While we are toying with Google tools, take a look at the Advertiser Competition column, which is a relative value for number of adwords buyers and how active the bidding is (Google adwords are placed on the basis of the price the customer is willing to pay for the click AND the success of their efforts in garnering clicks that they pay for. Doesn’t matter how much you’ll pay, if your wording doesn’t get clicks you’re outta there). Clearly there are lots of people that know “cheap flights” is a better search keyword than “low fares”–they are competing hard for the term. Do a Goggle search for cheap flights and you find all the online travel companies–Priceline, Orbitz, etc. and Southwest Airlines. Hmmm. Search “Low Fares” and you get all the same folks and Alaska Air as well as Southwest.
The google traffic estimator is an interesting and useful tool–we’ll cover it in detail later. Here’s the estimator for these two terms.
Here’s low fares:
And here’s cheap flights:
Looks like if you want to be a player in the “cheap flights” sandbox you better have deep pockets and a good conversion rate from clicks to sales. Fifty thousand bucks per day will eat through a budget pretty quickly if the ROI isn’t there.
I’m not privvy to the decision making at either Alaska or Southwest, but I have no problem seeing the brash Southwest folks embracing “cheap flights” (hey, that’s what we are!) and other airlines having a problem with that.
You are probably already aware of the challenges of using an adwords campaign for a hot keyword like this. Since Google places your advertisement on the basis of the amount you are willing to pay for the keyword and your success at garnering clicks, you are unlikely to garner a good position in the listing until you have spent a great deal of money.
But what if I was doing any other kind of advertising for an airline? Perhaps TV, or direct mail, or email. With this understanding, which cost me absolutely nothing but a few seconds of my valuable time, I might lead with “If you’re looking for cheap flights…” because that’s what people are doing when they are using a search engine. Looking. And then I might talk about low fares and quality service. And I would certainly write any paid search copy to include the words “looking for cheap flights” perhaps even regardless of the keywords I was paying for. I can use more complex search terms that have less competition–what are currently called “long tail” keywords and still benefit from understanding what words will cause prospective customers to click on my ad.
Whether you care about web searches or not, you certainly have to see the value in being able to find how your customers, prospects and the big wide world think and talk about you and your products. This example also serves to illustrate early on that not all keywords are equal in value. But you should also understand that the most common may not be the most important. Even before you start your search for keywords you should understand that some of them do not signal intent to do what you want them to do. That is a critical concept. Keywords should be grouped according to type and the most useful keywords signal intent to take action.
For our sample company, Ke Nalu, the term SURF is the most common search term our prospective clients use, but how many people searching for SURF want to find Stand Up Paddle Surf information. A small fraction, not only because SUP is a subset of the sport of surfing, and “surf” has many non-sport meanings, but also because searching for the word “surf” displays no intent to buy. In fact there are a lot of surfers that HATE stand up paddle surfing because it encroaches on their particular flavor of surfing.
If you follow this book your keyword efforts will yield multiple sets of keywords–product focused, feature focused, customer focused, prospect focused, brand focused, competitor focused. You’ll also have negative keywords and keywords aimed at particular steps in the sales cycle. Many of them might be the same, but you will find unique segments that are best addressed with unique words.
Keywords aren’t the only issue I want to talk about, but they are the key to the conversations that are the uber issue of this book. The marketing I’m going to talk about is mostly the straightforward tactical kind. I’m not Don Draper. I don’t have the talent to concoct the “wants and needs” inspired by triggering brain chemistry. I’m just a guppy for them like everyone else–I can’t watch Mad Men without wanting some scotch. But the tactical stuff I’m going to cover does relate in some ways to persuasion and brain chemistry. We won’t build stories or theories about WHY certain keywords relate to intent to purchase while others have more to do with searching for information or reassurance that the prospect is taking the right next step. Instead we’ll work at isolating them. And then we’ll work at owning them.
If I help you own the organic version of “cheap flights” for your industry then you owe me a really great bottle of single malt.
These words can even relate to the personas and philosophies of our prospects and give hints about the triggers that can cause behavior. People are constantly thinking and constructing their world. They gather up clues from the external world and incorporate them into their personal existence. While visual elements like style and color, and auditory or olfactory components all have their place in the mix, they are not accessed in the same way ideas, beliefs and concepts are. Thoughts and memories are fundamentally words. We communicate thoughts and memories almost exclusively through words. Anyone that can do it another way is termed an artist.
Surely you can see where I’m headed with this. If we detect the words properly we can construct stories–content–around them that cross the cultural divide because they align with the thoughts and beliefs of our targets. It can be as simple as getting the name right–it’s not “low fares” it’s “cheap flights”
Continue with Chapter 3: B2P–Business to People