Thursday, May 2, 2013

AMA Presenter: How Search Engine Marketing Works

As a board member of the Reno-Tahoe American Marketing Chapter, I had the pleasure of presenting at our first (soon to be annual!) mar-ket-ing Workshop for local business owners on May 2, 2013, at UNR's Joe Crowley Pavilion. My slides are below.

The vision was to share our experience as marketers with the small business community and offer tools, tips, guidance and generally simplify the ways to engage customers.

I presented "How Search Engine Marketing Works". This represents an overview of the tools and considerations a business owner or marketing manager might run into when developing their own SEM campaign. SEM has excellent potential for lead generation for certain businesses. I also work with Swift Communications/Swift Digital and we have an SEM product that packages up many of these components and handling them on behalf of clients.

My core thesis...
which may not be perfectly clear in by the slides, is that we are past the era when advertising that interrupts our potential audience can be effective. I offered several examples of "Marketing interrupticus" such as the Flowvie, any kids cereal, products to help your dog carry your beer...the list is remarkably and comically long.

We now have the means to filter our message only to those who are inclined to be open to it. Ideally, we want to find those people WHEN they are looking for us, like when they are searching online to evaluate buying a product, possibly your product or service.

One objection I hear often to search engine marketing, using paid keywords in text ads, is "I never click on those ads. I'm not buying that service." I also hailed from that camp when the right column of Google ads came out. I'm too sophisticated, never going to get suckered like that.

But lately, I've taken up skiing. And Columbia Sportswear came up in my endless search for the perfect jacket. They offered me women's' skiwear at 70% off. Guess how long it took me to click on that text ad? When the offer is compelling and relevant, it is more efficient and more effective. I didn't buy a jacket in the clearance page they sent me to (a simple pre-filled search page, dynamically generated on Columbia's end without making another static landing page), but I did poke around their site for 15 minutes and bought some gloves for my husband. I also showed my husband which jacket he should buy me for my birthday. Columbia made two sales.