A Powerful Structure to Search Engine Marketing
A Powerful Structure to Search Engine Marketing
In today’s extremely competitive markets, sometimes search engine marketers try to “cut corners”, in an effort to save time and a bit of money. This is perfectly understandable, given the conditions they sometimes have to face, such as tight deadlines, limited budgets and overall difficult market conditions. However, neglecting to build a strong search engine marketing structure can seriously hinder any online ad campaign.
To be truly successful, plan for an initial trial period, followed by some benchmark testing, where you will be able to carefully measure each result of your online ad campaigns.
Any company, independently of its industry, should have a carefully prepared business plan where your search engine marketing foundation is accurately reflected and equally well spelled out, down to the last detail.
To truly achieve the best overall ROI and create the most impact, both with first-time visitors to your site, as well as repeat buyers, the four most important steps to the success of any good search engine marketing structure are:
1. Mission statement
2. Unique selling points
3. Targeting the right market
4. Finally, a strong call to action
Neglect any of these four important ingredients and you are wasting your time and your resources, while giving your competitors a chance to beat you to market.
Carefully writing your mission statement
A powerful mission statement that has a lot of “punch” can be summarized as explaining your single most important benefit to a prospect or client. An easy way to write this would be to accurately describe what your company does, using only one or two sentences.
A good example to this could be: “Our company produces powerful accounting software helping Fortune 500 companies get more work done in one day, while at the same time saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars every year”. Another good example could be: “Our company designs and manufactures highly accurate automated robots used in the automotive industry”.
Note the words that are the most important in each message are highlighted and in bold. Those are strong words that will remain in your prospects memory.
What’s important to note here is that anybody that receives such a mission statement could be a potential client or industry partner. It may not be right away, but some time down the road. The important thing is that he or she gets the right message, the first time.
You should always try to keep your mission statement short and to the point. If some of these people need more information, they will ask you.
Unique selling points
In writing your unique selling points, try to think of a unique fact or feature that truly places your company above all the others. Is your product or service really superior from the ones offered by your competition? Is it offered at a lower price? Maybe the warranty lasts longer or the product can be shipped the same day.
Using powerful facts similar to these will make your prospective client realize how different your company is, and will entice them to buy from you.
What’s also important is to prioritize all your strong selling features, beginning by the ones you think are the most important.
Targeting the right market
Try to mentally select what you think would be your ideal clients or customers. You might want to look at your current ones, or maybe look at your competitor’s clients, if you are a new company.
Important demographics such as age, marital status, sex, job title or geographic region of the country can play a significant role in this critical step at targeting the right market for your products or services.
For example, if you are a real estate broker and if you are trying to sell a house to a young couple just starting out in life, chances are that their needs will be substantially different than a middle-aged couple nearing retirement.
The more information you can find out about your potential clients, the better prepared you will be at accurately targeting your right market. Always remember that strong relationships play a key role in your first sales, as well as in repeat customers. It also becomes important for referrals, since these can be the best testimonials and, what’s more, they are totally free.
A strong call to action
This last step is one of the most critical, and usually the one that many online and search engine marketers often forget. Ask yourself the ultimate question: “What do you want your visitors and prospective clients to do on your website?”
When I ask this question to people that are rather new to search engine marketing, most site owners or online marketers will usually answer they want them to buy something. While this is great and certainly very satisfying to most business owners, sometimes another call of action would be to subscribe to your free online newsletter, or perhaps to send in a request to get more information, either by mailing them a brochure or having a sales representative call them.
Finally, you should carefully review your call to actions both before, during and after you perform a keyword research, either using Wordtracker or other keyword research tools. Remember that for each call to action, your ad copy, your keywords used and your landing pages can all be changed to permanently improve your online ad campaign’s performance and ROI.
Conclusion
A good structure or solid foundation to a well-planned search engine marketing campaign can make a big difference in the overall ROI of any online marketing efforts, and will continue to yield long-term benefits if done the right way.
Planning any ad campaign without the four basic and important steps mentioned in this article would be to take unnecessary risks, both with your ROI as well as the outcome of your work. You should carefully review these four steps, both with your marketing or sales department, as well as your SEM firm if you outsource your search engine marketing to professionals.
Reference: “Search Engine Advertising” by Catherine Seda. 347 pages.
New Riders Publishing. Indianapolis, IN. 46240.
Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales
