Would Your Sales Increase If Hot Longaberger Prospects Wore Bright Pink Shirts?
For years, I remember quite often having the privilege of working with Longaberger home consultants. Regardless of all my attempts to explain, I still often get folks that say, "internet search marketing might be good, but not necessarily for my baskets, kitchenwares, home accessories & decor."
While this always amazes me, I'm certain that one of the reasons I hear this is because the "strategy" of internet search marketing is still not understood. Below is my attempt to shed a little light on why this idea is so powerful.
Maybe it's a marketer's dream, but think for a second how advantagious it would be if you could situate yourself at the front door of a Kmart or JC Penney and immediately spot customers who were looking for your product? Lets say they wore vividly colored Pink T-shirts shouting out what they were searching for. And what if they knew to go straight to you rather than go up and down the isles looking for what they might have come for? With Yahoo's Sponsored Search, Google AdWords, a top 10 pay per click search engines, or perhaps even one of the minor league PPC engines, you connect with targeted site visitors the very instant they want to hear from you.
Let's take this concept a step further. What if you could have an unlimited number of college students at the door of every shopping center in the country. What's more, you'd have to pay them only if they found prospects and began marketing to them your baskets, kitchenwares, home accessories & decor.
Now, even if your competition has posted large billboards, hovering over everyone, it doesn't matter. Few customers are going to pay that any attention. All the while, your "agents" are constantly interacting with every single prospect that seems targeted for what you have.
Using search engine ads is like deploying a team of enthusiastic "agents", except that these search agents won't require breaks and they'll work for free until they deliver a ready-to-buy potential customer. Your "agents" will be waiting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for customers looking for your products or services. As soon as customers start shopping, you'll be the first to know.
Of funds budgeted for search engine marketing this year, marketers said they would spend 51% on paid search ads, 6% on paid inclusion, 10% on contextual ads, 12% on search marketing agency fees for paid search, 11% on search marketing agency fees for optimization, and 11% on other areas of search marketing. (Source: Forrester Research 02/2005)
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Longaberger | PPC | pay per click | Google AdWords | Yahoo Sponsored Search | Dan Hollings | giftbaskets |baskets | kitchenware | decor
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| posted by Dan Hollings @ 5:15 PM 1 comments |
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Yes, you're reading it right. According to authors Patricia Cobe and Ellen Parlapiano, who trademarked the term "mompreneurs" and were recently featured in Time magazine and various other programs like Lifetime Television; their mompreneurs online 
That's the challenge in any search engine marketing campaign; you should factor in from the start (as you are preparing your keywords, your ads, and your landing page) what the majority of visitors already 'have learned' about you and the baskets, kitchenwares, home accessories & decor you offer. If you're not sure, assume they've never heard of you. That's always the safe bet. 
What started as a play on the word googol, becoming the search engine everybody loved (or envied) and grew to become the "five-and-dime" of pay-per-click search engines, pulled the plug on the last server on this date in Mountain View, California. It's a story of a future time that could be soon, or beyond our horizon. 
