The Growth Of Co-Op SEM

There’s a growing trend in the world of jewelry co-op advertising. Finally, brands seem to be catching on to the fact that digital media should be a part of a successful retailer’s marketing mix. Over the last year or two, we’ve seen more and more brands mandate that in order for retailers to receive full co-op reimbursement on their marketing dollars, they must allocate a percentage of their annual budget to digital media. At Fruchtman, we’ve been preaching for quite some time now that digital media must have a place in your annual marketing plan, so we’re obviously fans of this trend and happy to see brands catching up. One of the options we typically see offered as part of the digital co-op mix is paid search marketing, most often times through Google AdWords. This gets us Fruchtman folks excited; we’re a certified Google Partner and are big proponents of search engine marketing, after all. However, we caution our clients to be careful, do their homework and examine the specific requirements by brand before signing on the dotted line – careful, like many other things the devil is in the details. When considering commitment to annual co-op paid search campaigns with your brands, make sure to ask some basic questions: • Is the brand requiring me to use general keywords that could sabotage my other brands’ SEM campaigns? • Many brands will suggest or even require you use general keywords such as “jewelry”, “diamond” or “watch”. These keywords can compete with your other paid search campaigns, and steal impressions and clicks from them. • Where will the paid search ads click through to? • Almost always, we structure our paid search ads to click through to the respective brand page on our clients’ websites; so, for example, a Brand X paid search ad for Client Y would click through to the Brand X landing page on Client Y’s website. Increasingly, we’re seeing brands require that in order to be considered for co-op reimbursement, paid search ads must click through to the brand’s website as opposed to the client’s. That means the Brand X paid search ad would send consumers straight to Brand X’s website. If your brand is requiring this, remember that your marketing dollars would be used to drive traffic to the brand’s website, not your own, providing you very little benefit. • Is the brand requiring you to have them execute and maintain the SEM co-op campaign, or will they give you the flexibility to allow whoever is controlling the rest of your SEM campaigns to control the co-op campaign as well? • Again, you want to make sure that your SEM campaigns aren’t competing with one another. If there are “multiple cooks in the kitchen,” this could lead to severe cross over with your campaigns and ultimately wasteful ad spending. You want to take advantage of those co-op dollars being offered by your brands – we get it. And many times this means “playing by their rules”. The key is to make sure all of your digital marketing campaigns complement one another, leading to the most effective use of your marketing dollars. On the surface this seems to be an easy task and common sense; however, as you dig down into the all of the digital options that exist today it can become pretty confusing. Not to worry – that’s what experts like us exist for, to help you make sense of the madness and put the digital puzzle together. Want to know more? Contact us at suits@fruchtman.com and let’s talk co-op, SEM, digital media and growing your business!