Week 9: Mkt 348 - Local search marketing

For this week, I'm going to talk about marketing strategies, and focus on local search marketing. The use of the search engine to find a local product or service has been increasing a lot during the years. In the keyword research, you have to implies certain kinds of information that qualifiers, such as zip codes, city, county, state, and streets.



Here you can see a lot of examples of search engine that focuses on the local search marketing:

• Yelp.com
• Local.com
• Infousa.com
• yellowpages.com
• superpages.com
• citysearch.com

Week 8: Mkt 349 - Growing a profitable campaign

This week I'm going to talk about how to grow a profitable and successful campaign in Google AdWords. There are 3 basic stages in order to achieve this:

• Testing: New campaigns would start from this stage. In this stage, you will try to find what CPC bid, keyword, and ad combinations are better for you. Your main goal is to determine profitability comparing costs to revenues.
• Growth: Your goal now is to reach more customers, and you may be able to do this increasing your campaign budget while leaving every other thing the same.
• Maturity: If your costs don't reach your AdWords daily budget and you're profitable, you have a successful campaign.

Week 8: Mkt 348 (SEO) - Bidding strategies

This week I'm going to talk more about bidding strategies. Bidding is exactly what decides fate of your PPC campaign. SEO certification stated that, "For example, let's suppose you're bidding on the keyword phrase 'search marketing' but do not know your max CPC. One way to estimate a max CPC involves taking the top 5 bids on Yahoo and computing the average. The current bids are: $0.51, $0.50, $0.33, $0.32, $0.31. The average is 39 cents. Use that as your max CPC to begin with." That is just an example of bidding; however, there are several other ways to see that.



On the other hand, you can use reverse calculation in order to see how much you can spend with PPC campaigns. In the reverse calculation, you calculate the profit that you are making with this kind of campaign and set up a budget for that. If you want more profit, invest more; and vice-versa.

Week 8: Mkt 348 (Hubspot) - Taking your sales process inbound

This week I'm going to talk about the importance of transforming the way you sell. Hubspot stated that, "Buyers have so much information available to them that they typically have already made 60% of their purchase decision before even talking to sales rep." It means that you have to focus on your inbound strategy because it is fundamental to attract customers.

However, we need to understand what is inbound sales. You have to deliver to the customer value of the product, giving to them exactly what he or she expected or even more than that. Here is the inbound sales approach:

• Attract visitors to the website with relevant content
• Be an open book and share your content
• Leverage the buyer's content
• Buyer now has all of the power

Moreover, you have to keep in mind that there are 4 transformations: transform the way you target accounts, transform the way you prospect accounts, transform the way you connect with accounts, and transform the way your prospects perceive you as a sales person.

Week 7: Mkt349 - How to edit your daily budget

Today I'm going to talk about another way that Google AdWords offers you to set your preferences. This PPC program provides you the possibility to edit your daily budget. It is really important because it is a way to manage your budget really closely. Here it is the steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com

1. Click the Campaigns tab.

1. Click All online campaigns, then click the + Campaign button and choose a campaign type from the drop-down.

1. In the Bid strategy section of your campaign settings, select a strategy. If you choose the "manual" option, enter aDefault bid as well.

1. For Budget, the amount you enter should be the most you're willing to spend on your campaign on average per day over a month. You can also apply a shared budget that you've previously created in the Shared library.

1. Click Save and Continue (on the next settings page, you'll be prompted to create and save your ad group).

1. You may edit your bid strategy and budget again at any time by returning to your campaign's Settings tab.

I hope these information help you.

Week 7: Mkt 348 (SEO) - Major PPC search engines

Today I'm going to keep talking about the way of advertising your company or website that I was talking last week. However, I'm going to focus on the major PPC search engines. The market leaders of this programs are undoubtedly Google and Yahoo. But what is the difference between these two programs? That is what I'm going to explain right now.

• Google

           Google's PPC program is know as "Google AdWords" and is considered the best of this industry. And the competitive advantage of Google is the ad positioning strategy. "AdWord's bid prices and click through costs are not synonymous. That's because your bid could be on a variety of phrases and because their discounting system attempts to keep bid spreads from getting too large. Your specified maximum bid of $3.99 per click may actually result an average of only $2.65 per click instead. Ads can contain 25 characters for the title, 70 characters for the ad text, and 35 characters for a display URI. America Online shows the title and ad text all on one line."    

• Yahoo

            Yahoo's PPC program, on the other hand, is know as "Overture" and was the first Pay Per Click advertising of the world. "In Google AdWords, ads are added automatically whereas in Yahoo human editors review your keywords and your site. You may bid on a search term only if the web site has substantial content that is clearly reflective of the search term. Also Yahoo asks their advertiser to rewrite the ad if they are not receiving proper click through and the landing page for visitors must be according to the query phrase."

Week 7: Mkt 348 (Hubspot) - The power of Smarketing

Today, I'm going to talk about Smarketing. First of all, let me explain the main goal of a Smarketing: put on the same team two different segments of the company - sales and marketing - and make them focus on revenue. So, the "S" stands for sales department and the other part is presumable. However, Smarketing can be critical because the relationship between these two sectors is often a negative one.



There are five steps to be followed in order to integrate Smarketing to your organization:

• Speak the same language
• Set up closed-loop reporting
• Implement a service level agreement
• Maintain open communication
• Rely on data

Following those five steps, your organization would definitely integrate Smarketing to its culture, and would see the results and benefits of this integration.