2019 Bronze Best Use of Search
04 Dec 2019
Agency: Merkle
Client: Benefit
Campaign Name: The benefit of voice
Campaign Overveiw
In a saturated industry, Benefit wanted to ensure it was the only voice being heard.
Traditional search leads to thousands of answers to a single question. But with voice search, users usually get only one answer.
Strategy
Optimising for voice search has two options: the transactional route via Amazon’s Alexa; and the informational route, where voice assistants read out Featured Snippets from Google. Amazon doesn’t list Benefit, so it plumped for Featured Snippets.
The cosmetics brand was able to own voice search and connect directly with the consumer, ensuring it would be heard. It also dominated traditional search.
The strategy enabled strong ROI, which will continue to grow alongside voice search adoption.
Creativity
As Benefit sold predominantly through traditional retail channels, it needed to compete with social media-backed start-ups and their direct links to consumers.
The creative thinking led to another direct medium: voice search.
To conquer branded Featured Snippets Benefit needed to implement product structured data.
It gives explicit clues to Google about the nature of content; pushing rich results including price, availability and reviews.
The data was marked up for textual descriptions. They needed to be easily readable for voice assistants. This allowed Benefit to command more prominent search results.
Other fields were added to the structured data: images, price and reviews.
Although not useful for voice, they help optimisation for a variety of rich results in traditional search.
Results
The structured data generated 16 new product description Featured Snippets - 60% higher than the target goal of 10 - which would be read out by voice assistants.
It also generated 50,900 clicks and 1.12 million impressions.
Benefit took control of 16 crucial, branded Featured Snippets previously owned by competitors.
The Team
Grace Devenney, SEO Associate, Merkle - Jonathan Lyon, Senior SEO Associate, Merkle - Charlotte Oldroyd, SEO Associate, Merkle - Stephanie Vincent, SEO Manager, Merkle
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