Summary

We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter. You chose the scope of your search marketing program, decided what strategy to adopt, and estimated the costs involved. All of these points are critical to your next step: convincing the rest of your organization to approve your program.

In Chapter 7, you chose your first search marketing campaignone that you believed would be high impact and relatively easy to do. Your first campaign lets you start small, show success, and build from there. Recall that your alter egos at Snap chose digital cameras. We can itemize the costs of Snap's first campaign in Table 8-5. To keep things simple, we assess the costs for the entire central search team and the SEO vendor to our first campaign, but you might want a more complex calculation to spread those costs over multiple campaigns.

Table 8-5. Snap's First Campaign Costs (Startup costs incurred in Year 1 for organic search drop off in Years 2 through 5.)

	Organic Search	Paid Search	Personnel	Total
Year 1	$5,000	$150,000	$500,000	$655,000
Year 2	0	$150,000	$500,000	$650,000
Year 3	0	$150,000	$500,000	$650,000
Year 4	0	$150,000	$500,000	$650,000
Year 5	0	$150,000	$500,000	$650,000
Total	$5,000	$750,000	$2,500,000	$3,255,000

Snap Electronics made its search marketing program scope decision right along with you, choosing an ambitious U.S. program across all of its products that emphasizes organic search and experiments with paid search. Table 8-6 summarizes Snap's estimated costs for the first five years of its program. The organic search costs are one-time only, but the remaining costs apply each year.

Table 8-6. Projected Costs for Snap's Search Marketing Program (Each expense must be totaled to develop your overall business case to be persuasive.)

	Organic Search	Paid Search	Personnel	Total
Year 1	$390,000	$300,000	$500,000	$1,190,000
Year 2	0	$300,000	$500,000	$800,000
Year 3	0	$300,000	$500,000	$800,000
Year 4	0	$300,000	$500,000	$800,000
Year 5	0	$300,000	$500,000	$800,000
Total	$390,000	$1,500,000	$2,500,000	$4,390,000

These costs look large, but the benefits look larger, as you will see in the next chapter. We take the work we did in Chapter 7 to analyze the opportunity across the scope of the program that we chose in this chapter. For Snap Electronics, we calculate the revenue opportunity for all U.S. products.

We're just getting started, however. In Chapter 9, we go beyond the numbers to close the deal. How do you convince all the members of your existing Web team (your extended search team) to change their jobs to include search marketing? And how do you persuade the toughest audience of allyour executivesto part with the cash you need to get started? In the next chapter, we show you how to convince your organization to take a chance on a search marketing program.