Why Paid Search Marketing Is the Most Appealing Advertising Channel for SMBs?

Paid Search Marketing has been helping businesses to archive sales since a long time now. If you are a SMB owner and not using Adwords or Bing to sell, then you must be at the loosing side of the competition.

What's More Appealing in Paid Search Marketing?

I. Effectiveness:
                        Yes. Its More effective than other marketing campaigns since you will be showing your ads to the people who actually has an interest. For an example: An Online Clothing Store runs ad campaigns in a News Portal and in Adwords. In News Portal, their ads will show up to every site visitor who came there to read news and has no interest at buying cloths immediately. But advertiser will be charged every time their ad being showed up. In Adwords their ads will only show up when someone searches for "Online Clothing Store". So they will be paying only for effective advertisements.

II. Targeting:
                     In typical advertising methods, advertisers don't have a proper control on the people who get exposed to your advertisements. But with Paid Search Marketing you can target a specific location & precise intention. What about: a Shoe Store owner holding a banner in City Highway saying "Branded Shoes at Lowest Price !" Vs. holding a banner in a shoe shopping festival with same advertisement. What will be the most targeted ad? It's simple isn't it? Paid search marketing has the power to target exact audience you wish to reach with targeting options like Keyword, Location, Placement, Time and list goes on.

III. Insights:
                    This is a standout factor in most of the digital marketing advertising platforms & it applies here too. With Paid Search Marketing you will have access to various reports which will showcase how successful your advertising efforts are. In the same time you can track down the under performers and get rid of those. Even you can compare between two markets and push more on successful one. For an example an computer seller who targets San Francisco, CA & South San Francisco, CA can measure past performance of his ad campaigns and select which location he need to spend his advertising dollars more.

IV. Control:
                   Control your campaign as like you wish. Pause, delete, launch, relaunch or do whatever you want  to do with analyzing what situation demands. You cannot have an easy to control platform than this in any field.

V. ROI:
                 ROI will be always high if you are smart enough too take full advantage of all the features provided by Adwords or Bing. You cannot loose if you are always there when your target market look for you.

I might have missed plenty of facts in my list. But my intention is to push entrepreneurs into Paid Search Marketing, you will find thousands of appealing factors when you start advertising with Adwords & Bing. Feel free to add comment anything that I might have missed in this list.

Did You Ever Spell-Checked Your Linkedin Profile?

Recently, I've been involved in project to screen job applicants for a mid-senior level position. As a digital marketer, I couldn't help but search for applicants LinkedIn profiles. I was devastated after looking at some profiles, mainly because of some silly spelling mistakes. Obviously, those applicants didn't make the cut but those drove me into writing this piece.

Authors of many articles related to social media, suggests it is not a big deal if you happen to do a spelling mistake or two. That can be true for platforms like Twitter and Facebook, where one has to put up their thoughts together within few moments and post, and nobody judge you by those simple mistakes. But does it applies to LinkedIn as well? LinkedIn is where many of your potential employers or customers can peep in to your profile to get to know you and your level of professionalism.

In an era, where all the tech solutions leading us towards an error-free world, even a simplest spelling mistake suggests your negligence, incompetency and carefree attitude. Every word processing tool and web browser comes with spelling correction features, so there is no excuse exists for this error. If you cannot spend few minutes to correct your professional self in digital space how can an employer or a customer can trust you to handle their work for them?

It’s a simple theory “What you present is what others see”. So present your best, without mistakes !

Calculate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - Infographic by Kissmetrics

Calculating lifetime value of a customer is a must before deciding on your acquisition strategy. Recently I came across below excellent infographic done by Kissmatrics.com . If you have never calculated CLV for your business its time to start now. I believe this tool will help you to do it in a flash. There is another tool by Harvard Business School too. It doesn't matter what tool you use, but its a must to know how much worth a client to you and decide on your sales and customer relationship strategies. ++ Click Image to Enlarge ++

Source: How To Calculate Lifetime Value

Easy ways to Boost Adwords CTR

This is a concern of every Adwords marketer, "How to Boost CTR?". Below are some tested and proved methods I used through out my career and achieved great success. Without further "blah blah" lets get in to points.

• Improve Relevancy of the Ads:

If your keyword is "free car wash" then your ad should not be "car wash for $10". Match your ad text with keywords as much as possible. It should be apple for apple.

• Play with display URL:

For me, sub domain style display URL's works better most of the times. Marketers usually don't take advantage of this valuable ad text line, even though it has many restrictions, you can still play with and try what works for you. Ex: accident-cover.insurance.com, california.adwords.com

• Add Site Links:

Site links makes your ad looks fatter, and fat is not ugly (Most of the time). Fat usually takes attention and stand out from the rest. Try implementing some custom site links below your ad. It will show up when your ad is served ad one of the first three positions.

• Apply Other Extensions:

Use as much as extensions possible, there are location extensions, call extensions, offer extensions, product extensions, social extensions, and few more. Each and every one of these improves the probability of a getting a click.

• Improve Negative Keywords List:

There is a little math which connects the negative keywords and CTR. That is "higher the number of negative keywords, higher the CTR". With negative keywords, you cut down your unnecessary impressions, that means your CTR automatically goes up.

This is just few ways I used to improve adwords CTR, But everything depends on trying & testing. There might be plenty of points you want to add to this list. Just add everything in the comments.