The Searchies

I suspect that many marketers sweat the “Launch” phase more than any other. They’ve seen other marketing efforts tank after tons of planning and want to get it just right. The bad news is that like with a book, the opening chapter of a paid search campaign sets the stage for what’s to come. Mess it up and the rest isn’t worth the bother. The good news is that it’s harder to mess up than most marketers expect. This post (and subsequent ones) will help you get your campaign on the right track from the start. Today, I’ll focus on marketing objectives.

As with any performance driven marketing campaign (and, regardless of media, I hope ALL of your marketing campaigns are performance driven), the first question to ask is “What are my marketing objectives?”. They come in all shapes and sizes, but I’ll generalize them as awareness, traffic, lead generation, and sales. Awareness and traffic are primarily the realm of brand marketers vying for more mind share, lead generation the realm of acquisition marketing, and sales the realm of acquisition and retention marketing.

Whenever we accept a new paid search client, I always hear the same thing. The client wants to focus on sales & leads. Period. The biggest misconception about paid search marketing is that it is ONLY a demand capture tool. This couldn’t be further from reality; it also functions just fine for awareness, traffic, and demand generation.

Take awareness as an example. Marketers, depending on category, could pay upwards of $30-100 CPM for banner ads. True, banner ads are rich media and that’s got to count for something compared with bland, short form text ads. But, HOW MUCH MORE? For simplicity, say you pay $1 per click on your text ad. Also assume your click through rate (CTR) ranges from 0.5-5% for a given keyword. Finally say your ad shows 1,000 times over the course of a month. After some fairly simple math, you are roughly paying $5-$50 CPM. Already, this is significantly lower than the range I’ve spelled out above. Don’t forget that a lower CPC would drive even more cost savings.

Let’s take it one step further. The example above (assuming the CTR I spelled out) drove 5-50 people to your site. Each new qualified person is an opportunity for further brand education, lead generation, or sales. With paid search awareness campaigns, you will rely on your website more for the heavy lifting. That’s what you want. By comparison, typical banner ads generate clicks at a rate of 0.1%. Thus, you’ve spent significantly more money to drive only 1 person to your site. With paid search campaigns, you’re getting awareness AND traffic. Now doesn’t it seem like a better investment to put your awareness budget into paid search marketing rather than banner ads? Wouldn’t you prefer that your site do the marketing rather than a skyscraper ad?

In my next post, I’ll further explore this topic of marketing objectives. There’s lots more to say. Stay tuned.