Please let me introduce myself – I’m John Lynch and I’m currently an Online Product Manager for Trinity Mirror Marketing Solutions (TMMS). In the not too distant past I worked as a Senior Online Product Manager for Yell.com. As the title suggests in both of the jobs my role has been to produce online products for small and medium businesses (SMEs).
In these roles I have found that SMEs tend to be wary of / distrust online advertising for a number of reasons 1) a lack of understanding 2) they have been burned in the past and 3) they’ve been repeatedly approached by sales people using unfamiliar technical terms about online advertising in an attempt to confuse them.
My aim is to help with one, avoid two and deal with three. Finally I would like to get us to think about four – making people think about the Return on Investment (ROI) of their online marketing. If you don’t know what your ROI is you would just be as good as giving money to a stranger on the street.
Now that we’ve set our stall out one of the first propositions I would like to talk about is Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) on Google aka Google AdWords. PPC advertising is when an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on one of their adverts and gets sent through to a landing page or their website. Google has 90% of UK traffic so if we’re doing PPC it makes sense to start there. What we want to do is harness the power of Google to get your business seen and new leads coming.
Finally, as I said we need to base our online marketing activity on ROI – we might try Google and not get sufficient ROI – at least then we will know that and be able to move on to look at other forms of online advertising.
