My team manages Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns for a number of B2B clients, and of course we’re always gratified when new ones choose to outsource their programs to us. A few clients, however, seem to operate as though there was some mystical connection between outsourcing and hand-washing (as in the Pontius Pilate story): so [...]
Continue Reading Add comment November 6th, 2008
It seems like once a week – at least – a client asks me, “Should we be doing SEO …or PPC??” So it was nice to come across a piece by Julie Batten for ClickZ, “Coordinating Organic, Paid Search Efforts” …with its title giving a pretty strong hint that the answer isn’t going to be [...]
Continue Reading Add comment October 9th, 2008
We sometimes get a call from a frantic prospect who says something like “I absolutely have to rank Number 1 on ‘convertible frammis’ by Monday.” Never mind that it’s Thursday afternoon, and that he means through organic search only …no PPC allowed. We can only speculate as to what motivates a normally sane marketer to [...]
Continue Reading Add comment August 7th, 2008
It’s a fairly common narrative: our client XYZ Co. starts up a PPC program while waiting for their search engine optimization (SEO) to kick in …typically following a website redo. Once they see their results-page ranking move up to acceptable levels, we can expect to get the plaintive question: “Can’t we stop spending on PPC [...]
Continue Reading Add comment June 27th, 2008
The first thing journalism majors are taught in college is how to write an obituary. It’s true! Writing an obituary involves thinking about the highlights of the subject’s life from beginning to end, and writing about it in an extremely concise manner. This exercise disciplines the writer to focus on what’s most important, and to [...]
Continue Reading 1 comment June 17th, 2008
We’ve spilled a lot of ink recently over the desirability of cranking up your online marketing aggressiveness during uncertain or shrinking economic times (see for example our blog posts, “How a Website Makeover Can Help “Recession-Proof” Your Company” and “Recession, Reshmession… Don’t Let the Headlines Scare Your Company into its Own Private Downturn”). Such aggressiveness [...]
Continue Reading Add comment June 5th, 2008
Getting a handle on the ROI of your e-marketing is really pretty simple …and because it can be all-electronic, it involves a lot less guesswork or assumptions than measuring traditional marketing elements like direct mail or space advertising. Let’s look at a fictional – but fairly typical – B2B example: Foobar Enterprise Software. Foobar’s flagship [...]
Continue Reading Add comment February 26th, 2008