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Posted on October 15, 2009
The Progression From Search to Social Media Marketing
BY PETE HALL
**This article outlines a personal experience with a client, leading them from search marketing success into social media and word of mouth marketing. To respect their privacy, I will only refer to them as 'The Client'.**
Five years ago, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising were only beginning to take shape as legitimate lead generation and marketing strategies. At the time, SEO and PPC were cutting edge marketing strategies - many brands and companies had heard the buzz surrounding SEO and PPC, but were unable to pinpoint strategy or purpose behind it.
Today, SEO and PPC have evolved into common marketing strategies for brands to place their marketing budget. Companies understand the huge opportunities that exist within search marketing for return on investment. Social media, conversely, exists much like SEO and PPC did five years ago. Companies and brands are keen to explore the social media space, but are often unable to define social media marketing success or execute a defined strategy.
Within our niche in the industry, we execute both search marketing and social media marketing for clients. As such, there exists a unique opportunity to take learnings and success from search marketing efforts and transition into the social media space. This is what happened with an opportunistic client of ours.
We were initially hired to restructure The Client's AdWords account and increase conversion volume. They had managed their PPC efforts internally, and reached out to us to take their account to the next level. After much research and testing, we were able to determine what converted within their account - what calls to action best resonated with users, what keywords and themes were most effective, and what landing page variations were most conducive to converting. We branched out their PPC efforts into Yahoo! and Bing with continued success. Eventually, The Client began asking, "what next?" - their PPC accounts were converting in record numbers at the lowest cost per conversion yet.
Moving forward, we thoroughly researched The Client and their presence online and saw a huge opportunity for them to improve their organic search rankings. Therefore, our next step in their overall strategy was an SEO overhaul. We were able to construct an SEO blueprint based upon their PCC successes and laid out a clear strategy with actionable goals. This SEO strategy is still being executed, but we have already seen important gains in organic search results for several search terms. Recently, The Client again asked "what next?" with their sights set on entering into the space of social media.
The next phase in the overall strategy for The Client was taking the business intelligence learned from successful PPC and SEO implementation and applying it into the space of social media. Sometimes, depending on what industry you are looking to engage with, simply setting up a Facebook page or a Twitter handle is not a priority for a client. After all, you cannot fit a square peg into a round hole. With The Client being in a niche industry, there simply was not enough chatter or interest on Facebook or Twitter to warrant developing a strategy. Therefore, we researched alternative, more relevant opportunities in the social media space for The Client to engage with.
After meeting with key stakeholders and discussing goals, we were able to conclude that the next logical step was for The Client to begin a blog. A blog strategy presented the best opportunity to base conversation in the social media space around learnings from search marketing. Why? Because through search marketing, we are able to pinpoint what inspires potential customers to engage with the company. The Client will be able to create engaging conversations based around these learnings through a blog. They will be able to reach their target audience, reach industry influencers who act as information-hungry word of mouth propellers, as well as comment on other niche blogs, message boards and forums.
As it was with search marketing five years ago, social media marketing today poses a conundrum for brands - they realize that they should probably participate in the space, but are unclear how to enter in and achieve success. For a company like The Client, calculated steps and a logical progression from search engine marketing to social media marketing proved to be the best strategy. The calls to action that have worked best through SEO and PPC now act as a road map for content creation we know will be relevant to prospects, customers and influencers in the social media space.
Has anyone else had success transitioning learnings from search engine marketing into social media? Have any questions or comments? Leave them here!
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Posted on May 15, 2008
Set and Forget PPC (AKA Burning Your Cash) - 7 Ways to Stop the Burn
BY BEN CASTELLI
Cruise control was a great idea for cars, auto pilot is perfect for planes, but in terms of pay per click advertising there is no such thing as "set and forget". A lot of companies waste their money (and Google makes a lot of money) from pay per click campaigns that are not regularly optimized. Checking up on your PPC campaigns several times a week is essential and tackling some ongoing weekly action items will really stretch that budget dollar and improve ROI. Where do you start? Below is a list of 7 digestible weekly to-dos:
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Posted on April 24, 2008
Keep it Crazy Consistent
BY BEN CASTELLI
Turkey sandwich every day for lunch? Consistency can sometimes be pretty boring but when it comes to online advertising, having a consistent message and offer is a key part of decreasing the amount of friction in your marketing process. Having a consistent message is important to increase conversions for all online advertising efforts but let's take a look at pay per click specifically as an example.
Once you have done the research and found a great set of keywords, it's not just enough to bid on the keywords, throw up some ad text and drive the traffic to your home page. Placing the keyword into the ad text and the main headline of the landing page will keep the visitor on the same path to conversion and reduce aggravation. (Having very tight knit ad groups with just a few variations of the same keyword helps here but that is a whole other discussion). Also, don't forget to keep the call to action consistent from PPC ad copy to landing page, this is equally as important.
So here's a decent example of what I am laying down here, I was searching for "web conferencing" the other day:
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Posted on April 7, 2008
Top 5 Pay Per Click Mistakes
BY BEN CASTELLI
I promised Stepan I would actually contribute to the CTC blog when the new design finally went live. Here were are 6 months later, the new design is awesome and its time for me own up. So here it is, the top 5 Pay Per Click mistakes we commonly see in client's PPC programs. If you are currently running a PPC campaign, I think you will find this list very useful, if not you may want to bookmark, star, tag or stash in a folder somewhere for future reference…
Top 5 Most Common PPC Mistakes (don't let this be you!)
- Abandoning ad copy split testing after initial success
- Misunderstanding margin and miscalculating ROI from PPC ad spend
- Assuming top ad placement will result in the greatest conversion or ROI.
- Not sending traffic to the most relevant pages
- Disorganized campaign structure
Ok, I actually have 6 but "Top 5" sounds better so here is a bonus one:
6. Having too narrow or too broad keyword strategy
Got any other common mistakes you think should be on the list? lemme hear about them!
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Posted on December 3, 2007
Facebook Marketing Infancy
BY JASON CORMIER
Stepan pulled my punk card regarding the last post I did regarding GoDaddy and Google Webmaster Tools. In fact, I was fiercely reprimanded by him since my topic was based on info actually 20 days after the fact. Hmmm... what should the deadline be on info that is too old to blog about (as if it were "new")?
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