Addressing Common Concerns

At Yield Software, we have the luxury of seeing a multitude of businesses across a wide range of industries, geographies, business models, etc. This give us a unique perspective on internet marketing effectiveness for different types of businesses. A question I hear often is: “For my type of business, is search engine marketing relevant?” While it’s not safe to over-generalize, I’ve put some thoughts together that can help you decide how relevant pay-per-click is for your business.

The benefits are well known and documented–search marketing has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry because it is effective and measurable. Combining the fact that a disproportionate share of marketing budgets are targeted to the Internet relative to the amount of time users spend on the it, together with the ability to assess exactly how valuable each placement is, it is not surprising that search marketing has quickly become a staple in every marketer’s arsenal.

But, will it work for your business? Here are some of the common concerns:

“My customers already know how to find me.”
If you are fortunate enough to have a well known or unique brand, you have already invested the necessary resources such that your prospects can find you when they want to. You also may have achieved the top natural search results for your target keywords. A great example of this is a professional sports team. If a customer wants to buy tickets or find out event information, natural search will undoubtedly drive that customer to your site. However, search engine marketing can still be very useful. For instance, if you broaden your targeting to include people who are interested in fun things to do for the weekend or good activities for families, you can easily see opportunities to drive new, high-quality traffic.  Also, you can use search engine marketing to generate interest for your other events — batting clinics, fireworks shows, and corporate events, for example. In both cases, you are targeting a more generalized need for a product or service than in your core keywords where your brand is dominant.

“My keywords are too expensive.”
Depending on the business you are in, keywords can be more or less expensive. There is generally a strong correlation between businesses that have high margins for transactions on the Internet and expensive keywords.  The nice thing about search engine marketing is that (with the exception of the quality score impact), in competitive markets, the bidding process ensures that the traffic goes to those sites that are willing to pay the most for that traffic — in effect, the businesses who will generate the most value from that traffic. So, what do you do if you aren’t the high-margin provider in a segment? Even in highly competitive segments, many advertisers run campaigns exclusively in Google. So, you should expand your paid search marketing efforts to include other search engines as well as other advertising mediums including Facebook and display advertising on networks such as Yahoo!

“There is little traffic for keywords relating to what I offer.”
If you are blazing a trail with a new product or technology in a category that has yet to be defined with a well known moniker, you are in the unenviable position: most people don’t know that your category (much less your product) exists. For those who do, it can be really hard to find you because of what I’ll call a terminology mismatch. I first noticed this effect at a company called Riverbed. They sell WAN Performance Optimization Appliances. How many people, when Riverbed first launched, knew to look for “WAN performance optimization appliances”? Most likely few, if any. Sure, customers searching for “Riverbed” would find them. How about everyone else? Companies in this situation should focus on targeting keywords that identify needs or problems. For example, “application acceleration” or “bandwidth optimization”.  In addition, they could target broader category searches like “top IT technologies”.

In summary, one of the best attributes in a search engine marketer is their ability to think more broadly about their business and to look at the world from the outside-in. In other words, they think about paid search from the perspectives of their prospects. If you can figure out a broader set of search queries that your prospects are likely to conduct and that correlate well to your offering,  you have a great opportunity to acquire additional relevant traffic.