What this SMB did to lift its search engine marketing game

Art lovers founder talks about the search engine strategy helping it to find new customers

Art lovers exhibition
Art lovers exhibition


When your business exists to sell the work of undiscovered artists, being seen is critical. But with the proliferation of online retailers in Australia today, standing out from the crowd has become an increasingly difficult proposition.

Art teacher, Nancy Donaldson, says she founded Art Lovers two years ago as a means of supporting under-represented artists. In her own life as a teacher, she has seen numerous students leave the arts due to the difficulty of making a living.

“We were seeing lots of really talented people who just don’t get seen or picked up by galleries,” Donaldson tells CMO. “You have to be producing at a certain level for a gallery to take you on, and for lots of people art is a part time activity.”

But while the online world offers a theoretically limitless exhibition space, it is useless if no one can find what you are selling.

Donaldson initially turned to keyword search advertising, but as a small business did not have the budget to compete effectively, and hence was constantly being outbid. So she turned to Melbourne-based direct response marketing agency, King Kong, to help turn things around using content, search engine marketing and retargeting.

King Kong founder and head of growth, Sabri Suby, says the strategy developed for Art Lovers reflects the transformation taking place in search marketing since it first emerged 20 years ago. One of the key changes was to be more targeted in the keywords Art Lovers was buying.

“Doing search marketing, you need to start thinking more and more not just about vanity keywords like ‘art online’, but specific artists names and people searching for long keyword strings,” Suby says. “In the beginning, people were just searching for one or two keyword-based queries, and now they are putting five or six keywords in search queries.”

Ascertaining intent

Another critical factor is to understand which searches actually carry genuine intent that might be converted into sales.

“If someone is looking for ‘art shop’, there is very low purchase intent behind the keyword, even though it gets the vast majority of searches,” Suby says. “However, if someone is Googling ‘art shop Melbourne’ you know there is purchase intent behind it because they are thinking about a location to go and look at.”

While search engine marketing might be 20 years old, Suby says it continues to evolve rapidly. This is being driven in part by changes being made directly by Google, such as removing the ability to target an exact phrase match.

“Google AdWords as a platform today is completely unrecognisable to what it was six months ago,” Suby says. “New features are constantly being rolled out across client campaigns, and unless you are really looking at these campaigns weekly and daily, then there is a lot of wastage that occurs.”

Suby says one particularly useful tool now is the site, Answerthepublic.com, which pulls in aggregate search data from Bing and Google.

“You can look at what that keyword mindmap looks like in a visual representation and look at all the questions people are asking,” Suby says.

As a result of working with King Kong, Donaldson says Art Lovers’ has seen a return on investment of $6 for every $1 spent.

“We could see the advice was valuable, especially for newcomers like us, and it brought our attention to things we had missed,” Donaldson says. “At the moment, we have 60 words out there and 50 sitting in first second or third place, and 56 are on the first page. So the agency has done a really great job of getting those words in there.”

More of CMO's coverage on digital marketing:

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia, or check us out on Google+: google.com/+CmoAu 

Join the newsletter!

Or

Sign up to gain exclusive access to email subscriptions, event invitations, competitions, giveaways, and much more.

Membership is free, and your security and privacy remain protected. View our privacy policy before signing up.

Error: Please check your email address.
Show Comments

Latest Videos

More Videos

More Brand Posts

What are Chris Riddell's qualifications to talk about technology? What are the awards that Chris Riddell has won? I cannot seem to find ...

Tareq

Digital disruption isn’t disruption anymore: Why it’s time to refocus your business

Read more

Enterprisetalk

Mark

CMO's top 10 martech stories for the week - 9 June

Read more

Great e-commerce article!

Vadim Frost

CMO’s State of CX Leadership 2022 report finds the CX striving to align to business outcomes

Read more

Are you searching something related to Lottery and Lottery App then Agnito Technologies can be a help for you Agnito comes out as a true ...

jackson13

The Lottery Office CEO details journey into next-gen cross-channel campaign orchestration

Read more

Thorough testing and quality assurance are required for a bug-free Lottery Platform. I'm looking forward to dependability.

Ella Hall

The Lottery Office CEO details journey into next-gen cross-channel campaign orchestration

Read more

Blog Posts

Marketing prowess versus the enigma of the metaverse

Flash back to the classic film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Television-obsessed Mike insists on becoming the first person to be ‘sent by Wonkavision’, dematerialising on one end, pixel by pixel, and materialising in another space. His cinematic dreams are realised thanks to rash decisions as he is shrunken down to fit the digital universe, followed by a trip to the taffy puller to return to normal size.

Liz Miller

VP, Constellation Research

Why Excellent Leadership Begins with Vertical Growth

Why is it there is no shortage of leadership development materials, yet outstanding leadership is so rare? Despite having access to so many leadership principles, tools, systems and processes, why is it so hard to develop and improve as a leader?

Michael Bunting

Author, leadership expert

More than money talks in sports sponsorship

As a nation united by sport, brands are beginning to learn money alone won’t talk without aligned values and action. If recent events with major leagues and their players have shown us anything, it’s the next generation of athletes are standing by what they believe in – and they won’t let their values be superseded by money.

Simone Waugh

Managing Director, Publicis Queensland

Sign in