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Posts Tagged ‘Paid Search’

Social Media is Sexy

By “sexy” I mean alluring and enticing. And Social Media is just that for marketers.

It’s immediately accessible.
It can give you instant feedback.
It enables you to touch your customers individually.
Public usage is growing like wildfire.
It’s fun!

In the past year I have attended countless workshops, seminars, and programs to educate myself on how I can help my clients use Social Media effectively to reach their goals. I have set-up profiles and pages, developed campaigns, and coached my clients on blogging, using Facebook Fan Pages, LinkedIn and Twitter. And we are seeing good results (even my dentist is getting new patients from his Social Media effort!).

But…last week one of my clients told me that he was encouraged by a friend in marketing to discontinue his Paid ads on the Search Engines (which have been responsible for a huge increase in his revenues) in favor of Social Media marketing. Hang on a minute there!

Paid Search is still the only guaranteed way for many types of businesses to be in front of their target market on Search Engines. Yes, Social Media can increase your company’s Internet footprint, but it can’t substitute for Paid Search for:

Having control over where your message appears.
Having control over when your message appears.
Being where your competitors are (remember, your brand can be used as a search term).
Reaching the most targeted ready-to-buy customers.

Social Media IS sexy. So, my advice is: incorporate Social Media into your marketing plans, but take a deep breath and think about what’s working now before you throw away the baby with the bathwater.

Your thoughts?

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Tags: Internet Marketing, Managing Time Social Media, Paid Search

Posted in Internet Marketing, Marketing, Paid Search, Social Media | 1 Comment »

December 14th, 2009

The Power of “Being There”

The beauty of paid search is that it can be adjusted so fast and so easily that I can help my clients respond to whatever is happening in their business. Here is an example of why it is so important to “Be There” when people are looking for your business’s services on the web.

I received an email from one of my clients two weeks ago asking to shut off his paid search campaign for a while. He said that his company was looking to cut-back on some of their expenses and felt that they had more business than they could handle for the time being. (A classic example of my having done my job too well!) After some discussion, we agreed that it wasn’t a good idea to shut his program off completely, so we lowered the budget by 1/2 and eliminated some business categories.

Yesterday, I received an email from him with the subject line: “Help!”. Turns out that his call volume has gone down significantly. We agreed to move the budget back up to the original level and re-launch in the ad groups we had eliminated.

My client has discovered that “Being There” is important, even when business is booming. His intelligently run and managed paid search program enables me to keep him there and keeps his phone ringing.

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