Categories
Business Performance Customer Experience Search Engine Marketing

NatYes or NatLess: NatWest Campaign Lacking TV & Digital Integration

https://youtu.be/jiN-cNJxvN0

From personal experience, I know TV campaigns cost a lot. Digital campaigns can be no small change either. But regardless of the size of your budget you need to be smart about getting maximum return on your spend.

This requires joined up thinking across your campaigns (or preferably your single integrated campaign) and plenty of forward planning.

With this in mind it’s disappointing to see the latest campaign from NatWest.

Check the video below of the new TV advert and watch out for the call to action in the penultimate ‘frame’.

Did you catch it? ‘Search NatYes‘.

Go search for NatYes – what do you find?

Nothing. Well, except for that paid adwords ad at the top of the page. Absolutely nothing about NatYes in the free listings.

This is a missed opportunity for NatWest – and an opportunity for a competitor to jump in and steal some traffic.

  1. If you’re going to ask your prospective customers to search for a keyword, then you need to make sure your website or landing page appears if someone searches on it. This requires preparation. You need to create your landing pages in advance of your campaign and given the gap between storyboarding a TV advert and the ad going live you have plenty of time to get this sorted.
  2. The advantage of using a phrase like ‘NatYes’ is that it is a unique word that no one is using – see the above search results as a case in point. Therefore, it should be easy to optimise for your chosen term(s)and get a top listing quickly.
  3. You might also want to go grab the URLs – natyes.co.uk, natyes.com, etc. Customers will likely just search for the phrase, but you never know if some cheeky competitor or affiliate marketer might jump in and secure a higher listing than your page
  4. At the very least NatWest have sponsored the term on Adwords. This is essential if you have no organic listings. Even if you do you’ll need to be prepared to spend some money on PPC to support the campaign just in case any of your competitors decide to sponsor the term too.

Where NatWest have done well is the landing page. Whilst you can only get to it from the paid ad, there are a couple of things they’ve got right:

  1. Firstly they have scent. They have continued the visual design from the ad onto the landing page, using the image of the boy actor in the Indian headdress. This gives the user confidence that they have arrived in the right place. Removing doubt in the customer’s mind is a key objective of every landing page.
  2. They have reused the slogan ‘NatYes’ from the TV ad on the landing page. The only thing I’d suggest is using it a little higher up the page. Currently it is beneath the fold and not visible in that crucial first second when the user scans the page.
natwest_lp

In summary, think about the customer journey from end to end. Everything must be consistent and flow. At no point do you want the flow to be interrupted – those are the moments you lose your customers. Even worse, is if you lose the customer to a competitor who was smart enough to optimise their activity around your campaign.

Say Yes to smart, joined up thinking.

Update 10/06/13:

The story doesn’t stop there. NatWest’s sister brand RBS are using the same approach, with a call to action of ‘Search RBYes’ in their TV advert. This time though there is a rather unfortunate run-in with Google spelling auto-correct feature that renders quite different results…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *