Questions to Get Your Paid Search Campaign Started Right
I’ve run into a number of clients who really don’t understand where to start when it comes to generating targeted leads through paid search. The more I thought about it, I decided it would be helpful to provide some guidelines for clients to gain a basic understanding of things you need to think about to run a successful online lead generation campaign.
I asked Joe Ford, our strategic partner from NetVantage Marketing, to pull together a few of the basic things you need to think about. He actually came up with several items for you to evaluate. Here are Joe’s thoughts:
Like any marketing initiative, it is always important that your online marketing campaign get off to a good start. The pre-launch work that goes into a campaign can pay large dividends, and it can also save a lot money and headaches in the long run.
The following is a set of questions that can serve as a checklist when you’re looking to get a paid search campaign off the ground. These are broad questions, in many cases you will want to dig deeper to properly investigate the value points of each area depending on the campaign objectives. You should be getting asked similar questions by your online marketing firm, or asking yourself these questions if managing your campaigns in-house.
1. What is the overall background and mission of the company?
2. What are the goals of your online campaign in relation to:
a. Brand positioning
b. Building awareness
c. Increasing leads
d. Increasing revenue via direct sales/ecommerce
e. Are there any offline/traditional campaign efforts that should be coordinated with the paid search campaign?
3. Has there been past work done in the online marketing arena? If so, what were the metrics for success, and is there data that we can use to investigate?
4. Has there been web analytics in place to detail the performance of the current website?
5. How long has the website been in its current state? If there has been current changes, was the results tracked through web analytics?
6. Is there a greater emphasis on certain products or services than others? Should we be marketing and driving traffic to certain products and services that are better sellers or represent higher margin?
7. What is the target audience profile, and what are the different personas throughout the buying cycle (this can have a profound effect on keyword selection)? Are there any new audiences that we are trying to target with this campaign?
8. Either from current web traffic reports, or from a qualitative business standpoint, what are the keywords that your target audiences are utilizing to find your site?
9. What are the initial keywords that you feel you want to be ranked highly on for your business?
10. Are there any online channels that you deem necessary to be placed on?
11. What is the testing strategy? What variables will be evaluated, and what is the cause/effect frequency that you or your firm has in place. (This will be especially important early on in your campaign)
These examples represent a basic foundation of questions to gain the right information to form a strong campaign that hits target audiences and meets your online marketing goals. As you can see, there is a combination of qualitative and quantitative information that needs to be gathered. Keep in mind that these initiatives should be treated with the same processes and standards as any marketing campaign you conduct.
As you can imagine, starting a pay per click campaign without answering these above questions can lead to major trouble and a lot of reactive work post campaign launch. It is important that this foundation is created as comprehensively as possible. This will allow your testing platform and refinement strategy to have the best chance for success!
Where do you go to find information on a business?
Filed under: General Marketing, Search Engine Marketing
We have had some discussion around the office recently on where people go today when they want to find a particular business or business product? It use to be that our only option was to pull out the “Yellow Pages”. Obviously today, the Internet has changed our world in this area … but, how many people are really using the Internet instead of the Yellow Pages?
Well, my informal poll is really inconclusive. Some still use Yellow Pages, some exclusively use the Internet and some use a mix of both depending on what their need is. I searched the Internet for some more statistical backing in this area. The reports I found were a little dated and one can only believe that today’s stats would point to an even greater share of consumers using the Internet:
- –In June 2007, comScore Networks reported that 60% of local consumers now go online to search for local businesses, as opposed to 33% that go first to the printed Yellow Pages.
- –Almost 40% of local shoppers say that a presence on the Internet – or lack of presence – will affect their decision about who they do business with. [Source: Web.com, 2007]
-
Nearly 137 billion searches were conducted at the five U.S. core search engines in 2008, representing an increase of
21 % versus the previous year. [Source: comScore Networks, 2009] - Search query growth was driven largely by an increase in searches per searcher, which rose 16% from the previous year, while number of unique searchers grew 6% . [Source: comScore Networks, 2009]
- Google Sites, which generated nearly 85 billion searches in 2008, accounted for nearly 90 percent of the total growth in
search query volume during the year. [Source: comScore Networks, 2009]
Clearly, every business needs to think through how they establish their electronic presence … as it is an increasing part of every company’s marketing efforts.
Build your email mix with sweepstakes!
Filed under: Data Cleansing and Enhancement, Email Marketing, General Marketing, Sweepstakes and Contests
I was visiting with a client the other day who was doing an excellent job of acquiring their customers’ email addresses. They are very experienced marketers who focus the majority of their marketing efforts on cross-sell activities.
They were leveraging enticing promotional sweepstakes as a way to drive email activation from customers who had not previously provided email addresses. Clearly, they understand the communications savings of the email channel and current customer marketing trends in this area. Take a look below, according to a recent industry channel preference white paper, over 70% of consumers would prefer the email channel for communications from companies they have granted permission to send ongoing communications:
Customer preferences are continuing to evolve … becoming more understanding when email communications is the most effective for their lives. Clearly, marketers understand the cost efficiencies and speed of the communications.
For marketers, the use of a well designed sweepstakes can be a great way to increase your customer email coverage … ultimately allowing you to lower your customer communications costs and speed to market.
