Maximizing your search results or search engine optimization is only one critical leg in the search marketing and sales cycle. This cycle has six elements: content, result, inquiry, offer, acceptance, fulfillment. Profitable search strategies make these elements fluid and seamless. Banks are looking for the most effective and profitable way to market their products and services on the Internet; however, they often disadvantage themselves by focusing on these elements separately. Maximizing search is about producing revenue not just leads.

 

 

Your content is the foundation of all of your search marketing. Whether you are looking for paid or organic search results the results drive from your content, the words you use and how you use them. Although the techniques of getting these words recognized and made significant vary between search engines fundamentally they are the building blocks of your search results. Consequently, it is critical that your words and the ways you them is consistent with the results you want to receive. If you want to be the leader in the results for “best online bill pay” your Internet content (i.e., websites, jump pages, blogs) should not have endless diatribe about your great mortgage rates. Likewise, your words should be aligned with the plain language of your customers. The average consumer does not search for “yield curves,” bond rates,” or “30 year treasury” they search for “low mortgage payment.”

 

 

The Web and the search engines that index the Web are vast networks of hyperlinked content. Therefore, in order to succeed in delivering you message in this noisy environment is to first focus your message, which is hopefully now aligned with your business objectives, and then control the conversation around this message. Your search marketing strategy must create and align multiple channels of conversation around these core messages. Your website can no longer be your only platform for communicating to the Internet customer. You need to create a megaphone that projects you as the expert on your search objective. This means using a creative mix of old and new media strategies to create multiple conversations that act as pointers to your search objectives (your products and services). This Internet marketing mix might be your website, press releases, executive, corporate, employee blogs, online publication, and various channel specific companion websites. These various outlets for content and inlets for inquiries need to be coordinated to amplify your message and suck in your inquiries.

 

 

Here is where a lot of search marketing strategies unravel. You have spent a lot of time on getting the right content creatively positioned on the Web and bingo you are the #3 and #12 organic result on “online banking” and your paid placement is consistently at #4. Here is where you look for your fat bonus check, right? Nope. You forgot the objective–revenue! This is what I often call the marketing to sales chasm. Producing a large volume of traffic and consumer inquiries for your products and services is all for not if it dumps into the huge, non-responsive hole between marketing and the sales process. You have to create the connectivity to turn these results into revenue.

 

 

Turning inquiries or Internet leads into customers is all about creating a fluid and responsive process for the customer. Delivering that experience means quickly presenting a relevant offer, getting their acceptance, and confirming to the customer your timely fulfillment. This highly connected marketing and sales cycle is what creates a compelling customer experience.

 

A phenomenal customer experience can only be delivered if you effectively aggregate, prioritize, distribute, and respond appropriately to every lead. This does not mean sending an email to your sales team from a Web form the customer submitted somewhere on the Web. You must actively manage and measure your lead sources and results. This active management will insure you are responsive to every inquiry and aid you in matching them to the most effective sales process thereby maximizing conversions–revenue. 

 

 

Ultimately maximizing search is about creating a focused message and being able to turn that message campaign into customers. To convert Internet search results your strategy must be a complete campaign. A campaign that creates the message, controls the conversation, and the actively manages the resulting leads into converted customers. This is not possible without a tight coupling of the marketing and sales processes to ensure that every customers gets the right experience.