SEO, SEM, and Programmatic: The Marketing Trifecta | Robert Royer

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simplify TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, marketers, media buyers, and business owners. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Robert Royer, Founder and President of Building Brands Marketing. With over 17 years of experience, Robert develops and executes comprehensive marketing strategies for small to medium-sized businesses with award-winning marketing agency services. Welcome to Simplify TV, Robert. Robert Royer: Hey, thanks for having me, David. David McBee: So Robert, I want to focus on something that I said in your introduction. The word "comprehensive" really stood out to me. So tell me, when you're working with SMBs, small to medium businesses, there in the great state of Texas, what are the table stakes marketing strategies that you feel should be a part of every or most campaign? Robert Royer: Yeah, absolutely, David. So when we talk about comprehensive marketing strategies, especially for SMBs, we're focusing on a few core elements that are essential to any campaign. For starters, the presence of an actual marketing strategy. I know that seems intuitive, but so many agencies, it seems like these days, focus on selling advertising products and they forget about the importance of a strategy. So things like the campaign objectives, target personas, unique value propositions, messaging depending on channel within the funnel and so on. So after that strategy is defined, we layer on all the necessary marketing mechanisms to help the client reach their goals. It might be search engine strategies, social media, programmatic, other blends of branding like traditional media. And our team definitely built a reputation in this industry being exceptional in search engine marketing and optimization. But we essentially have a department in every area of marketing, including general strategy, so we can truly provide a comprehensive marketing approach to our clients and not just sell ad space like the old days of media. David McBee: Yeah. So I've got to tell you, I love talking to SEO guys who have actually embraced programmatic, because there's a lot of them that still don't really see the value in that. So it sounds like you do SEO and search engine marketing, social media and programmatic, which of course we love talking about here at Simplify. So do you have any examples of how building brands marketing integrates programmatic with search engine marketing and traditional media? Robert Royer: Definitely, yeah. I've actually been doing programmatic advertising just as long as SEO, basically, and the two go hand in hand, really. At BBM, we believe in this cohesive approach where programmatic media really compliments SEO, SEM, and traditional media as well. For instance, many in this industry know BBM for our SEO, SEM development talent, but we often use programmatic and traditional in order to target specific audience segments based on their user behavior or demographics. And it helps build the brand awareness at the top of the funnel. And then we use SEO and SEM to capture the interest generated at the top of the funnel through relevant searches for additional touches through the consumer journey. So when the consumer is finally ready to take action, then we're easily found. And this effectively drives users from the top of funnel through the middle of the funnel. And the thing that I really love about coupling programmatic with SEO and SEM is coupling search targeting and site retargeting from a programmatic tactic like OTT or CTV, along with the same exact keywords that we're targeting organically or through paid search. And this helps drive users that have already engaged with the brand through the very bottom of the funnel. And we try not to forget traditional media, especially because we operate in a lot of smaller to medium-sized markets, and we can support our digital efforts basically by reinforcing the message to people through traditional media that may not be as active online. And this integrated approach ensures that we're present at every stage of the consumer journey, from awareness to conversion, and also across different audiences that just consume media differently. David McBee: So what I heard was traditional and programmatic, and SEO and SEM kind of at the bottom of the funnel, right? Robert Royer: Correct. David McBee: All right, so that leads me to ask the question that advertisers always ask me. How do you measure the impact of the things that are at the top of the funnel, whether that's traditional media or programmatic? Because very few people click on display ads, nobody's clicking on CTV ads, because you can't, and then all the leads funnel down into the search engine marketing campaigns, and Google Analytics tracks all of that through Google, and it looks like your search engine campaign is exploding. How do you prove that these played a role in that? Robert Royer: Yeah, that's a great question, David. So measurement can be a challenge with awareness and branding tactics. Essentially, we try to have our clients focus on a blended cost per lead and everything as a whole and not get fixated on one specific tactic, and that cost per lead through an OKR objective that our VP of Operations came up with. For example, we use multi-touch attribution to show how programmatic media contributes to the overall customer journey, even if the final conversion happens through Google search. We look at metrics like view-through rates, ZIP code penetration, conversion zones to demonstrate the value of the programmatic. And even showing heavy engagement from one specific search query in the programmatic that's driving weighted events can identify a correlation between the SEO and SEM tactics and the programmatic tactics. David McBee: Wait, time out, time out, time out. That's the first I've heard that in one of these interviews. Can you dive into that just a little deeper, maybe even give an example? Robert Royer: Yeah, yeah. So for example, when we look at the search targeting report of a programmatic campaign, the first thing we do is we look through all the search queries and we try to identify what queries are high-performing, what queries are low-performing in terms of engagement. And that's through analyzing the view-through rates. Same things I just talked about: conversion zones, weighted actions, ZIP code penetration, so on and so forth. And if we see a correlation of a keyword that's high-performing in programmatic that also is high performing in SEO and SEM, then we know that maybe we should strip the campaign down on the search targeting side to those keywords that are highest performing. So we have a very complementary campaign of the same search query that's triggering top of funnel branding awareness being the same search query that's also driving conversions at the bottom of the funnel. So we have a really unified consumer journey there. Does that make sense, David? David McBee: It does, but let me be devil's advocate here. Couldn't an advertiser argue that that's just coincidental? Couldn't they say, "Well, of course AC repair is going to perform in programmatic and in search engine marketing because it's 109 degrees out"? Robert Royer: They could with a transactional keyword like that. Discovery search is where it gets a little bit different, with longer-tailed keyword searches. But ultimately, at the end of the day, what the advertiser is worried about is their cost per acquisition. And so you just have to take it back to that OKR objective that I talked about, where our primary objective, if it's to increase sales or increase customers by X amount, we have to bring it back to the blended cost per lead and not the specific cost per lead from one individual tactic. I think that one of the problems, David, is data and analytics are more prevalent than ever, and they're very important in driving effective marketing, but we cannot confuse a lack of hyper attribution with a lack of effectiveness from every single tactic in the marketing funnel. David McBee: That's brilliant. I love that sentence. Say that again. Robert Royer: So let me see if I can repeat that in the same exact words. While data and analytics are more prevalent than ever, and we have it at our fingertips more than ever, I think the biggest mistake we can make is confusing a lack of hyper attribution with a lack of effectiveness of the marketing tactic altogether. David McBee: Love that. That would have been really handy for a TV or radio rep to [inaudible 00:08:34]. Robert Royer: Yeah. David McBee: That's a really good sentence. Like, oh my Google Analytics shows all this, but you're running 10,000 TV commercials a week. Yeah, I get it. Robert Royer: Exactly. David McBee: Speaking of TV, let's transition to streaming TV. Are you using that with your clients yet? Robert Royer: Definitely. A whole lot of it. David McBee: Okay. How's it going? Well, why are you using it? How's it going? Robert Royer: Yeah. It's going great, but going back to the attribution problem, the only issue is that people don't carry their smart TVs in their pocket the way they do the cell phone. So it's a little bit harder to track the direct click through measurement and conversion zone measurement. And the reality is that we use streaming TV the same way that people used linear TV for decades, and it still offers tremendous value. It's the same top-of-mind awareness that's been a part of marketing strategies for decades. But now you can penetrate your target audience at a much lower cost than the shotgun approaches of the past, because with streaming TV, you have more data available to identify, hey, that 2% of the market, that's your target audience, and just hit them time and time again, as opposed to just trying to go across the channel that's most applicable to that target demographic. And what we do, David, is we leverage Google Analytics for and cross device tracking to measure the impact of streaming TV ads. We can track the increase in web traffic and search volume during an online video campaign or the conversion zone events from mobile devices that are connected in the household. And all of this really provides a comprehensive view of how the streaming TV ads are contributing to the overall marketing strategy, through just long-term results analysis and seeing, is there more brand equity in the market? Are there sales increasing? And just looking at, again, at a blended view there. David McBee: Yeah, I think we're pretty excited here at Simplify about the position of streaming TV in the marketplace and all its growth. So love hearing that you guys are utilizing it effectively. All right, before I let you go, I do like to ask all my guests if they have a favorite podcast or a book that has been instrumental in their success. Do you have one? Robert Royer: Oh, yeah. A classic. An old classic. What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. Read it 10 years ago. Love it, and it's been instrumental. David McBee: All right. We'll add that to our list. What is the best way for viewers to learn more about you personally? Robert Royer: Me personally, you can follow me on LinkedIn, Robert P. Royer, Robert, P as in Patrick, Royer. And then you could go to our website and we have, I mean, a massive amount of resources on there, BuildingBrandsMarketing.com. David McBee: Perfect. Robert, thank you so much for being my guest today on Simplify TV. Robert Royer: Absolutely. Thank you, David. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simplify TV is sponsored by Simplify, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry-leading media buying and workflow solutions. Please help us out with a like, a comment, a share, a review, and be sure to subscribe for new episodes. I'm David McBee. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.