Notes and Thoughts on Grocery 2.0

As more advertising budget dollars are shifted to online efforts, search marketing is becoming an essential part of an online strategy. Search marketing is a method of internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs)  through search engine optimization, paid placement, paid inclusion and paid search. Though paid search is only one aspect of search marketing, its popularity has increased as it allows for a quick setup and can be managed by either an agency or in-house. Free tools from Google make it easy to set up campaigns and get on the search results pages quickly. Once established, your paid search campaign will produce quantifiable results in as little as seven days. Paid search campaigns can be used to achieve many goals, from increasing brand / online awareness to selling products and services. Regardless what your goal is – if you’re not advertising with the search engines, you should be.

So you want to try paid search? The first step is to choose a search engine and set up a campaign. Below are some quick tips to get your campaign up and running:

• Keyword Research – Knowing what terms customers associate with your brand, product/service is essential. Once you have identified core and assist keywords on your own site, check out your competition. Checking a site’s keyword density with the SeoQuake toolbar or SpyFu is a good place to start.
• Creative – Be creative and clever with your Ad Copy. Writing text ads can be hard – look at other text ads in the space and see what your competition is using, and then write something that stands apart from the rest (while still conveying the message of course).
• Landing Pages – Never be more than 3 clicks from completing the desired action. If the goal is to have users sign up for a newsletter, put the form on the landing page. Landing pages should be simple and designed to produce the desired action within three clicks.
• Geo-Targeting – A million eyeballs is better than a thousand, right? Not with PPC. There is no use in spending money on eyeballs that will not convert. If your flower shop only delivers within a 20 mile radius, set your campaign to only target that area. Do NOT waste your impressions on unqualified individuals that decrease ROI and lower your CTR.
• Pre-qualify with Ad Copy – If you’re only selling $40 red widgets, say that in your text ad. This will help weed out searchers who are searching for the $20 blue widgets.
• Iterate & Test – Think the first headline converts better than the other? Test it. And then test it with the copy. Combine different copy with different headlines and test that too.

Search marketing requires continual tweaking and refinement. Monitor what goes on in your space and apply it to your campaigns. Google Alerts can notify you of current articles, postings and blogs about your product. Read the comments and join discussions to see which benefits matter most to your customers, then incorporate them into keywords and copy.

Remember, search is constantly changing and affected by external influences. It reflects what’s going on in society, the market and, your customers head; how people think and what’s important to them – your campaigns should too.

Good luck & happy bidding!
Elise