Marketing Communications

490 CHAPTER 15 E-COMMUNICATION

To promote French wines to the UK, a campaign wanted to prove that there really is a French wine for every

occasion. In addition, the agency wanted to recommend specific wines to accompany local dishes by region,

while simultaneously promoting tourism in France. To meet the above challenge a micro-site was set up. Traffic

towards this specific site was effectuated via a partnership with BBC Good Food. Display ads on the homepage

bbcgood food.com directed users to the micro-site. In addition, users could click on a feature in the wine section of

the website. This took them to a bespoke micro-site, where the client’s branding dominated. By exploring this

micro-site visitors could discover the climate of the region, and the resulting obstacles that vineyards encounter

when growing grapes there. On further discovery, they could find historic facts about the region, must-see travel

destinations to visit and recommended recipes to go with each type of wine. A separate section of the website

featured a competition, allowing users to win a two-night trip to the French wine region of their choice by answering

a question on the content.

After being exposed to the display advertising, over a third of the respondents said they would benefit in some

way from seeing the ad, and 27% pretended to look for more information. Respondents were also more likely to visit

the website, visit in-store and buy something after seeing display ads on the site.^15

BUSINESS INSIGHT

French wines: a touch of magic

Search engine optimisation

Th e biggest issue with having a brand or company website is to attract visitors to the site. Unlike

traditional advertising with its interruptive nature, online marketing communications oft en

require an action from the consumer as the Internet is a pull medium. To fi nd this, traffi c marketers

use a combination of offl ine and online marketing communications techniques. One specifi c

online technique is search engine optimisation (SEO) , improving the listing in search engines.

A survey conducted by PEW Internet in May 2011 revealed that 92% of the online adults use

search engines to fi nd information on the Web. Th is places search at the top of the list of most

oft en used online activities among US adults.^16 Th e search engine is the new homepage for

brands and businesses.

Search engine optimisation is important to many companies, not least to online stores and

e-commerce sites. Some web agencies are specialists in registering sites in top and niche search

engines and in improving their rankings on the engine. For this purpose, they use specifi c

metatags, page titles, reciprocal linking, hidden keywords and multiple domain names as

these are the factors that infl uence search engine robots’ behaviour. Today the dynamics

(frequency of changing content, links towards the site, likes/shares of site content via social

media such as Facebook and Twitter, etc.) on the site are also taken in consideration to rank

the site in the result list.

Another way of increasing search engine share-of-voice is keyword buying , one of the

online advertising techniques explained below.^17

Online advertising

Online advertising can be defi ned as commercial messages on specifi c rented spaces on websites

of other companies. Whereas global advertising spending is growing by nearly 4%, global

online ad spending is expected to grow by another 16% year on year up to nearly €76 billion

by the end of 2012. By the end of the same year US online ad spending is expected to surpass

print spending in newspapers and magazines. Th e current share of online ad spending of 19% of

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