Marketing Allocation Conundrums Revisited
How to assess marketing options based on risk and unexpected benefits. In the column, “Evaluating Your Marketing Mix: An Exercise,” I encouraged marketers to evaluate their marketing mix on a more varied and flexible set of parameters than pure return on investment. As marketers, we often forget there are other factors involved in marketing allocation […]
Evaluating Your Marketing Mix: An Exercise
Before allocating your marketing budget, consider this approach to assessing your options. On top of being massively successful, entrepreneurs like Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens are often blissfully free of academic distinctions. Call it marketing. Call it unmarketing. Call it “doing what works.” Stephens is widely quoted as saying: “Advertising is the tax you pay […]
Online Marketing Budget Allocation
Are you using ROI to justify your ad spending? An alien analysis might be more effective. In online marketing, everything is good to do, and nobody wants to be left out. That is to say, all sub-disciplines, sectors, channels, tactics, and professional organizations in online marketing and advertising compete for marketing budgets, and most claim […]
Is Your Client Going Mad?
Are other people’s marketing allocation decisions driving you crazy? Is there a way to make a firmer case against these decisions? Let’s examine a strange form of madness: other people’s marketing allocation decisions. Hereafter, OPMAD’s. Maybe it’s a client, or senior management of the company. They’ve passed over the important increase in display advertising again. […]
Two Simple Tests to Try With Google AdWords Campaign Experiments
Want to more reliably test key variables in your Google AdWords accounts? Try these two tests. Issues of test design, keyword auction dynamics, and statistical significance are complex. To help marketers more reliably test key variables in their AdWords accounts, Google has created a killer little feature called AdWords Campaign Experiments. You’ve no doubt heard […]
PPC Campaigns in Small Markets: 10 Top Tips
When managing ad campaigns in small markets, it can be difficult to obtain statistically significant conclusions. Here’s how to overcome that obstacle. How can one apply North American search marketing insights to a very small market in Europe? I was reminded of this question when I recently spoke at a conference in Norway. Norway’s e-commerce […]
The Digital Marketing Future: Listenomics, or Creep Factor?
If you optimize highly targeted digital direct response campaigns, conversations, and other buy cycle functions, you are the future. The last of a four-part series. Previous columns in this series have argued that paid search is the most sophisticated current version of a true direct response “machine,” and that companies typically under-invest because they fail […]
The ‘Chaos Scenario’: Will You Be Ashes, or Green Shoots?
Part 3 of a series on building marketing information assets. The “Chaos Scenario” is upon us. It’s not proving to be an orderly transition. On one side: “old, dead media” (and the advertising that assumed and furthered its continuation). On the other side: “something very different,” and possibly far less valuable. There is hope…if you’re […]
Maximizing Your Paid Search Asset
Are companies doing what they can to identify, nurture, and maximize the paid search asset? Here are some things they should be doing. Can a well-honed advertising campaign be considered an asset? A mature paid search campaign is an asset, in the sense that it’s a complex, diversified portfolio of laser-targeted advertising touch points (search […]
Your Paid Search Campaign: It’s an Asset (Literally)
The biggest sin in the marketplace isn’t asking questions and digging up data from people; it’s not asking, not digging, and getting it wrong. Can an advertising campaign be an asset? I don’t mean asset as in “Say, Biff, you’re a real asset to Norelco. Another quarterly sales increase, and thanks for taking care of […]