Clear Channel

Clear Channel UK is an Out of Home media and infrastructure company, operating over 33,000 advertising sites nationwide. These sites include:

1. The UK’s most extensive digital Out of Home network, Adshel Live
2. The biggest digital shopping centre advertising network, Malls Live
3. The largest digital network in pubs and bars, Socialite, among other advertising formats.  

The Clear Channel Direct team specifically focuses on SME’s and local advertisers, while the national sales team partners with brands, agencies and Out of Home Specialists.

Clear Channel came to Climb Online seeking a marketing strategy that would enable them to grow the value of inbound leads while maximising the overall effectiveness of their marketing efforts. 

Clear Channel Direct had two websites with two distinct audiences. The direct website was designed and managed in-house, and used to generate leads for the direct sales team. They also utilised a second website, which was used as a shop window for the national side of the business. 

Clear Channel Direct historically utilised PPC to drive their sales leads, focusing on branded terms.

Given the two distinct audiences, Climb Online identified two overarching objectives. Firstly, they needed to ensure both brands appeared in the SERPs for relevant search terms. Secondly, they needed to create a paid strategy that did not confuse the two divergent user personas.

After an in-depth analysis of both websites’ performance, respective share of traffic and exhaustive market and competitors research, we discovered although both sites had distinct audiences, there was significant keyword overlap, with the brand name ‘Clear Channel’ being the biggest traffic driver for both sites.  

Armed with this information, Climb Online developed an approach that would resolve the issue of the two websites, while reaching two overarching objectives: 

1. Ensure both brands appeared in the SERPs for relevant search terms
2. Create a paid strategy that did not confuse the two divergent user personas and would allow deeper insights and optimisations to maximise Clear Channel’s marketing growth.

Given the greater brand recognition of the direct site, Climb Oline’s solution was to migrate the two sites onto one domain, strengthening the position of both in the SERPs. 

The Climb Online SEO team and Clear Channel’s Marketing team carefully planned a new sitemap, plotting how to best integrate the Direct content into the national site.  Our collaborative approach resulted in a smooth migration, leaving the site in a much better technical position when compared with pre-migration. 

The Climb Online CRO team conducted an in-depth user behaviour analysis and a UX audit of the website features on the old site. It delivered an optimisation recommendation report including mock-ups and designs of new features to improve the functionality and conversions rate of the new site. 

Based on the clients’ objectives, the audience analysis and the overarching omnichannel journey, Climb Online formulated a paid social strategy focused on driving awareness and consideration for Clear Channel products, targeting the direct customer base. 

Clear Channel direct’s first-party data revealed that the audience could be segmented into broad categories. 

Clear Channel’s awareness and consideration campaign was designed as a full-funnel strategy to be used across LinkedIn and Facebook to gain the benefit of detailed audience segmentation on LinkedIn, combined with the cost-efficiency on Facebook, resulting in an increased reach of the most relevant audience at each touchpoint. 

Based on the customer base analysis, Climb Online created audience segments of the three main categories (SMEs, Education and FMCG) that were then targeted with bespoke creative strategies using tailored videos and statics relevant to their category and conversion path stage. Facebook was used as the main re-targeting platform within the omnichannel conversion strategy to engage users before conversion.

Having identified a reliance on branded terms for search conversions, the aim was to transform this reliance by introducing generic terms and increasing non-branded traffic. 

The goal was twofold:

1. To capture the portion of the market owned by Clear Channel’s competitors
2. Given the ongoing site migration, to use PPC as a mining tool for SEO keywords for use in Clear Channel’s blog and on-page content. 

The brand campaign was shifted to pure brand awareness, focusing on significantly increasing impression share while reducing cost-per-click, improving visibility and efficiency, while continuing to grow retention leads. The account was then restructured to focus on non-branded keywords and gradually move to a cost per acquisition bidding strategy. 

As well as increasing the volume of enquiries through non-branded traffic, Climb Online wanted to improve the quality and relevance of generated leads. This was achieved through the creation of local breakaway campaigns, audience targeting, wasted spend optimisation and strong keyword exclusion.

Having migrated both sites into one, Climb Online sought to increase the visibility of the Clear Channel direct pages on the national website. These were new pages with limited authority and generated no traffic, therefore required a strategy that would ensure increased traction for the URLs through outreach and link building, whilst increasing on-page optimisation and authority through new content creation. 

Climb Online focused on blogs for the new content creation strategy, ensuring they responded to the needs of the new audience, whilst supporting the new pages dedicated to locations, and utilised keyword targeting pulled from conversion and search data taken from the PPC campaign.