This is going to be my last post for a while as I return to the cockpit and put this company on hold for a few months.
When I started the company back in June of 2010, I was focused almost entirely on search advertising. As I started working with clients I saw the need to include additional services such as web design, SEO, social media marketing, and mobile. The fact is that the best results occur when all of these things are working in concert.
Recently I was approached by a producer for a local television show that has a thirty minute program focused on local businesses. They wanted to feature my company on the show and wanted to know if I was interested. Then I got the sales pitch. They would feature my company on their program, but there was a cost. If I wanted my company featured in a five-minute segment the cost was $12,000. I could go with a short one minute segment for something like $3,600. The producer went on to say that he wasn’t sure how long these low prices were going to last so I needed to act fast. Yeah, right. I politely turned him down. First off, it was obvious to me that the purpose of the show wasn’t to promote local businesses but was instead a way to generate income for this station. A station one step above cable access. The producer pointed out that I could use the video on my website. And I definitely am a fan of using video to promote products and services. You can read about it in my article The Power of Video. But I also know that I could accomplish the same thing for a fraction of the cost with a simple digital video camera. I’ve seen some examples of companies that have gone this route. In one instance the entire thirty minute program was on the customer’s website even though the company was only featured for five minutes. So to get to the five minutes of video about the company a visitor had to sit through some fifteen minutes of irrelevant content.
A few weeks ago I met with a landscaper. I asked him if he was doing any search advertising. His business is ideally suited for search. He told me that he didn’t know anything about it. I’ll admit that I learned about his company from one of those coupon packs. So I asked him how much it cost him to run the coupon. He told me that it was around $2,700. Now I’m not saying there isn’t a place for that type of advertising. Afterall that’s how I learned about the company, and I wasn’t actively looking for landscaping services. But that same $2,700 could buy a lot of search advertising. Additionally, his rates were high. Too high for me. Maybe if he didn’t have to charge so much to cover his advertising he would have gotten me as a customer.
Now If I had an endless budget and I could afford to do TV, radio, print, and search advertising, sure I would do them all. But if I had a limited budget and I had to choose only one, search would win every time. Why? Because search still gives you the most bang for your buck. Why advertise to ten thousand people when only a couple hundred of those ten thousand people are actual potential customers. Why not advertise to just those people actively looking for what you have to offer?
That doesn’t mean that search advertising is a walk in the park. You have to know what you’re doing or you can quickly throw a lot of money down the drain with nothing to show for it. That’s why you need to have someone actively manage your campaign. If you have the time to learn the ins and outs of Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter, then by all means do it yourself. But the truth is the vast majority of businesses that can benefit from search advertising don’t have the time it requires to run effective campaigns themselves. Some will try on their own and then after a few months of poor results conclude that search advertising is a waste of time and money. Afterall, as competition grows for the few spots available on page one of search results the price per click can get out of hand quickly. I’ve seen CPCs as high as $26 a click. Yet the conversion rate still hovers around 5%. So to use the above as an example. Let’s say you had 100 clicks at $26 a click for a total cost of $2,600. If you’re on top of your game you will convert 5% or five of those clicks to customers. If you can’t make more than $2,600 from those five customers, you just lost money.
So be smart. Put search advertising in the number one spot of your marketing efforts. Make sure that you do all of the other things correctly with regard to web design, SEO, and social media. Make sure that your site is mobile friendly. Definitely consider adding mobile into your marketing mix. And lastly, hire a professional to handle this for you. You’ll save money in the long run.
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