Stephen Skobel, principal of Skobel Consulting Group, is considered one of the top authorities on Google AdWords strategies and SEM. In these pages we’ll post his insights on those topics as well as other aspects of internet marketing, email marketing, and the integration of offline and online marketing campaigns. He has conducted seminars on these topics at Digital Marketing events in
Don't try to run with Google, before you've walked with database marketing
A lot of times when I talk to people about using the internet to increase sales the initial focus of the conversation is usually on generating more traffic to a web site or how to best use Google AdWords for search marketing. While both of those topics are important, of equal or greater strategic importance is the need to grow your company’s database. If you do decide to use AdWords as one of the tools to grow your database it’s particularly important to use a two-step process—not just to get people in the door so you can begin talking to them, but also as part of managing your relationship with people who are already part of your database.
The key aspect of the two-step process is to give a potential customer something of value—most often this takes the form of a white paper, a report on addressing a problem they’re facing or are likely to face, or even an e-book. Remember, you don’t have to do all that content production yourself. It might be worth your money to hire a good copywriter. Of course, you’re going to have to give that copywriter some material to work with. Where do you get that? Depending on the business owner’s situation, getting some of that material can be as easy as spending time with their top sales people to find out how they’re selling your product or service; what differentiators are they gaining the most traction with.
The Stephen Skobel Multi-Step Tactic
Once you’ve got something of value to offer potential customers, you can add an AdWords campaign or at least a new ad group, to drive those clicks toward the landing page where you can capture their details. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on landing pages, but I’d suggest at least one specific landing page where your visitors can order your white paper or report without having to go anywhere else—the purpose of that landing page is to capture the visitor’s details in return for your information. It’s best to have a couple of landing pages with different headlines, different images, etc. for your report so you can split-test them.
It’s also a good idea to set up several highly targeted groups of keywords for this campaigns or set of ad groups. For instance, I was recently working with a business that focused on children’s furniture. They were doing a pretty decent job of using AdWords to get people to their site, but they were focusing almost solely on keywords like children’s beds, children’s desks things like that. Those are pretty expensive clicks—especially when they’re not being given a special offer or taken to a targeted landing page. What we ended up doing was spending less on clicks by targeting women who hadn’t had their babies yet. Were they going to buy today—maybe yes or maybe no. But that wasn’t the point here. The point here was to target that group of women and form a relationship with them even before they were in the market for the furniture. This way, when they were ready, and the second step came into play, they were more willing to trust—and buy—because the company had already given them something of value in return.
