#1 is when you talk directly to people who want to hear you.
#2 is taking #1 to scale by paying someone to carry your message for you, like advertising. Expensive, not always effective, but easy to scale.
#3 is when magazines and news outlets pick up your story because they think it matters. This is unpredictable but worth more because it comes off as unbiased.
#4 Is when, thanks to new technology and the democratization of distribution, people can pass your message to others, free, through blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Its costs little, very effective and scalable.
The tricky thing about #4 is that you can’t buy it like #2. And because it’s the most effective, companies try to make it work like #2, but it intrinsically doesn’t work like that, you can’t buy genuine desire to share. The only companies that are successful with #4 are the ones that make stuff worth talking about. If you really want to be successful in #4, don’t spend more money trying to turn it into #2, spend more money to change the product or service instead.

The filter function in AdWords is pretty powerful. Definitely should be one of the first steps in discovering opportunities and diagnosing problems. Here are a few of my favorites:

This one helps identify low hanging fruit. These keywords have great quality score, low CPA but just need a little increase in bid to get to a higher position so they can make more of an impact.

CPA is high, conversion rate is low and average position is also high. The bid unnecessarily high for these keywords. They’re not doing much for you so you might as well pay less for them.

These keywords are the bottom feeders. Really expensive and nothing to show for it.

Lots of clicks, high CTR and low conversion rate generally means that the ad does a good job of being relevant with the keyword but there is a disconnect when it comes to the landing page. Test different landing pages with these ones.

Lots of impressions and no clicks means these keywords are going to kill your quality score over time. Try different adtext.

Lots of clicks with a low quality score means these keywords are really expensive. Is it worth it?

Landing pages are underestimated in the role they play in paid search. I think the reason is because it’s a lot easier to tweak adtext, bids and keywords than the landing page. For the query “front load stacked washer and dryer” this is the ad and landing page Sears gives me:

Can you imagine walking into a sears and telling the rep that you are looking for a front loading stacked washer and dryer and in response he says, “sure, all washers and dryers are in the back, go ahead and find it yourself.” Yet that is what this landing page is telling me – “here’s everything we sell related to washers and dryers, figure it out.”

You can discover where your ads are writing checks that your landing page can’t cash in Google Analytics. Pull up your keyword report under Advertising > AdWords and add the secondary dimension of Destination URL (or make a custom report like mine below). Sort by bounce rate and here you will see all the keywords that aren’t matching very well with their chosen landing pages.

In my example below, line 2 has spent $335 and has a bounce rate of 90% and -40% ROI – ouch. Time to rethink the quality of this keyword and the quality of this landing page.

Deciding the time frame that you use to retarget both prospects and purchasers from your website make a big difference. Visitors that leave the site without buying have the most potential for coming back and purchasing in the first 14 days (of course the tricky part is figuring our whether they would have come back anyway without seeing your ads). The more time passes, the colder the prospect gets in terms of re-activating them as a customer. Past purchasers are just the opposite. Right after purchase isn’t the smartest time to serve them ads since they just purchased, but depending on your product, the more time passes the more valuable they are to message.

The traditional advertising model is to use interrupting content to capture attention, but with the saturation of advertising and increasing ability of customers to ignore it, the question now is: ‘How do you become a part of the content?’ How do you weave into someones experience in a way that adds value rather than detracting from that experience? A business must be present when the customer wants them to be, not when the business wants to be. How can a business engage with people in a way that’s useful or helpful to their lives by exchanging value instead of just sending a message? A hyper-targeted, relevant, engaging content marketing strategy is the answer.

When starting up a content marketing strategy I think the content can be segmented into two kinds of content: discovery content and acquisition content.

Discovery Content

This content is used post-stimulus: after the user sees a commercial on TV, a friend mentions something to them or a need is discovered – like the wheels on the car are starting to get bare. It’s the online pre-shopping research that, according to a study by Google, 84% of shoppers now do before deciding to buy. The main objective of discovery content is to allow the business to be found when people initiate this pre-shopping behavior.

Its the content that comes up in organic search results when people ask questions like: “best (your category here)”,  “(your category here) reviews”, how to, where to find, etc.

What life situations happen that would arouse a new need in your customer’s life? They are now in the market for what you sell because _____ happened. Make content that helps them solve that need that just appeared. The old product has worn out, they’re going on vacation, they’re used it up, getting married, graduating from school, got in an accident, etc.

Mediums include: product demo videos on Youtube, staff picks on your site, blogs posts that answer questions/explain how to, Facebook status updates that promote good reviews.

Acquisition Content

This content is where the marketer comes in and creates compelling creative that holds the person’s attention and adds credibility along the path to conversion. Content that builds interest, desire and trust. Beautiful photography, good design, going behind the scenes, personalized/optimized landing pages, replying to questions, aspirational stories, relevant curation and filtered recommendations. This is the content that fills news feeds, email subscription lists, rss feeds, twitter streams and the stuff that gets shared.

You meet the customer post-stimulus with discovery content and then you date a while with acquisition content in the hopes of someday getting married at the sale. No one gets married the first time they meet or on a first date, it’s a process that takes time and trust. And then after marriage you work to have a happy one.

There are endless ways to organize the structure of your AdWords account. I put together this flowchart to help get the process started. Its easy to see how complex an account can be if you sell multiple products, in multiple locations, for products that all have different uses and seasons.

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Content creation is an important marketing strategy for a business and so is content curation.

At the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA in August 2010 Eric Schmidt said, “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until  2003. That’s something like five exabytes of data.”

With that perspective in mind, it makes sense that curation on the web is really important.

Seth Godin explains it in his post Nearly Infinite, “If you know 100,000 words, names and brand names, there are now a hundred trillion different searches you can do… with only two words in combination.  No, you might not want to search on Starbucks Matzoh, but you could. Just knowing what to search for is now as difficult as the search itself.
In the face of infinity, many of us are panicking and searching less, going shallower, relying on bestseller lists and simple recommendations. The vast majority of Google searches are just one or two words, and obvious ones at that. The long tail gets a lot shorter when you don’t know what’s out there.”

A business can take advantage of this problem that most people face online by curating content for their blog. Use the purpose of your business as the theme of your blog and then find other blogs and content out there that focus on that same content and re-post it. If your business purpose is something that people want to rally behind then your blog can be the rallying point.

Magazine publishers don’t sell magazines and web sites don’t sell content, they sell their audiences to advertisers. They do it by focusing on a topic that attracts a lot of visitors and then churning out a lot of content, most of it curated, on a daily basis for advertisers to sponsor. There’s nothing really special about what publishers do that a brand couldn’t do. So instead of paying publishers to be able to brand their content, make your own content and brand it all for free.