Make the most of those offline marketing dollars by including PPC in your marketing mix. You may not be able to match your offline message exactly in PPC, but there are some best practices.
We’ve all heard the stories about companies spending millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads, only to forget to include their URL in the ad, or to load-test their Web site. Let’s look at how to make the most of those offline marketing dollars by including PPC in your marketing mix.
Step 1: Do Your Homework
Just like school, you need to do your homework if you want to get a good PPC grade. Before launching your PPC campaign, meet with the client or your in-house marketing staff to discuss the offline promotion. Get as much information as you can, including promotional calendars and offline marketing assets (TV scripts, print ad mockups, etc.).
Talk to the client about the goals of the promotion, including the desired call to action. If there’s a traditional agency involved, bring them into the planning meeting, if at all possible. They’ll have a plethora of useful information, including specifics about the ad buy, target demographics, and other tidbits that will be useful in planning your PPC campaign.
Step 2: Research and Launch
Now it’s time for some keyword research. Often, this is a trickier prospect than you might expect. One of the great things about search marketing is that the searcher is telling you exactly what they’re looking for: they’re essentially raising their hand and asking a question, which the search marketer can answer in their ad copy.
Traditional marketing works to generate demand from scratch by creating awareness of a product or service. Also, unlike in search, there’s a very small window in which to communicate the message: a single page in a magazine, for example; or 30 seconds of TV airtime.
Therefore, traditional advertising often appeals to emotions, using stunning photography and flowery language designed to grab attention by making the viewer feel good about the product or service.
Search marketing is anything but emotional. With search, relevance is key; emotions play little if any part in the process. And the search message is both more and less constrained than traditional. You only have 70 characters to tell your story in a PPC ad, but that ad can stay on the screen indefinitely, and searchers can return to it time and again if needed.
Bottom line: You may not be able to match the offline message exactly in PPC. That said, there are definitely some best practices:
Step 3: Do a Postmortem
Reviewing campaign results should be part of any well-run PPC process, but it’s especially critical for integrated campaigns. Upon completion of the campaign, sit down with the client or in-house marketing staff and review what did and didn’t work.
This is probably the most important step of the entire process, and yet is probably the most frequently skipped step. PPC is akin to a huge market survey, yielding invaluable insight into what resonates with consumers.
Use the knowledge gleaned from PPC to inform future marketing efforts. Share the top-converting keywords and ad copy variations with the marketing team. Smart marketers will use this data to craft future campaigns, both online and off. If you’re doing this, you get an A+.