaign are equivalent to employing an inept sales clerk. If a user asks a question about shoes, and they are directed to the electronics department, confusion and annoyance will follow.

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