Search Marketing (PPC) | Carpet Bomb or Target Hit? (Part 1 of 5)
In this 5 part series, I will attempt to document and share my learnings of some of the common mistakes search marketers make and how to overcome it. I will also share some of my ideas that I have used in the past that should help you reach that pot of gold using search marketing (PPC)!
When you look at Search Marketing as an option, there could be one of 2 primary objectives:
1) Brand Awareness OR 2) User Action (lead generation, direct online sale and so on)
More often than not, you’d be pushed into taking the carpet bombing approach regardless of the objective.
This could be because of some key issues (depending on the industry or vertical)
1. Limited Budget
2. Crowded Space
3. Everyone’s bidding for everything
So, what do you do? You bring out a long list of keywords and go after a share of the pie in each of these keywords. Ultimately, the campaign doesn’t do well, because you are stretching your moneys and diluting your budget.
Here’s what you should look at even before you work out the search marketing campaign structure:
1. What does my business do? Get into the details really. Is it a crowded market? Is competition intense? Is there enough business to go around for everyone? You’ll be surprised to find that there actually is enough for everyone.
2. What works best for my business? Take that clear shot at conversion. Work out the math (or should I say Science) of what you need and then work backwards to how many impressions you need, how many clicks and therefore how many conversions…
3. Choose not more than 75-100 keywords and bucket them based on which phase the consumer is in the online purchase cycle (more on this in a future post in this series)
4. There are between 4 and 5 phases as far as online search behaviour is concerned (depending on the industry vertical). Now bid for just those 20-30 keywords in each phase. Follow this up with the usual keyword level optimization, A/B Testing on ads and Landing Pages, Bid optimization and so on. Now, watch the ticker move in the right direction…
Easy? Try it! Once you are done with those 100 keywords and the structure works, move on to another set of 100 and so on, adding to your search marketing growth and performance.
How to Push Down Negative Comments in Google Search Results?
About 3 months back I posted an answer to this question on LinkedIN and this morning received a notification that my answer was chosen as the best answer by the person who asked the question. Since it took so long for the person who asked the original question to pick the best answer and my answer recommends a 2-4 month plan to resolve this, I guess s/he waited to see if the solution works. Now that it has been chosen as the best answer, I think it’s only fair to share it for all to use, so here goes…
- Identify the keywords/phrases in your optimization list that is common to the negative comments listing.
- Stop all optimization for these keywords/phrases for the next 2-4 months
- Generate general & press articles and submit them to appropriate directories (at least a 100 directories a month) for the next 2-4 months
- Add more content on your website (needless to say, relevant content) high on in-links and optimize these pages for your keywords.
This 4-step technique should do the trick, but it really depends on specific details on what kind of negative comments you are referring to.
So, go ahead and use this simple approach and share it along.
Google Places | The Good and the Bad
Over the past couple of weeks or more Google has begun testing their new algorithm that gives prominence to local business listings in the search results. I have been following the changes closely and it got me thinking on a search engine’s fundamental stand and commitment to the end-user. Being the game changers in the late ’90s, Google’s commitment to provide end users what they want and help users find information quickly was what separated them from the “directories” of yesteryears, like Yahoo! and AltaVista. That was definitely great news for all and sundry and how this contributed to today’s Google is legend in itself.
Keeping this basic value proposition in mind, a couple of aspects in this new test phase got me thinking:
1. Local business listings showing up over organic results is definitely a great idea, but the user experience or more so user behaviour is such that people will not go beyond the first set of results, so here’s what might happen… if things actually work out the way they should, the first page of Google’s search results will have PPC ads, places ads, places organic and search organic results, all of the same brands (probably 2-3 brands). Not good! Will the first page result end up being a blind spot for users?
2. Relevance of reviews from trusted websites is another great idea but here’s where this fails as of now. The results shown are sorted based on total number of reviews. How does effect overall effectiveness of showing a user relevant content? Let me use a hotel as an example to depict this:
Hotel A‘s website has a total of 500 reviews on a trusted website such as TripAdvisor while Hotel B‘s website has 200. Hotel A will have prominence over Hotel B. Now, let’s dig deeper… of the 500 reviews, 480 are negative reviews of the hotel while Hotel B numbers show only 2 negative reviews. In this case, Hotel B definitely needs to get higher prominence and as a user is more relevant that Hotel A.
So, sure the algorithm needs tweaking and reworking but what is really needed is for a path-breaking innovation from Google’s end to ensure that they stick to their core of giving a user the most relevant content on the web in a fraction of a second!
There is another nagging issue of the importance given to domain names that match search queries, but that’s for another day…
Web Analytics | What it Means to me
Earlier today, I read an article by Brian Clifton, Five Predictions For Web Analytics in 2010 and found myself feeling nostalgic about web log files, WebTrends, MarketWave’s HitList and so on. Back in 1996 when I first began my tryst with the web – designing, creating and managing the first web presence for Aditi Technologies, I remember getting excited about the Pivot Tables feature in Excel. I would see these graphs on WebTrends or HitList and sit with my manager (and my long-standing mentor), with log files in hand and talk about how cool it is that we have grown from 20 visits a day to 200 visits a day! His response would be, so how much time did people spend on our website?
Hmm… one minute, I have it here somewhere, Ah! yes it’s in the web log file, there’s a session start time and session end time. I can work it out through the night and give it to you first thing in the morning.
Today, the world of web analytics has changed and I do love this new world but somewhere the mystery of playing around with raw numbers and new data types is still missing. In 2005, Google Analytics, changed the game. People didn’t necessarily have to rely on “analytics junkies” or “expensive tools” to understand what was happening on the website. Great? Not really, because 5 years down the line, we’re back (both the junkies and some tools, including GA). The most interesting part about the Internet game is that everything is measurable, so let’s talk business outcomes now!
I’m back on this blog after a 2 year hiatus but I am hoping that this post, for me, is one game-changing post for things to come.
Signing off for now…
Amitha Singh
Branding for the long haul
Time and again, it is said that branding is always for the long haul. However, in today’s drastically changing marketplace, not to mention rising inflation, everyone is focusing on (rightly so) increasing turnover, profitability, bottom-line immediately. How then should one survive in this marketplace, while ensuring that the brand itself will remain relevant all the time and live past the ‘interesting times’ that we live in?
Let me see if I can put down a bullet-list to answer this based on experience and observation:
1. Separate branding from marketing and sales
This needs to be done from an ownership point of view and not necessarily a functional point of view. What this means is that branding has got to be, at all times, an ongoing activity in itself, with overlaps onto marketing and/or sales activities. As an organization, it is healthy to set aside a branding budget and ensure that even in the toughest of times, this does not get slashed. Consistent efforts in branding, enables a long-term acquisition of mind-space in a consumers mind. The psychological model, Associated Network Memory Model (will elaborate on this in a future post), demonstrates how the human mind stores data and how the stored data can be strengthened. The age-old adage of “out of sight, is out of mind” is sure to catch up with brands that fail to have a constant branding plan.
2. List what marketing support your product would require from a branding perspective to ensure positioning is consistent.
This one is my favourite, yet I have seen very few brands doing it and the ones that do are, needless to say, successful brands (in terms of brand valuation for sure!). Basics toward maintaining consistency of a brand is often ignored by organizations. Do you have a brand manual? Do you have a brand bible? Do you have a brand history book?
If you don’t have any of these, now is as good a time as any to set this straight – go on and get this done!
If you do have all these, is this data accessible to anyone and everyone within the organization who is even remotely associated with a marketing function? If not, don’t rush out to handover copies of these to everyone, not yet (we don’t want the rainforest depleting anymore than it already is, do we?)!
You have all these and all marketing people within the organization have access to it? Now, that is a lot of data for someone to handle, take a step back… information overload is not what I had in mind. You need to build a content management system which will give out information from these 3 books based on job role and / or marketing activity for which the person requests the data.
Makes sense? Now, from a branding perspective, all your marketing activities is set to ensure consistency in product positioning.
3. List what sales requires (from the brand) in order to increase sales.
This is very specific to brand identity elements, starting from the name, logo, and moving on to tools such as a website, the right packaging design and so on. Since you have covered the point above, brand consistency should be a given now.
That seems simple, right? But here’s the tough part… Your branding initiative itself needs to be broken into current image (historic data), immediate requirement (tactical) and long-term path (strategic).
Now bring in design thinking. What is design thinking? It is nothing but the ability to solve problems (I am now conveniently assuming that requirements are also problems) using creative approaches and understanding of human behaviour is critical here. Here is what should happen when you do that:
1. Current image – turns into knowledge of your brand.
2. Immediate requirement – turns into ‘relevant tweaks’, for a lack of a better word, that is an absolute must for your brand.
3. Long-term path – maps all such things including trends, human behaviour (from a sociological perspective), business core purpose, potential of your business (more in line with the knowledge of your brand) and collectively produces the right image that your brand will need to grow into or evolve into as time passes.
I will get into the depth of these 3 in another post on another day (will also ensure that I add a link here back to the post).
This will result in some ‘boring’ guidelines, some interesting concepts and a lot of strategic direction for your brand. Seems like a long process? Sure, but the best recommendation is to make this an ongoing part within your organisation, it needs to be part of your culture!
Now, just put a team of designers with each of the teams (branding, marketing and sales) with mandates as defined from the above process and voila! Watch how your brand grows and the bottom-line gets healthier too.
Raison d’être
Around a couple of weeks back, I sat down to review and grade answer sheets on “Brand Marketing and Promotion Strategies” from my recent MBA batch. While most of my students seemed to have understood basic concepts in brand marketing, almost all of them were unable to grasp the practical aspect of building brands and growing them in such a changing global environment.
Now, most of us who are in the field of communication, branding, brand marketing and design are able to keep pace with changing economies, market trends, evolution of media etc., I just put myself in my student’s shoes and what do you have as information? A lot… and nothing! That’s when I decided to start 2 blogs, one on Design and Branding (more from a brand marketing standpoint – which is this one) and the other on Design Management.
I am hoping that I will be able to generate a repository of information, examples, views, and a lot more that would enable a willing and interested newbie gear up to the concept of brand, brand marketing and the relation between design and brand. This is clearly the current Raison d’être of this blog. I know that this will be a long road, but the plan is to stay disciplined about this and keep it growing…
Marketing, Branding, Internet Marketing, Web Analytics, and more... 