Focusing on customers

Archive for December, 2007

The other day, my friend Heather, president of Mogul Mom and 2 Virtues, was thinking of doing some ads in Google and asked for advice. I thought I would post the advice I gave her in case others find it helpful.

Heather: “A quick question for my marketing guru amigo! I’m going to try out some Google Ads and I’m trying to think of good search terms for The Mogul Mom stuff. What do you think? Here are some I’ve considered: Mom inventors, Resources for mom inventors, Mom entrepreneurs, Work at home moms, Consulting for moms in business. Let me know what you think-you know more about this stuff than I do! Thanks! Heather”

Anna: “I know more about Google from the B2B side, but the same principals apply. First, I would check out the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator in the Campaign Management tab. They tell you how competitive those words are and the current PPC (pay per click) rates. It would probably take a week to go over the whole Google PPC but I tried to narrow it down in this email. We can talk more about this.

1. Don’t select highly competitive words unless you want to pay the high PPC rates! If you don’t pay those rates, most of the time you will be so far in the search, people will never see your ad.

2. Try to pick creative phrases you think mompreneurs will use or will be attracted by (know thy audience). The tools suggest phrases you may want to consider.

3. Monitor your budget like a hawk!! Do you have any idea of how much you want to spend? Google can easily clean you out. I have to be honest that I’m not a big fan of Google PPC because it’s highly competitive and can get very pricey unless you have a real niche, but you should experience it for yourself.

In addition, I would focus on making sure you’re entering into your blog daily and using keywords you think moms may search on throughout your content. For example, your Blankeaze is one of a kind and a niche, therefore, you would kick butt doing PPC on that. Google loves fresh, consistent, relevant content. Also, try linking with relevant web sites to boost your rankings. Pick highly visited, relevant sites and try to link to their web site content (such as articles, particular products, etc.) rather then their URLs (www.XXXXXX.com).

Try the tools and let me know if they help you out. If not, we can set some time aside for PPC 101 and SEO 101. I know them enough to be dangerous >:-). Lastly according to the tools, the words you chose are either very competitive or not competitive enough (no one has ever searched on them).

Here’s a summary I got with the tools. You will have the best luck with “mom inventors” and “mom entrepreneurs” than you will with the others, which are very competitive or not competitive at all.

Lastly, take advantage of Google’s radio and newspaper ads. Google rules the world…!! Anna”

I’m very proud of myself. My Christmas shopping is done and I am “ready” for the holidays. I’m even beginning to feel that warm, Christmassy feeling in my tummy. It all happened without me really paying attention; somehow it came easily this year. I find that extraordinary since I work full time and spend the weekends doing errands, taking my daughter to dance class, cleaning…the list is endless. What did I do differently this year? For starters, I didn’t stress over what to buy people. Why? Because I found out what everyone wanted this year instead of wracking my brain trying to figure out. I also kept it simple with gifts certificates, ordering on-line (great deals and free shipping anyone?) and wrapping as I received them. Thank God for http://www.amazon.com/ and http://www.etoys.com/. These two web sites made my life easy this year and I highly recommend everyone to use them! The walk-away here is for you to somehow deep within yourself try not to worry about things you can’t control or even things that you can because in the end, everything always works itself out! It’s taken me a long time to realize this and I’m still trying to practice what I preach, but I’m getting better.

I’ve been looking over my marketing analytics, which I’ve carefully captured throughout the year on my email marketing efforts. Talk about geeky, I have this huge spreadsheet listing all my email campaigns and results. I’m going to put this data together and analyze it to see where my trends for the year are. For example, what days of the week produced the best results? What is my average open rate? Clickthrough rate? I could go on and on. Many web sites and articles on the web claim that they know what the open rates should be. While I enjoy reading that information, there is one thing email marketers have to realize. Just because the industry standard for an Open Rate is 45% doesn’t mean that’s what MY specific open rate is. It all depends on the tactics I specifically used for my campaigns, which are unique from others’ campaigns. Stay tuned, I’ll post my results here when I finish my report. Maybe I’ll uncover some really interesting things I never realized that I can put to work in 2008!