SiteProPPC » Content Advertising

Why You Need to Accelerate!

Chelsea — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 22:43:25 +0000

There’s no denying that marketing strategy has changed drastically over the last several years. Between the economic downtown, the rise of social networking and Generation Y reaching adulthood, marketers must work in new ways to reach their target audience. Arnie Kuenn’s new book, Accelerate!: Move Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing, reiterates that sentiment, and offers loads of helpful advice for businesses looking to launch successful Content Marketing campaigns.

Content marketing refers to the practice of generating highly relevant, targeted material to audiences in order to drive return profits. If you can find a way to decipher the audiences’ wants and needs, you can develop highly specialized campaigns to reach them, and in turn, increase your ROI. Arnie Kuenn reminds you that interruption marketing doesn’t work anymore; instead marketers need to integrate themselves into the current social atmosphere and propose sales of which consumers have already gauged interest. In other words, you need to make your audience come to you.

Accelerate! provides you with the tools needed to implement and execute successful content marketing campaigns. Kuenn offers an 8-step program to develop your campaign and effectively measure your results. Additionally, he gives 16 examples of content that your business can use, introduces free marketing tools that are already available at your disposal, and presents several real life cases from both large and small businesses that can confirm that this type of marketing truly does work. You don’t just have to take Arnie’s word for it; there are several other industry professionals credited for contributing to this book, including Jay Baer, Rand Fishkin, and Joe Pulizzi, just to name a few.

The book has been called “very user-friendly” by many readers. Accelerate! is meant to be used as a handbook for anyone looking to give their small business an online marketing boost by using modern web tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and search engines like Google. Arnie spends several chapters talking about the importance of social media presence, as well as how to use search engine optimization to your business’s advantage. Read this book, and learn how to streamline your content for improved audience response.

So why should you take Arnie Kuenn’s lead? For starters, Arnie is the founder and president of the online marketing firm Vertical Measures, a company that is exercising the tactics of content marketing. Vertical Measures provides search, strategic, and social/content marketing services on a global basis. Their approach has shown success repeatedly for clients by consistently increasing website traffic and achieving above average conversion rates.

Arnie Kuenn has worked as an executive for a multitude of marketing and new technology companies over the last 20 years. He is also the founder of MediaChoice, an internet start- up firm that boasts an impressive portfolio of clients such as NBC, ABC, Fox and several major music and film studios. Additionally, Arnie has served as president of the Arizona Interactive Marketing Association (AZIMA) and can be seen speaking at major marketing conferences such as SMX Advanced, Online Marketing Summit, PubCon, eMarketing Association and AMA Phoenix, among others.

Order your copy of Accelerate! on Amazon >>

Google content advertising. Part 3– Your results may vary.

admin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:43:07 +0000

In part 2 we talked about Google’s statistics for advertising on their Content Network. In this final installment we will look at some of Site Pro’s actual customer numbers and some basic do’s and don’ts in Content Advertising.

Here are three examples from our own customer accounts that I think fairly represent what Content is capable in terms of traffic and conversions.

Company A.

Here is our flagship example of how content advertising can really make a big difference. This company has three primary campaigns. They sell a high end product and did not use content advertising in the past. Notice that while content was not the best cost/conversion performer, it fell within their performance goal and provided 60% of their leads. In fact if you really wanted to pitch this, the addition of content advertising more than doubled their leads at a lower average cost. Not bad!

Company B

The results here are more typical and reflect what Google has said about the effectiveness of their AdWords Content advertising. BTW, this customer was not using content advertising before they came to us for their PPC management….same as Customer A.

Notice that the gains were less spectacular, but still impressive. They experienced a roughly 35% increase in conversions, but at a higher cost/conversion. Since that conversion rate was still within their acceptable range, they were happy.

And remember, that traffic and those conversions exist outside of SEO optimization!

Company C

In the interest of full disclosure….

Here is an example where AdWords Content advertising just didn’t work out. This company sells high end services and we could not get a content campaign to perform in their cost/conv. range. Frankly, they have been more the exception than the rule.

Some simple do’s and don’ts in Google AdWords Content advertising:

Do’s -

Monitor your campaigns daily, especially in the beginning. Google will run your ads on sites that just will not convert well. You need to exclude those sites ASAP.
Actively look for sites. Look for sites that correspond well to your product. Often you will find they are on the Google Network.
Create Managed Placement campaigns. I have found that I get the best results when I use managed campaigns and put the best performing sites into those campaigns.

Don’ts –

Don’t combine campaigns. This is really the big don’t and its something that many beginners do. Create separate campaigns for your search advertising and your content advertising. Otherwise it is too difficult to track how well each is doing. Trust me.
Auto pilot. Don’t turn content ads on and then forget them. They will become a money pit in a big hurry. Check them daily and weed out the bad performers!

So, even if you are thinking SEO, don’t forget to keep your content advertising going. Often time it is the easiest way to add quality traffic and conversions.

Google Content Advertising. Part 2 — What does Google say?

admin — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:08:35 +0000

In Part 1 we talked about the forgotten area in the great PPC vs. Organic leads debate….content advertising.

At this point, you may be thinking, "well if hardly anyone is using it, then it must not work". And actually you would be right for a great number of advertisers. Many advertisers do not use it properly and it can turn into a money pit when it is not working correctly.

But let’s look at what Google has to has about content advertising on its network.

"Ads on the Google Content Network can be an effective way to gain additional conversions beyond those you get via search or in combination with your SEO efforts.

When used in combination with Search, the median advertiser has a content CPA that’s within approximately 2% of their Search CPA.
The Content Network drives nearly 20% of total conversions for the median advertiser."

The first bullet is an eye opener. CPA (or cost per conversion) is essentially the same or a bit higher than search CPA. Considering that Content campaigns are typically an afterthought for many advertisers, that is a surprisingly good number. And CPA is the number that counts. Content ads may run more impressions and have much lower click thru rates, but if they convert just as well who cares?

The second bullet highlights the primary point I’d like to make. Even if you have a very successful SEO project going and you have replaced all of your paid search traffic with organic traffic, why would you want to abandon the other 20%? Especially in this economy. And some companies can do far better than 20%.

I n the next post I will talk about my experiences with Content advertising and some basic do and don’ts!

Google Content Advertising. Part 1– the itch that SEO can’t scratch.

admin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:41:07 +0000

The great debate between SEO and PPC is well documented and the subject of countless blogs and articles.

Basically the debate is this…do I want to pay as I go for search based advertising or pay a lump sum up front to get my company listed high in the organic results so that I don’t have to use pay per click advertising?

Obviously in Pay Per Click advertising the advertiser pays a fee each time a visitor clicks on their ad. The appeal of SEO is that you can get your clicks for free if they occur in the organic results. You pay for SEO too initially, but the idea is that that is a onetime deal (is it?) and then the clicks are free.

Like I said, I will let other folks debate the merits of one over the other.

What can happen in the debate, however, is that one side is viewed as the solution at the total exclusion of the other. For those that choose SEO, they could be losing a significant number of leads in the process. How so?

SEO and organic results can replace search pay per click advertising, but they cannot replace content pay per click advertising. It’s whole different game. For those who don’t know — content ads are basically display ads that are shown on other websites in Google’s (for AdWords users) network of participating sites. In content advertising, you set up ads just like you do in search and then suggest keywords to Google. Google then looks for other sites that have content that match your keywords and then places your ad on that site…provided you bid high enough.

(If you would like a more detailed explanation of content advertising , here is one from Google:

http://www.google.com/adwords/contentnetwork/audience.html).

With content ads you can even experiment with various media ads. I have tried the image ads and there are video ads available as well.

But do the ads work? We’ll look at that in Part 2 and Part 3.