Spend Small and Think Big
Carrie Hill | 30 August 2006 |
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In her recent article in the Search Engine Watch blog - Winning Big With a Small Search Marketing Budget Patricia Hursh outlined some great tips for competing with the big boys with a small marketing budget. She referenced a session at the recent Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference in which Jennifer Laycock of the Search Engine Guide outlined some steps you can take to be sure your small budget keeps up with the basics of big budget marketing. Here are a few to keep in mind:
- Tip #1: Build Web sites that provide good, solid content that is unique and truly useful to your target audience.
- Tip #2: Web site optimization efforts and search ad campaigns should replicate the way customers think and act. “Focus on the words that customers actually use when they search, even if these aren’t the highest volume keywords in your industry,” said Laycock.
- Tip #3: Small businesses must track and manage ad campaigns down to the keyword level. Laycock explains, “Remember, it’s not about buying clicks, it’s about buying customers.”
- Tip #4: Jennifer stressed that link building is really not about soliciting loads of links. It’s about forming long-lasting business relationships. Think of a link as a business relationship… a referral.
Although a large marketing budget makes things a bit easier, there are resources to implement every plan available, good gains can be made with a smaller budget, it might just take more time so see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Carrie Hill - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
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August 30th, 2006 at 11:31 am
I liked tip #3 — when I talk PPC with customers, or potential customers, they typically want to talk about the amount of traffic or how they rank. Very few focus on the amount of customers and business it drives them. Most make decision based on their ego (paying top dollar for that expensive keyword) or on overall traffic. Few are looking at individual keyword phrases to determine what actually brings in a new customer, versus a click. At Blizzard, we want to focus on ROI when we setup and manager PPC accounts. There is a litmus test here: do you measure ROI? If you don’t measure it, you cannot act upon it. Remember there are many ways to measure ROI, but the quantity of clicks is not one of them.