There are lots of way to use media to promote your business, but in the digital space, they typically fall into one of three categories: earned media, owned media, and paid media.
Earned media is generated by raving rans. It’s the experiences your customers share across the Internet because you earned it with a unique product or service experience.
The media you control completely is referred to as owned media. The content you develop on your website is an example: videos and blogs.
Paid media has been around for generations in the form of outlets like print, radio and television advertising. However, digital opens up the possibilities. With digital media, you have countless opportunities to adapt your particular marketing messaging, targeting and delivery. You can constantly improve the effectiveness of your advertising.
What’s Our Paid Search Secret?
We don’t have one. In basics terms, we follow the same best practices that are available to any company out there. We don’t leverage hidden buttons, secret tricks, or “cutting edge technology”. What we do bring to your team is creativity, hard work and best of all, analytics. Years of experience provides you with our intelligent strategy, constant testing, regular optimizing, and the “art” of balancing technology with the knowledge of customer buying behaviors. So you can track exactly how effective your spend is performing.
And yet there is a PPC secret.
Well, it’s not really that secret. The secret is you. Setting goals for your website.
Here’s what we mean. Too many companies launch Paid Search campaigns with little direction. They simply want to increase website traffic. This can be done pretty easily, and sometimes at a lower cost, by using a lot of different tactics. And there are many unscrupulous PPC agencies out there who use the tactics.
If you want a top-performing digital campaign, it requires a structured plan. Here are a few of the items we analyze.
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of your business
- Seasonality
- Economic conditions
- Cash flow
- Advertising restrictions
- Plans for expansion
- High margin products
- New products
- Previous and present marketing activity
Now we know what the purpose of your website is. Is it to generate sales leads to be followed up by your sales team? Is it an eCommerce site? Do you need to drive traffic into your retail locations? Conversions take many forms. Consider some of these:
- Purchases – obviously, if you sell online, this is the big one. Which products being viewed and purchased? Is there too much cart abandonment?
- Engaged Visitors – how many pages and how much time are customers spending on key pages?
- Calls to action – we track form fills and even phone calls. How many people go to your location map? Even who pauses or fast forward your videos?
- Best performing ads – measure and adapt using your best performing ads as benchmarks
- Subscriptions – how many visitors sign up for your content delivery
- Downloads – is your content being downloaded and consumed (video)
So how do we improve your paid search?
The biggest way we improve your paid search is consistency and expertise. Even the most effective internal marketing manager only has a certain number of hours in the day to manage dozens of marketing activities. Paid search needs consistency and tweaking. Why? Because the algorithms are constantly changing and your competitors are tweaking. We live and breath lead generation tactics, so we can stay on top of this for you.
However, here are other activities we help with:
Competitive keywords: It’s a great way to help you benchmark. We analyze your competitors marketing spend, keyword coverage, even their technical intelligence and brand positioning.
Keyword generation: There are millions to choose from, how do you narrow the field? We start with the basics of relevance and competitiveness, but then we sprinkle in what we refer to as “high purchase intent” keywords. What are the behaviors of your customers when they are ready to buy. A simple example is “used cars” is a general online shopping phrase. A potential customer who is utilizing this keyword is still probably in their early research stages. However, a customer who searches “best used cars in Houston under $10,000” has probably narrowed their search and intending to purchase immediately.
Targeting: In addition to using keywords to target customers, we can show you how to target customers based on their geographic location, the devices they use to browse, the jobs they work and even their hobbies and interests based on their browsing behaviors. It sounds very Big Brother, but customers actually are interested in information being easily accessible as long as it’s relevant information and not spam.
PPC Ad Writing: Missing out on clicks sometimes means the ads are not written effectively based on the information the customer is seeking. However, the reality is there’s no way of knowing which ad is going to be most effective. So many factors change depending on the search query, the geographic location of the user, the time of day, the position of the ad on the page, and a many more. We don’t really like to guess. It’s far more fun to drive profits for you. So we methodically write, test and optimize your digital ads until they are perfect. And then we test them again.
Integration: We integrate your PPC/Paid Search with your conversion rate optimization, search engine optimization, social media, and even your public relations.
Bidding Strategy/Bid Management: We utilize automated bidding management, but this technology is only as good as the strategy. Every bid management technology needs structure start and then needs to be managed with intelligent analysis and data handling.
Alternative Search Engines: We transfer the intelligence we gather from our Google Adwords data and transfer similar tactics to the other search engines. Many think this is a waste of time, but depending on what you read on the Internet, Bing still accounts for as high as 20% of searches. That’s too big to ignore.
International PPC: If you’re passing your ads and keywords through an online auto-translator, you will have problems. Americans don’t search the say way as other nationalities. There are thousands of different colloquialisms and idiosyncrasies. If you want to make searches relevant to the country you’re marketing to, you have make certain keywords not only make sense in the foreign language but also that relevant foreign slang terms are also accommodated. We utilize a speaker of the target foreign language to ensure you’re getting a combination of our PPC expertise with the expert local knowledge. It takes longer, but the results show the benefits.
Advanced Analytics: Without analytics, your website is basically an online brochure and your digital marketing efforts are paralyzed. We use a variety of analytics tools (including Google Analytics) to do more than track traffic. We align the data with the company and website goals. Not only understanding traffic acquisition, content efficiency, and customer interests, but more importantly the data that is driving conversions. Because conversions drive revenues. And that’s the knowledge you need to make informed business decisions. Our approach is simple: better data yields greater results.
Consistency: As we mentioned above, proper Paid Search management takes regular maintenance. And it requires a constant re-education on the changing technological landscapes of search. We can make sure your campaigns stay on top.
Contact us for a free audit of your current Paid Search efforts. We can help you tweak what you’re currently doing.