Spend less, get more with PPC marketing
There is no such thing as a sales funnel with Google Adwords PPC marketing.
With traditional marketing, it is tempting always to contact a lot of people, and by process of elimination the leads will eventually fall out the bottom of the funnell.
Yes – the sales funnell is deliberately upside down, and you don’t need to read it. Starting with awareness and ending up with a deal is the old way.
Starting with your best prospects and working outwards is the new way, at least it is for us here in marketing newtown (milton keynes).
Search marketing visualisation
The reality of the search marketing world is that it’s flat. Time starts as soon as you press the ‘go’ button.
Advertising on the most specific of terms, those best describing the product or service you offer, the more likely you are to get contacts.
So, widening the search, so to speak, as per the diagram above, can result in potentially less hits for your money. The balance is to keep juggling factors to keep the return on investment.
In other words, the less you spend initially, the more likely you are to get good value. (why not start then?)
Broad search terms could still be desirable, because you may still influence people earlier in their buying cycle. But the key is to reduce the non-relevant clicks as much as is possible. Negative keywords, restricting location or keeping phrases and adverts very specific are good examples of digital marketing to the niches.
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Unfinished Websites
It is a state of mind.
How shall we improve it today?
Splitting the marketing atom
You may know that physics has a rather interesting problem.
In layman’s terms (meaning I can get this ever so slightly wrong), there are;
a. well understood laws for large objects – bigger than an atom – called relativity, and
b. well understood (if not quite complete) laws for very small objects or particles in ‘quantum’ level physics.
And, these laws are mutually incompatible.
Up until 50 years ago, physicists were making brilliant progress, assuming that all was going swimmingly well, and but for a few pauses, discoveries of the 18th century were being developed and were informing the next logical theories right through to the point it all just….got really confusing, and nothing worked.
Even Einstein spent his last thirty years looking for something that would bring it all together, but ultimately he came up blank.
Marketing has similar issues.
As our friend Seth Godin says, mass marketing has worked fine, making its inexorable progress through the TV industrial complex, right up to the point where things got very small. Channels, readership, circulation, user bases, blog posts (twitter) and attention spans (I must get to the point), well, they have all shrunk immeasurably.
Suddenly, the old rules don’t work any more – in fact they’re more confusing than anything we could have possibly imagined. Just like our physics.
We’re dealing in fragments.
Fragmented tasks, fragmented communications, markets, job descriptions, jobs, economic realities, projects, product life cycles and fleeting fads, microscopic opportunities. Higgs Boson PR anyone?
Are we truly going to end up marketing on a one to one basis? Hasn’t anyone got a chaos theory we can use to put this together? Well, there have been a few viewpoints around one aspect – SEO vs PR. All from one conversation on a social network. Now there’s a promising start.
Jamie Burke and the evolution of Online PR
Jed Hallam, SEO and Public Relations
Stuart Bruce, Public relations is about reputation
Stephen Waddington, good summary from a technical PR perspective
Julia Shuvalova, you need every digital marketing skill in a perfect world (including the higgs boson perhaps)
My two penneth, at this stage, is that this seems like a classic big bang confluence of ideas, skillsets and job descriptions. A Large Hadron Collider…especially when you include communications technology, which is driving all this together (in circles perhaps). Convergence.
Industry vs techniques, pah, so much fluff to me. Where do we all come from, and what is the meaning of life? Is there a dog after all? Which particle of the marketing atom are you?
Forget whatever industry you think you’re in, it is about sales, marketing and relationships. But not necessarily in that order.
As an aside to my PR friends, isn’t reputation management only necessary when you’re not able to control your product or your people….oh wait, what? we can’t do that?
I do have some string theory, I’ll have to post soon, but I’m getting the feeling the attention span is ‘gone’, and we’re all moving on to the next big passing phase. So I’ll stop for now.
Any more views you can point out, the more the merrier.
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Google's tough tactics for tough times
A timely page from Google for people thinking of reviewing their Adwords tactics.
I did chuckle at one stat they used to support the Adwords business case.
Marketing is more important than ever. Ninety-four percent of CMOs believe that “a tough economic period is precisely the time when marketing plays a key role.”
Source: Epsilon, “Epsilon CMO Survey,” September, 2008.
What I want to know is, which 6 percent of CMO’s don’t think marketing will play a key role.
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Internet marketing numbers, quick look
If your website isn’t working as well as it might, how much do you have to improve to make a significant impact on the numbers?
Without measuring, lets say the poor site is converting visitors to prospects at perhaps just .5% – lets go with that low figure for the moment.
By the way, when you look, exclude people who search for your business – this includes referrals, existing customers, suppliers and competitors and so forth -they already know you, so you’ll get those prospects anyway. Also exclude any possible robotic visitors….this is about potential new internet customers.
At half a percent, just a 1 percent extra conversion rate could triple your prospects.
Once you improve the conversion rate, lets say we doubled the number of relevant visitors, or tripled – wouldn’t that mean we were adding 6 to 9 times as many prospects?
It’s not difficult.
If you don’t know how your website is working – that would be the first step.
And yes, ok, lots more questions to be asked, but it’s useful to keep in mind how a little effort can go an awful long way.
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