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Welcome (*firstname*) Welcome to the third edition of Konstrukt – the Cru Creative eNewsletter. As promised here's the 2nd of 3 newsletters for this month. In part 2 of INSIGHT (PPC Advertising) we’ll demonstrate how to create your own PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign. In part 2 of CREATIVE CORNER (Sitelets) we'll discuss how to approach he building of your sitelet.
Stay tuned for the final chapter next week. Until then... happy reading! Best Regards
Ben Stokes |
Search Engine Marketing: buying your way to the top! In this month’s edition of Konstrukt, I’m going to let you in on a secret that will almost certainly change the way you market your business online – and quite possibly offline - forever. This secret is pay-per-click advertising. Some of you may have heard of it. Some of you may be already using it. Almost certainly, none of you are using it to its full potential. PPC Advertising (pay-per-click) can be categorised into all the paid listing offerings by search engines around the world. In this article I’m going to:
Creating your campaign Choosing search terms Both Overture and Google will require you to set up some campaigns in advance. Don’t get too nervous here – anything you add can be changed later! The first step is to choose your search terms. This may sound easy… it can actually be quite difficult. The problem is trying to get yourself to think like your customer would think. For example, let’s say I want to run an ad for my company. I want to target people who need web development services (for example). I might take this approach:
Now if I take a quick look in Overture’s “Search Term Suggestions” tool it will tell me that I’m likely to get up to 53 impressions per month – total number of click throughs = 1! Now I don’t proclaim to be a rocket scientist, but the odds of me ever growing a business with one click through (it’s not even an enquiry yet!) seem pretty slim. The problem is that my potential customers don’t ever refer to “web development” – they think in terms of “web pages” and “web sites”. Let’s change my search term to “web sites”. WHOA! Overture now tells me that for search terms related to “web sites” I can get 10’s of 1000’s of impressions per months and thousands of click-throughs. Of course I wouldn’t choose all the search terms they suggest, but this does illustrate how important it is to choose your words carefully and think in terms of the customer’s search (not necessarily what you would search for!) Google has a similar tool called the “Keyword Estimator” – one which I prefer in fact! The Keyword Estimator will tell you forecasted clicks per day, average cost per click, cost per day and average position. With Google you will need to input a maximum cost-per-click before it will estimate, but that’s no biggie, you can always change it later!
Setting your bid Your bidding calculation should be based on three factors:
Your search engine marketing budget may be determined by yourself, it may be determined by your Marketing Manager, it may be determined by your CEO. All that aside, if search engine marketing proves to provide a lower cost per sale than other mediums, you should throw as much money at it as you can! More important than your budget is your maximum allowable cost per enquiry and cost per sale. Of course we want to keep both these as low as possible, but it is important you understand what they are before you go diving head first into a bidding war! Let’s assume, for instance, you sell computers online. Your gross profit on your computers is $400. You estimate your current net profit to be $200 per computer. Now it doesn’t make a lot of sense to go and bid $10 per click through to your site when you know darn well you won’t convert 1 in 20 click-throughs! That said, if the lifetime value of a customer (in repeat sales, software purchases and upgrades etc.) is closer to $3000 net profit, it may indeed make sense to bid $10 per click.
Now that we understand what our allowable cost per sale and cost per enquiry are (or at least we’ve hazarded a guess!), it’s time to calculate our allowable cost per click. Initially this WILL BE an estimate. We don’t know yet how many people are going to go from being a visitor to being an enquiry. Luckily for us, both Google and Overture will provide us with the tools to measure this over time. Let’s be conservative and estimate that 1 in 60 site visitors will request further information. This makes our allowable cost per click $5. So we certainly won’t be bidding over this amount initially. That doesn’t necessarily mean we want to go ahead and set our maximum bid at $5. We just want to ensure that we generate sufficient enquiries for our sales team to close. This is where capacity comes into play. If you go crazy and outbid every competitor on every conceivable search term there’s a good chance your traffic and enquiries (and costs!) will go through the roof. Unfortunately for you, both your sales and production teams are finite resources, so only aim to fill that capacity – not overflow it! Both Overture and Google have their own tools which will help you set your maximum bid and hence estimate traffic and your relative position in search results. Overture will even show you who you are bidding against and how much they are bidding! Writing your Ad Here’s the fun part. You have one heading and two lines of copy to sell yourself. Lucky you’re an expert copywriter! Of course, for most of us mere mortals we’ll need to put some more thought into this. The most important thing to consider when writing your ad is relevance. Go back to your search terms – this will tell you what people who are seeing your ad are looking for! Let’s assume our search term is “web sites” again. Chances are, people searching for “web sites” are either looking to get theirs built, or are sneaky designers like me going to check out the competition! Assuming the former, we want an ad that will appeal to someone who wants their website built. What appeals to this audience? Price, speed, quality, information? We’re only guessing anyway – so why not write an ad for each!
Now before you give me a hard time on my copywriting, I just wrote these up for the purposes of demonstration! As you can see, our existing ad is pulling in a 1.1% CTR (Click-through rate). If I leave up my four new ads, Google will soon tell me which ads outperform the others. This is extremely valuable information! Imagine if one of my new ads started pulling in a 5% CTR. I would then start writing more ads based upon the content of that ad. One of those ads might pull a 6% response and away I go again! As you can probably already gather, the combinations of ads, search terms and bids are immeasurable. How to determine the best mix for you will be a case of trial and error (and persistence!) Please stay tuned for part 3 next week for more information on "Fine tuning" |
Sitelets: making your web marketing dollar go further A sitelet is simply a purpose or campaign specific website that is generally a subset of a larger website. What Is® provides the following definition:
In this month’s Creative Corner I would like to discuss:
Please stay tuned for part 3 next week for more information on "Sitelets"
Building your sitelet Not too dissimilar to building a website, the building of your sitelet will involve planning, specification, development and revision. Planning When planning for your sitelet you need to address the following questions:
Once you have answered these questions for yourself you are ready to put together a specification for your creative team (whether they be a creative agency, in-house marketing department or web development team). Specification Let me get one thing abundantly clear – the more time and effort you put into your specification, the more pain you’ll save yourself when it comes to dealing with your creative team. A clear and concise specification / creative brief will save you money in revisions; will reduce your development time; will result in you getting the sitelet you want; and will result in the least amount of confusion and stress! Your creative brief should roughly include the following:
Of course, if it’s all a little too hard, you can simply give a brief outline to your creative team and trust in their experience to come up with their own specification. Just don’t be surprised however if it doesn’t fit with what you had in mind – they aren’t mind readers after all! Development and revision Once your happy with your specification it’s time to get the ball rolling. Of course you won’t be privy to most of what goes one here, but let me assure you that a LOT of work can go into these things! Unless your creative team is in-house you will almost certainly need to go through a decision making process as to who your creative team will be. You may have someone already in mind for the job, or you may be pitching to a number of would-be candidates. Either way you’ll need to sign off on a proposal or authority to proceed at some stage to get things happening. One thing to be mindful of is copy and photography. Unless your creative team has made it clear that these are included in their proposal, assume they are not and double check. These will add significantly to the proposal if they need to be provided separately. Once the project has started it’s important to stay on top of it as much as is practically possible without stifling your team’s creativity. If your creative team is worth their weight they’ll almost certainly schedule in some dates in advance for first drafts and will agree upon a final delivery date with you. You should always factor in some risk here as Murphy is always ready to strike and will do so when it’s least convenient for you! If you have a set date that the website MUST be operational by I’d suggest demanding the final draft two weeks prior to the date. This should build in enough fat should something go wrong. Make sure any feedback you give is objective (i.e. devoid of emotional outbursts and based around the facts!) Whilst your creative team may miss the mark on occasion, this can often be due to a miscommunication and can be easily resolved. Most creative teams will work with you until you’ve achieved what you’re looking for. Assuming your spec/brief was tight enough and your team’s interpretation is good, you’ll almost certainly be happy with the result! |
Last month we had a request for further information on Rich Media Advertising, Sitelets and Building your customer database. I’m happy to say that we’ve spent some time researching both Sitelets and Rich Media Advertising in the last month and for those who hadn’t already noticed, we’ve incorporated our research and experience with Sitelet’s into this month’s Creative Corner. Look out next month for our in depth study of Rich Media Advertising and Trade Show Advertising! (We’ll also get to “Building your customer database” in the not-too-distant future!) If you’d like to find out more about a particular creative
topic, promotional technique or advertising strategy, please don’t
hesitate to let us know. We’ll do our best to incorporate
into a future issue. As you can see, we’re eager to give our
readers what they want. If you’re struggling for ideas, we’ve
listed some categories below to get your brain ticking over… To have your say shoot an email to: thecru@crucreative.com.au
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BRAG FILE #1: LIPS! This month's brag is for a company called Lifestyle and Investment Planning Solutions (LIPS for short! MUAH!)
This project involved website design, eNewsletter, four different logo designs, a postcard design, business cards, letterheads, email stationery and miscellaneous print stationery. LIPS asked Cru Creative to help get them up and running and the Cru came to the party.
Possibly the most exciting aspect of LIPS work is their Postcard Campaign which will be running shortly to over 15,000 households in the local area. We're looking forward to measuring the response to their campaign and the sales it will generate for them over the next few months. Many thanks to Damian and Justine from LIPS for their support on this project. |
So you’re ready to take the step… you’re ready to refer your friends. It’s a big step we know, which is why we’re going to give you some friendly prodding in the right direction. Some call it bribery, but we just like to think of it as “sharing the wealth”… you refer some friends, we’ll give you the same number of entries in our eNewsletter competition. That’s right, for every friend you refer you get one more chance to win your very own eNewsletter design! It’ll only take you a few minutes -and your friends will benefit each month from the creative insights and tips that we will pass on. Click here to refer a friend. |
It’s coming… and it’s big. The Cru Creative website, now months in the making, is coming soon to a web browser near you. More mind blowing than The Matrix, more involving than Futurama, and more engaging content than CNN on steroids. Plus there’s some purple monkeys and stuff too. All that and a bunch of sweet competitions and freebies to boot. You won’t want to miss the Cru Creative website launch. To ensure you get your ticket we’ll email you as soon as the website is released… we may even throw in some free popcorn. |
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