Part I: Planning a Successful Strategy

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Part I: Planning a Successful Strategy

Introduction

The key ingredient to any media campaign is the marketing strategy. Through a strategic planning process, you'll identify your messages, target audiences, and marketing goals. These foundational elements are core to search engine advertising, too. Once they've been established, you'll find it much easier to choose relevant keywords, write effective ad listings, and develop landing pages that close the sale.

As you read Part I, write down whatever creative ideas pop into your head. Plenty of tips are included to help you evaluate the market viability of your concepts. Plus, you might decide to run with them once you learn how to track your results later in this book. Let's start by uncovering the mystery of how search engines work and how they impact your business.

‚	Chapter 1 Why is Search Engine Advertising Important?

‚	Chapter 2 Marketing Campaign Foundation

‚	Chapter 3 Choosing Keywords for Maximum Performance

‚	Chapter 4 Copywriting Tips to Improve Your Click-Through Rate

‚	Chapter 5 Landing Pages that Convert Visitors into Buyers

‚	Conclusion

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Chapter 1. Why Is Search Engine Advertising Important?

Web sites that lack search engine visibility are losing business. Second only to email, the most popular activity for U.S. Internet users is information search ‚ 67.3% of users perform searches, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. And an estimated 40% of Internet users are using the web to make product or service purchases. With the popularity of online searching on the climb, eMarketer calls search engine marketing "almost a no-brainer" for companies. ^[1] Figure 1.1 shows the breakdown of the top five Internet activities among U.S. users.

^[1] The eMarketer charts and quotes as provided herein have been reprinted with permission.

Figure 1.1. Product/service information search and product/service purchases are among the top five most popular Internet activities.

These statistics suggest that if you want shoppers to buy from your web site, one way to do so is to make sure they can find you in the search engines.

With nearly all search engines moving to some form of a "pay-to-play" model, companies must proactively advertise on search engines. Sure, there are still a few spots to land a free link. But those opportunities of the "good ole days" are nearly extinct. Don't worry, search engines are generating profitable results for a lot of companies. Yours can be, or may already be, one of them.

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It's Quick, Easy, and Inexpensive to Generate New Business

I don't know about you, but before I invest any money into a new marketing program I want to know about the potential return on investment (ROI). It helps me to hear success stories during my marketing efforts; I spot ideas to improve my results. It's also inspiring . That being said, you may be happy to know there are many examples throughout this book of how companies are achieving success from search engine advertising.

As the new media director for a direct response television agency, I witnessed immediately how profitable search engine advertising can be. A handful of the agency's clients sold "As Seen on TV" products. As soon as the latest products appeared in television commercials, I marketed them on search engines, directing shoppers to the clients ' web sites.

Important

Trademark terms identify a particular company. Generic terms, also called related terms , are keywords that could be relevant to more than one company.

For example, for Tristar Products' popular Flat Hose product, I bid on keyword phrases using the product trademark name , such as flat hose, flathose, tristar flat hose, as seen on tv flat hose, the flat hose, and flat garden hose. I also bid on generic terms such as hose, water hose, and garden hose. For less than $2,000 per month per client in search engine fees, several As Seen on TV companies generated an extra $10,000 ‚ $40,000 in gross sales each month. Around the 2002 holiday season , one ab fitness product generated close to $40,000 from only $800 in search engine fees. Now that's an impressive ROI.

What made this form of marketing even more exciting was that it took me less than 15 minutes to add a new product listing to a search engine. The links generally appeared during a keyword search within a few days (Google, bless them, launches listings after you've deposited money online using a credit card). Because some search engines require only a $50 deposit to start advertising, you're just $50 and a few days away from sending qualified traffic to your web site.

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