MIVA's VP of global marketing and communications explains how brands can leverage emerging trends to optimize pay-per-click strategies.

Marketing is a conversation. The phrase sounds like the title of one of those sleep-inducing industry books, but in today's Web 2.0 world it truly has become a reality. The campaigns that get results today are those in which companies listen to their target audience, monitor emerging trends and use the insights they glean to develop engaging two-way dialogues.

In the past, gathering these insights would involve laborious quantitative surveys, or long hours spent sitting behind two-way mirrors in focus group sessions. Those days are all but gone now. Analytics and Web 2.0 sites give marketers near total visibility into the opinions of potential customers and, importantly, their reaction to emerging trends and breaking news stories.

Yet despite these resources, there are still many companies not fully harnessing this wealth of available data. So what are the tips marketers should be following to effectively leverage emerging trends?

Breaking stories -- whether it is Britney Spears shaving her head, or buzz surrounding the latest movie release -- result in spikes in search volumes, that is a given. Understanding and acting on these spikes is the challenge and that comes down to resources. Whether you in-source or outsource your online marketing, it's important to have someone who can monitor emerging trends as they relate to your specific business sector.

As stories break, you need to make a strategic decision as to whether you can leverage off them. Newspaper publishers have been quick to seize on these opportunities, using Pay-Per-Click extensively as a tool to increase readership. Newspapers have an obvious advantage, however, through the availability of related content. For companies in other sectors, there may be a requirement to develop bespoke content. As a story breaks, for example, is there value in building a micro-site and buying keywords against relevant terms to drive traffic to that site? Or buying tactical keywords and pointing people to a blog posting or forum on the topic in question? Your objective should be to try and gain ownership of relevant trends as they emerge.

Newspaper publishers' aggressive use of Pay-Per-Click to increase readership highlights an interesting issue, namely the dos and don'ts of bidding on potentially sensitive terms. Several publishers have come under fire for bidding on terms relating to major tragedies. Are they right or wrong? The reality is that there's no one-size-fits-all solution; the key instead is to understand your specific target audience and in turn their likely reaction to ads being aligned with breaking stories.

Your PR agency or department will often be best placed to feed into this more reactive style of Pay-Per-Click advertising. They will typically have many of the evaluation and monitoring tools already in place to pick up on trends as they emerge. Pay-Per-Click simply gives PR people a powerful and immediate tool to support their ongoing media relations. Integrating PR and SEM is smart business practice and can help ensure you extract the maximum value from your online marketing investment.

This Pay-Per-Click strategy is of course equally important for trends that may have a negative impact on your brand. A search on Google and Yahoo! for McDonald's ubiquitous 'I'm Lovin' It' slogan reveals an activism site more highly ranked than McDonald's own micro-site. This activism site is essentially leveraging McDonald's ad spend to get its negative message across. A tactical Pay-Per-Click campaign would help give McDonald's a degree of control.

In addition to developing reactive campaigns, it's also important to know when to switch off existing campaigns or adapt keyword strategies. Well-planned keyword portfolios by default cover a range of different areas or themes. That increases the touch points for potential customers, which is a good thing as long as there are no negative stories associated with the areas that your keywords target.

You may be using Pay-Per-Click to leverage your sponsorship of a sports personality, for example. But if that personality becomes embroiled in a doping scandal, best practice would be to immediately suspend those campaigns and in turn limit the damage to your brand.

You should consider grouping keywords by theme and then setting up news alerts or appointing online monitoring agencies to regularly report on those themes. In essence, it's about ensuring that your online campaigns are evolving in tandem with emerging trends and not working in isolation.

When leveraging emerging trends, it is also important to consider ad placement. The search networks are clearly an important gateway, though for many people, getting their latest news fix will often involve going straight to their bookmarked gossip sites, industry portals or social networks. As a result, the contextual Pay-Per-Click networks become increasingly important and can also provide a considerably lower cost of entry for these more reactive Pay-Per-Click campaigns.

Trends emerge across every sector, both in the B2B and B2C spaces. Leveraged effectively, they can greatly enhance online marketing strategies. Your customers can in effect become an extension of your marketing department, defining the creative and strategic direction of your campaigns and even informing the shape of future product launches. Web 2.0 has opened up direct channels of communication with your customers. How you use them is up to you.

Chrysi Philalithes is VP global marketing & communications, MIVA. Read full bio.