This is an exciting time to see how the Microsoft vs. Google wars plays out in natural language search wars between CHATGpt and BARD.
For this post, we focus on the ability of Google to find your search intent and try to give the best answer to not only your search question but your search intent.
There is lots of material online that explains how Google Search Ads work. However, we could not find much content that explains why Google Search Ads work. Hence this postThink of every time you search for something on Google. You are curious to find out more about something. To us this is the holy grail of marketing and sales because your mind has started on the customer journey. Other forms of push advertising (Display ads, Video Ads, TV Ads, Direct Mail, Billboards) are trying to put you in a frame of mind to ignite your interest in at least the product category.
At the early parts of the sales funnel you are trying to build awareness about your brand. Your target market needs to know that you exist. You need to get the word out.Popular choices in digital marketing is to use Google Ads and Facebook Ads that are both great in getting the word out. For this post we stick to Google Display Ads and exclude Google Search Ads. For search ads work better for lower parts of the sales funnel. By the time someone searches for something (eg. ‘Cheap flights to Paris”) you can be sure that the person is now looking for a specific destination. When your search ad pops up that mentions “Cheap flights to Paris” it becomes very likely that the searcher clicks on the ad to check out what your landing page has to offer.
Social Cause marketing is something that all nonprofits are trying to do.Companies with strong CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) programs similarly advertise for causes as do Governments. Generally, the marketing and advertising community takes a cue from commercial sales methods of “asking for a sale.” Thus you will see TV commercials and internet ads that exhort you to “Donate Now”.It turns out, that an in your face” assertive message can backfire when a section of your audience does not care deeply about your cause.
The holding company for Google is Alphabet (stock market symbol is GOOGL but company name is Alphabet inc.). We found it interesting that although the holding company is called “Alphabet inc.” Google’s entire purpose is not to organize alphabetically. Instead the goal is to show results that meet the searcher’s search intent. For more on how Google thinks see our updated post from 2017 on “Getting found on Google.”
With COVID vaccines all US businesses are hopeful that the pandemic will soon be behind us. Empty stores will be full of customers again!
It turns out the the smallest business with a physical storefront can now track ads from click to in-store purchase. Yes there is some work involved but all the data and analytics is free- for the Google ecosystem. For our variety of dear readers we discuss 5 different scenarios that would apply to your situation as a store owner.
Businesses tend to wonder about the effectiveness of their advertising spend in terms of what they actually sold that could be attributed to advertising.To understand how advertising works its useful to look at the hierarchy of effects AIDA sales funnel credited to Advertising Hall of Fame member Elias St. Elmo Louis in 1898. No that was not a typo and check out the history of this kind of thinking called Hierarchy of Effects in the article by Barry (1987).
This post was originally published on April 22, 2014. We have many readers asking about the connection between the AIDA sales model and the Digital Customer Journey or Digital Buyer’s’ Journey. We are delighted to update the original post on March 5, 2021. We hope that this will help all businesses come back after COVID as customers go through their AIDA process online.
Engineering companies are often unsure as to how digital marketing is relevant for them. Frequently, they rely on the sales-force alone to clinch contracts. This can be challenging without digital marketing support. Engineering companies that are in B2B markets need to think in B2B Buy Task format as they structure their Google AdWords campaigns.
[ Note: This post was originally published on May 20, 2016 and due to the great interest of our dear readers this post is updated on March 3, 2021. We have added an example from aerospace from high tech manufacturing. The earlier example food manufacturing remains. In 2021 though, modern food processing facilities tend to be comparable to aerospace in terms of automation, digitization. We hope that this post will inspire readers from manufacturing to redouble their marketing efforts as we come out of COVID 19. ]
