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Network With Randall
Blogging and Corporate Culture
Corporate blogging is still fairly rare, with only a few big companies choosing to blog. For many companies blogging seems like something that only upper management should be involved in. Many companies begin this way, opening up the blog to department managers, with the plan to slowly open up the blog to a larger number of employees.
While limiting the blog initially to department managers, those managers soon found that either they weren’t familiar with the technology or they didn’t have the time to write. So they asked their employees to either write the posts, and have them proof them, or they wrote them and asked someone to enter them into the blog.
Employees who normally don’t interact with clients started getting excited, the blog means recognition publicly of their expertise. Soon employees were communicating more across departments talking about what someone posted on the blog.
When a corporate blog is opened up to employees it benefits the business in more ways then just taking the load off of management to produce content. The corporate culture is given a boost.
CPA - Is this AdWords or Finance?
In my life, before the Internet became the center of my business and professional life I was a Financial Advisor with one of the largest firms in the US. I wanted to crunch the numbers and find the opportunities and help people actually retire. If you would have asked me about CPA online advertising at the time I would have probably responded that a CPA’s advertising options online are pretty limited, since they are such a highly regulated group. As a Financial Advisor the industry jargon defined CPA as Certified Public Accountant.
In online advertising with Google AdWords, CPA stands for cost-per-action/acquisition. It is a bidding system that requires the use of conversion code, and a specific number of conversions per month. CPA is essentially an autopilot for bidding and daily budgets where Google automatically sets bid level, position and budget levels to meet a target cost per action set by the user. This type of structure is set up for use with campaigns that generate large numbers of conversions. For example, an e-retailer that sells designer hand bag shoe sets can utilize CPA pricing to optimize their campaign for buyers of a new item in stock, or last season’s items by properly organizing and targeting their keywords, ad groups, and campaigns.
The lesson here for small businesses starting into PPC advertising is to be aware of what other industries use the same terms as yours. Usually a few Google searches of individual words can really open up ones eyes as to the true complexity of the English language and the meanings we assign to words.
When is Your Customer? Paid Search Patterns
One of the most important aspects of every businesses online marketing plan includes brand research and development defining who your primary customer is. Unfortunately, your customer is not the only type of person searching for the terms you have identified as essential to your paid marketing campaigns. There are many techniques we use as search engine marketers to ensure we minimize that cross over into other demographics or industries to deliver your ads to your target market.
One such technique is exploring when your ads aren’t just receiving click-through, but also converting, by completing a goal you have set. By looking at historical data down to the time of day, we are able to stop your B2B ad from being shown during the hours when consumers may be searching with the same general terms you are bidding on. By eliminating the possibility of your ad even being shown during times that have not performed lets us increase your ROI .
Learning from history in paid search marketing optimizes your efforts and minimizes your costs, making your budget go farther, and conversion rates increase. Day timing techniques are an essential tool in making sure you reach your product or services decision makers when they are not only most likely to be searching, but when they are most likely to convert into a customer.
Google Alerts – Monitoring Your Brand
One of the ways I monitor the online presence of clients is to use the application Google Alerts. What Google Alerts does is send you an email of recently indexed pages which include the terms of your alert. For example, I have had the following alerts set up for myself for the last few years: “Randall Gniadecki,” “Gniadecki,” and “Google Advertising Professional.”
Google Alerts provides an easy free service that keeps you from having to search for if anything new has been said about your company or one of it’s brands.
A few things to have Google Alerts for:
- Company Name
- Company Stock Symbol
- Division Name
- Product Brand Name
- Key Employee Names
The key is not to over do it. Don’t make an alert for every employee to run everyday.
However, being aware of the online presence of key employees is important, as if they list their employment with your company anywhere on the web, or in social media sites like Linkedin, they are representing your brand whether either you or they even realize it.
Semantic Judgement and Keyword Research
Responding to a Tweet from David Bullock made me confident in the way I pursue keyword phrases and write ad copy for my clients.
When it comes to PPC being part of a conversation with your customers David hits the nail right on the head . Its all about history and the conversation the keyword is part of for the user.
Just using the lists that the ad platform spits out at you based on your site and their data does nothing to apply the semantic judgments that are necessary to convert those who view your ad into customers.
There are two parts to this to consider in PPC marketing:
1. Exactly what David mentions, and the knowledge of the customer to make a good judgment call.
2. The historical data on that keyword phrase and those similar to it.
Exploring the search history of the keyword, as well as the competition for that keyword, can help any size business take their PPC marketing to a higher level.
Be daring, stop tracking CTR and just optimize for Conversion rate. With knowledge of the conversation you are having with your prospects you will quickly notice the improvement in the ROI of your efforts.
SEO and PPC together in perfect harmony
In Late July Google released the results of a study they conducted on the interrelatedness of search engine placement and paid search placement and how they can play off of each other to increase trust from a surfer. Biz reports gives a good run down of the numbers.
I agree with the Google study to a point, but am always skeptical about studies who’s results so closely benefit the source. What I have observed is that the greatest value is when the term that is being bid on is one for which the website ranks high in natural search. When the company appears in the top of both organic and paid search results the industry positioning and brand value of the website are increased.
As always, third-party verification provides another layer of trust for the searcher. If you can complement high results for your website with good things said about you on prominent social networks and Blogs the outside verification off of your website provides the best brand value.
Killer PPC Ads: Fundamental Approach Mistakes
I was recently forwarded a post from David Szetela of Search Engine Watch, Killer PPC Ads: The fundamentals, and I was a little disturbed. He was talking about ad copy and CTR.
”But first: let’s agree on one thing: the objective of your ad. Is it to sell your product? Get a sales lead? Nope. Your ad’s objective is this, and only this:
Get the click.”
This is why many companies, especially small businesses, do not trust PPC marketers, if ads do not disqualify you are wasting your clients budget on junk clicks. This is outdated thinking, Clicks mean nothing if they do not convert. Ad copy needs to be written to disqualify those who you do not want to click or that 25%CTR is just a pile of garbage.
CTR is only useful in the old model of Google Quality score, welcome to the new model, good luck keeping clients who look at conversions happy. Just because there may be a $0.25 difference in click cost due to quality score because of CTR who cares. It is all about the bottom line ROI, Executives care about conversions and return, not the smoke and mirrors of Click-through-rate.
For those just learning PPC marketing this is the road most marketers take, and they are giving us all a bad name. Next thing you know, he will be telling us that even with tightly grouped ad groups dynamic keyword insertion is a good idea. Short cuts are never a good idea, and neither is only worrying about your stats. If a PPC marketer cannot look at the big picture you need to either make them or move on.
Overture Died a LONG time ago, and so did the Yahoo! Ambasador program.
Every time I see a website that has the Yahoo! SM Ambasador logo it upsets me that someone would fall for it and not check it out. Yahoo discontinued the Ambasador program in March…which I found out in May when I called to ask them about it. I am amazed that so many “Yahoo Ambasadors” are unaware that the program has been discontinued.
Even more common, is seeing SEO, SEM, & PPC practicioners talking about Overture as if it is still around. If you are selling SEO and you don’t know that Overture stopped collecting data over a year ago and stopped being accessible months ago you are not very good at what you say you do.
In taking over the Marketing Curve site and Blog from Jen I was amazed that my AdWords ceritified professional logo was not linked to the profile. It was the first thing I fixed.
Blogging for Business – 10 Laws & 10 Rules to Blog By
By now you would have to really live in a hole not to have heard of “blogs” or “blogging.” Blogging as a traffic generating technique is becoming more common in businesses small and large in America. As small businesses it is of utmost importance that we, as company bloggers, extend your company’s brand authentically and accurately. Therefore, I have compiled this list of 10 rules to blogging business blogs.
THE LAW
1. Follow all Guidelines as set forth in the Employee Handbook, or develop best practices.
2. Conversational tone. Like you are speaking with a friendly prospect.
3. At least 200 words, but enough to cover the subject well.
4. Use the English Language well. Please have someone else proofread all entries before posting.
5. Bounce Blog Posts off of Coworkers in your department for content coverage.
6. Do Not!!! use the Blog as office chat room. This is for Public consumption.
7. Remember, nothing you put out on the internet really ever goes away, there are plenty of sites that let you browse the internet of the past.
8. Keep it positive, do not write negative opinions, but write positive opinions about the other side of the argument.
9. Never Plagiarize, Steal Images, or link to competitor’s sites. Always use content and give credit where it is due. If the source of your blog post’s topic is from a newspaper of website, a link to that site as the source (link the exact page) will help your site increase in page rank.
10. Be Yourself, but keep personal politics and preferences private. We may all love da Bears, but the prospective client in Indianapolis doesn’t want to hear about it.
THE RULES
1. Set time aside each week to write that week’s blog posts.
2. If you write a post that is super long, we can leverage it into installments.
3. Look to the past to provide pre-written material you already have.
4. Be prepared ahead of time. Pre-write a month’s worth of Blog posts on general topics that can be posted at any time to fill a gap in writing.
5. Set time aside each week to write that week’s blog posts.
6. Think about things outside of branding and advertising as subjects and show how they reinforce our integrated branding approach.
7. Mixing media enhances the users experience, a blog post is always better with an image.
8. Comments on other people’s post should only be made if they bring more insight into the topic, and not just a pat on the back. Prospects see right through that.
9. Don’t over think it. Be yourself. Represent your company accurately and just write.
New Media Giant Google Passes?
One of the things I do on a regular basis is follow Google. It’s not just because I am a Google Advertising Professional, but really a fascination with the Calculus with words and sociology that pay per click advertising is. With real dominance in the PPC/Search industry Google, Inc. is constantly trying to innovate and expand their offerings across media platforms. Not a week goes by that some new way to advertise doesn’t seem to be popping up in my client center.
When I first began in Internet Marketing it was less than six months after the first massive Google slap that forced many adsense revenue earners to take out a second mortgage and rethink their entire business model. Since then several Google dances have stood out. The introduction of the google quality score and many others have rocked the internet marketing community which claims to be white hat, but all to often has a small black hat hiding underneath. Google has been so proactive in tying up loopholes they have left us the users and searchers of the public and business to business world with a results because of it. Even competitors Yahoo SM, MSN, and Ask.com look more like the dominant Google everyday. The new media giant google is dead. Long live the emerging media king, Google.
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