Hey, Jay here,
This is the first post in a series of 3 posts on lead generation and conversion strategies for SME's using Google's Adwords tool.
AdWords is a very challenging advertising medium. And Yet, it can be the most rewarding, most effective, lead generation strategy available today.
However, many Small to Medium business owners tend to dive in head-first, and soon find that they're losing money and not getting the conversions they need to have a profitable return on their investment (ROI).
The problem? A lack of education on the Google AdWords system.
Much of the material out there is either too basic and lacking in any really useful information, or as with many of the courses, there is too much useless detail and unreadable technical information etc. about the inner workings of the Adwords system. For an entrepreneur or business owner who simply wants to start generating massive traffic and converting sales with AdWords, just the thought of trying to make sense of all that data, send shivers down the spine.
Well, the next 3 blogs (including this one) are all about how wade through that and cut to the chase. I'll show you how to generate as much traffic to your website that your cashflow can afford you. I'll show you how to convert that traffic into qualified leads, and I'll show you how to convert those leads into sales revenue. And finally, I'll show you how to increase your return on (lead generation) investment, 10 fold.
After this series, I will also show you why cold calling is a poor return on investment and why you should stop, before you damage your brand and your reputation beyond repair. This is the stuff that the other sales guru's won't want you read. In fact, I'll flat out say now that they will have their say on this blog. I look forward to that.
For now though, I'm going to start by telling you the story of how I learned to use Google's Awords system to generate traffic for my clients' websites, and about how I learned how to convert that traffic into leads and sales revenue (Kaaching!).
My background is in sales development, training, coaching and mentoring. I began my sales career some 25 years ago selling advertising space, office equipment, marketing concepts, luxury boats, mobile phones and other telecommunications equipment. I moved into management in the corporate world, studied NLP and Coaching with the masters (Michael Hall, Michelle Duval), and many leading cognitive behavioural specialists (learning DISC, Spiral Dynamics, Saville's Wave tool etc.). I moved into training and coaching in my corporate role and began developing cutting edge training programs for telesales and door to door teams.
In 2005, I decided that I was going to set up a life coaching business so I enlisted 25 coaches from around Australia and New Zealand and set up The Coaching Room web site. And I waited. Nothing happened. So I set up a Strategic Alliance with Australia's largest speed dating firm - Fast Impressions and whoa, we were inundated with business. Problem was, the business we were getting through wasn't profitable business.
All the time I was working in a corporate role as well (about 16 hours a day in all), and this went on for a year before I finally decided to set up a sales consulting arm of my coaching business . I found a major client and left my corporate role altogether.
I haven't looked back and neither has my major client. Their revenue growth has been 300% year-on-year for the past 2 years, not to mention my businesses growth!
To do that, I had to unlock the secrets of Adwords and the secrets of the web.
Now I'm going to show you how to grow your business by that much and even more.
Starting out is quicker than you think. I started out by reading the texts of the real guru's - Frank Rumbauskus and Perry Marshall. These guys rock and I urge you get on to their newsletters and check out their e-books and DVDs right away. You can find their links on this blog.
You can start a Google Adwords account with as little as $10 and get your ads up an running in minutes.
Google has all the tools on-board that you will require to track, monitor and test your ads, and you can set your own spending limits (monthly) and adjust to suit your cashflow daily if you like.
Getting started.
Google Adwords is set up in 3 core levels:
A Campaign - you can have as many as you like - one for each customer segment or product, or service that your business offers.
Ad Groups - you will learn to create ads that are absolutely tuned to your customer's needs and the best part is, Google will show you how!
Lastly - Keywords, these are the words you are going to bid for, to trigger your ads. We'll be looking for some high traffic niche's that no one else is targeting, so you can lower your costs and increase your ROI dramatically.
Okay, so the first thing you'll need to know is how Google's Ad ranking system works. Contrary to popular belief - it's not just about how much you bid (ie. I bid $1.25 and you bid $1.30 and you hope that your ad ranks above mine). That's part of it, but only a very small part.
You see, Google has to please both their advertisers and their search customers - they make their money from looking after both.
So built into the bowels of Google's algorithm are other things like relevancy. That is, how relevant is your ad to the keywords you are bidding on as well as the thing that the searcher is searching for, and of course how relevant both are to your website landing page.
The other areas that are taken into account by Google are Click Through Rate (CTR) and Quality Score (QS). Click through rate is the amount of times your ad is shown, divided by the number of times some one clicks on your ad. If your ad was shown 100 times and 10 people clicked on your advert - you'd have a click through rate of 10%. Your quality score is determined by Google using an algorithm that includes your ad quality (does the headline match your ad's subtext and your website text?), your website quality, historical click through rate (by keyword) and relevancy, among other things.
Sounds tricky eh? It really isn't, and it doesn't need to be. You just need to address one thing at a time and build your campaign up, build your website up, ensuring that you have the correct keywords, capture systems etc. (Google loves websites that are constantly changing and being added to), and build up your products and services over time.
That's what we will be doing here.
Next time around we will dig right into the Quality Score thing and most importantly we'll cover off the secrets of how to build great quality ads. Later we discuss how to convert traffic into leads and sales and much much more.
Until then, I hope this helps!
Best regards, Jay
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