The Future Has Arrived - It’s Called Web Clicks, Apparently!
A good friend of mine forwarded me an email last week from a large well known UK communications company (Lets just call them Busby to avoid offence) announcing a new product that "will carry Busby's advertising portfolio forward in the next few years".
Busby, apparently, aims to move its marketing packages away from paper, to more interactive methods of generating business leads. I wonder if this is part of it's 21C initiative?
They've realised that:-
- Nearly 90% of the UK population visited a search engine in February last year ('06)!
- That the UK Paid Search market grew by 65% in the said year
- And that paid search marketing is by far the most popular online format, accounting for 57.9% of Internet advertising spending in 2006.
They say that it takes 30 hours to set up your campaign and 10 hours a month to maintain your campaign. Only that much, I must be going wrong somewhere!
Busby Offers:-
- Fixed budget, so you can decide how much you want to spend
- Guaranteed leads, they will send you however many clicks you agree to pay for
- Advertising copy, Busby apparently use professional online copywriters to write the advert for your website which will attract customers
- Keyword generation, they have a team of experts who look at your site and analyse search engine usage to work out which keywords will attract people to click through to your site
- Direct Leads, when a customer clicks on your sponsored link they go straight through to your website!
- No admin for you, their automated systems do it all for you by connecting direct with the search engines to bid for keywords and upload these funky sponsored links
Oh yes, and they're so confident in the product that they "will guarantee the number of clicks your website will receive in twelve months and give you your money back if the agreed figure is not reached". Sensational, eh?
But it gets better!
You can have a guaranteed 480 clicks per year for just 80 per month and for only 200 per month you can have 1200 clicks per annum (I suppose there must be a volume discount in there somewhere).
Now, before you rush off to sign up, there's one thing they've forgotten to mention in their very attractive presentation. Yep, Quality of clicks. And as you know that's the only thing that I think is important. Any idiot can get traffic to your website, what matters is the quality not the quantity.
Now, much as I'd love people to pay me 200 per month to deliver 200 clicks to their website, if you're focussing on just clicks you're missing the point, and the huge potential of targeted search marketing.
A lot of people can set up a PPC campaign (though, admittedly, quite a few can't), many people can even "professionally" write Ad Copy, some people can even research & develop a keyword list, but the point is that BEFORE you do any of that you have to develop a proper marketing plan (I'll omit the phrase strategy if it sounds too pompous but hopefully you get my drift) and, with respect to Busby, you can't do that for 80 per month. Even if you paid them 400 per month, I doubt they would have the calibre of people, at this level, to develop a proper marketing plan for your business.
Once you've properly crafted your marketing plan (and I use the word carefully and deliberately), developed your keyword list, written your copy and developed your landing pages (something Busby forgot to mention in their presentation and probably one of the most important factors), then you have to properly and actively MANAGE the campaign, test out different approaches & strategies, find out what works and what doesn't and develop a proven viable model.
Even if you'd paid these guys 2,400, would you really be able to say you'd developed a proven formula based on just 1,200 clicks (that's 23 clicks a week or just over 3 a day)?
Ah yes, one more thing on the large Corporate bashing front. As they acknowledge, it does take at least 30 hours to set up a campaign and 10 hours per month to manage it. I make that 150 hours per year. Now if you are charged 80 per month and promised 480 clicks into the bargain using PPC routes, one presumes they're going to have to pay Messrs Google, Yahoo, Windows Live, et al something for those clicks. Now my simple maths works out that would mean you were paying Busby less than the national minimum hourly wage rate, so either they were subsidising this grand caper or something was up.
Peter van Zelst is the Principle of Inovative Internet Marketing, a practical online marketing company. If you want practical help to make your business or e-commerce venture fly visit http://www.innovative-internet-marketing.com/
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