BUS572 - Blog #1

                         Search Engine Marketing, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, and eMarketing Strategy.

Source: http://dgtizer.com/pay-per-click-advertising/

Concept #1- Pay-Per-Click Advertising 

      One very crucial concept that will be utilized in our Google Online Marketing Challenge is Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC). This type of advertising system is where advertisers pay only for each click on their advertisements. This type of advertising is keyword based meaning that it is based on a specific search term or phrase that an internet user enters in a search engine, such as, Google or Yahoo. This type of advertising is extremely crucial because it allows advertisers to present their product/offerings to customers who are most likely already in the buying cycle. When selecting key words, the advertisers can use a number of platforms to find key words. For example, if an advertiser wanted to use Google they would use a program called AdWords and could find the following match types: Broad match, Phrase match, Exact match, or Negative match. With this type of advertising, one will need to monitor conversion rates as well as click-through-rates. I believe that this type of advertising is extremely important because every marketing plan is trying to achieve the highest return on investment that they possibly can. This advertising system will allow one to easily monitor and track their results as well as make any changes necessary throughout their marketing period.
       However, there can be many threats to this type of system if not monitored carefully. Click fraud is an example because competitors realize that you must pay for each click so they will deliberately keep clicking on your Pay-Per-Click ad. This article explains how to prevent Click fraud. What do you think is the best way to handle Click Fraud? Bidding wars is another example because high-traffic keywords are expensive and one could quickly burn through their advertising budget. Finally, this type of advertising takes a lot of time to monitor and the larger your campaign gets, the more time one will have to spend monitoring its activity.

Concept #2- The Four P's of Marketing

      The internet is changing our world and how advertisers market to their target population. The four P's developed by McCarthy are now being challenged because new theorists believe that they are outdated. The original four P's stood for products and services, price, placement, and promotion. New smart marketers such as Godin and Mootee believe that Customer-centric marketing is the new way to market to individuals because this type of marketing suggests that we must understand the needs of the customer first and only when we do that will business outcomes be achieved. Seth Godin suggests that there are five elements which should be followed. First, "Data", because the internet makes it much easier for advertisers to mine and gather information. Second, "Stories", everything a customer does and says. Third, "Products", which is the physical manifestation of the story. Forth, "Interactions",  any tactics that allows the marketer to reach out and touch the consumer. Finally, "Connection", this is very important concept because creating a relationship with the customer will allow for repeated use of the good/service in the future. Mootee stated that there are four new P's of Marketing. These are personalization, participation, peer-to-peer communities, and predictive modeling. These new developments are a result of the trend towards the use of the internet, but it is also important to remember that marketers also need an offline strategy as well. Although eMarketing is becoming essential in this technology crazed world, one must have an offline strategy as well so that they can complement each other and allow the organization to take on a holistic view of all objects. What do you think are some best ways to market your business online as well as offline? Should one put more emphasis into an online strategy in today's society?

 Skill- Keywords 

      After our first class, the readings, and speaking with the client, I believe that the most important skill set I've learned about is the use of keywords. A keyword is a word or group of words used by a searcher on a search engine. For example, a keyword could be  "textbooks", "textbook rentals", or "cheap textbooks". A person enters these keywords in a search engine, such as, Google or Yahoo and the search engine will begin to crawl the web looking to find matches to the information that you have just typed in. I believe that this will be crucial for our client because creating unique keywords will not only make internet users more aware of their business, but hopefully, in turn, this will create more traffic to their website, which will ultimately result in more business for our client. However, I find keywords to be incredibly useful, but I also think it will be a challenge to create the correct keywords for our client because their could potentially be thousands of other keywords that we will be competing with in our marketing campaign. I'm still a little confused about negative keywords though. Are you supposed to include them into your Ad Groups or exclude them? I am looking forward to the strategies one uses when creating specific keywords and phrases.

Personal Journey Reflection:
      
      So far we have only had one class and it has been extremely overwhelming with all the assignments we have to do on a weekly basis for this class plus handling all of my other school work as well. I think that we are beginning to clear some issues that we have struggled with thus far. I am also still confused about this GOMC project because we were't given any examples of past projects. Our first class was also overwhelming because of all the different things we had to set up for Google and I don't believe we had enough time to go over everything in class because of all the guest speakers. I am hoping that in tonight's class that we will gain a better understanding of the project and be shown how to use AdWords so that we can get a better idea of the programs that we will be working with.


Stokes, R. (2011). emarketing: The essential guide to digital marketing. (V 1.0 ed.). Quirk Education. Retrieved from http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/19