|
| Recent
Articles |
A BtoB Marketing Checkup
It's always fun explaining business to business marketing at a cocktail party. The people asking are really just making conversation by asking what you do for a living. So you need an easy-to-understand...
International SEM & Arbitrage
Limited Competition in Secondary Markets. I recently took the AdWords professional exam again and the section I failed was international search. It is easy to do that because if you are primarily focused on the US market there are parts of search you can't...
Marketing Is All About The Experience
Marketing, in whatever form, is all about the experience. This is the why behind how link bait and viral marketing work. We recently moved to Southern Utah, and in our family we like to be tourists everywhere we go...
Closed Loop Marketing Is Not Software
I recently spoke with a reader who was struggling with his closed loop marketing process. I'm sharing part of our conversation so that other readers may benefit. He explained that his company had invested "big dollars" to install a new marketing automation software system.
Stages Of Marketing Accountability
The five stages of Marketing Accountability are: 1. Denial. "Marketing is an art, not a science. It can't be measured. The results will come, trust me!" At first the CMO may deny the need to be accountable for results.
|
|
|
11.06.07 
Measuring Brand Awareness For Free
 By
Mike Moran
Often, I work with marketers who aren't ready to expand their horizons to Internet marketing.
They remain mired in the old TV and print habits, religiously comissioning expensive surveys to measure the uptick in brand awareness stemming from their latest campaigns. But one time I baited my hook with something they desperately wanted-I promised to do their brand awareness survey for free.
Several years ago, my nascent search marketing team was having a heckuva time getting a certain group of marketers to pay any attention to us. we'd shown them the statistics and the business case and everything we could think of, but they clung to their traditional ad spending-this newfangled search stuff made no sense to them.
One day, however, we found our opportunity. They were introducing a new product feature, one that they intended to publicize widely. They were determined to blanket the airwaves, magazines, and anything else they could think of with this interesting marketing message. They were determined to get the message out on this new feature.
But they had a problem. As often happens in big companies, their promotional budget was much smaller than what they needed. They faced the Hobson's choice of reducing their spending on advertising or eliminating the brand awareness survey-the very survey that would prove to everyone how effective their campaign was.
So my team came to the rescue. "How would you like us to show you whether your campaign is working?" we asked sweetly. "We can prove that people are becoming aware of your message, and we can do it in a few days-not the weeks or months you must wait for a typical brand awareness survey." And that's not all we promised. "We can do all this for your favorite price-free."
For the first time, these marketers were interested in what the geeks had to say. They wanted to know more. So, we explained that we can use keyword tools that tell us what words searchers are looking for. We can run those tools before the campaign starts to show that no one is searching for any terms corresponding to the new feature. Then, after the campaign has started, we can regularly show how many more people are looking for those very same words. And it won't cost a cent-just a few minutes of time. Obviously, the only reason for an uptick in searchers looking for these words would be the success of the offline campaign in raising awareness. Tracking search volumes is a free way to measure brand awareness.
The marketers were ecstatic. They eagerly diverted the money allocated to the follow-up brand awarness survey and poured it into the ads themselves. They still had less money than they had hoped, but that's always true, isn't it? They also hoped that our statistics might convince the powers-that-be to add more money for the campaign once they saw it was working.
Finally the big moment arrived. Our keyword tools showed without a doubt that something no one had ever heard of was suddenly driving hundreds of searches on a regular basis. The excited marketers gave each other "high fives" to celebrate their success. And, just as they hoped, they got an increase in funding to do even more advertising. It couldn't have worked out better.
Then, one of them asked an innocent question, "Um, just what do all these searchers see when they type these words in, anyway?" And we showed them. The search results pages showed magazine reviews of the new product with this exciting feature, they showed newspaper stories and many other results-with one Web site conspicuous by its absence. Ours.
You see, because these marketers had never been interested in search marketing, they had provided no content on IBM's Web site for the search engines to find. They had a nifty Flash demo, but all these potential leads were forced to find some other way to get information from IBM. Google hadn't found any information on IBM's own Web site.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Copyright Mike Moran
Mike Moran is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, expert on Internet marketing, and the author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., the best-selling book on search marketing. Mike also writes the popular Biznology newsletter and blog.
|
