bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

I have dozens of Adwords hacks but here’s one that’s hugely valuable for startups that helps you identify very quickly which markets you should be targeting.

• Set up a Google Adwords campaign using keywords that describe your customers pain points
• Break it up into regions, measure which get the highest impressions & click throughs, also note the level of competition (important in a crowded market)
• Run it for a month

You can then narrow it down by region after collecting some data to find the market with the most potential.

I’ve done this numerous times but most recently for a client in an ultra niche market.  Their product is very innovative and only some segments of the market are worth talking to in the early days (the rest require education).  Thus we ran the campaign for a month, found very quickly (for under $200) where the main interest was – a specific country.

We also found out, that there was no competition in the market but also the level of interest which was approximately four times the next highest in the world.

Great – now our client can target an area where there is the absolute most interest.  Thus making growth a bit easier.

It amazes me how many people ARE NOT doing this, so….

Do you:

1) Have an online business (or storefront)

2) Automated systems to sell your products?

Then you need to be investing in automating your business growth.

How you say?

Invest in:

1) Google Adwords / Yahoo Search Marketing: capture people already motivated in your product and sell to them.

2) Search Engine Optimisation, after above run a Search Engine Optimisation campaign to garner daily free traffic to drive sales.

After three months you will have a fair idea on growth off that and do exactly that.  Grow.

Here is a freebie strategy I use all the time.   Seems obvious but quite often gets overlooked.

This is the most simple way you can increase sales online whilst decreasing costs (over the medium to long term).  It’s the Adwords Long Tail Strategy.  Simple, quick and effective.

What to do after running your Adwords campaign for a period of time (say 3 months):

• Do long tail analysis of impressions.  (How? get keywords, total impressions over time period, graph)
• Find the head of the graph
• Target those keywords via seo
• Cover the rest with adwords

Results:

1. Decrease acquisition costs by gaining visitors you already know convert
2. Increase traffic.

I have increased traffic at organisations whilst decreasing their acquisition cost by up to 75% with this simple strategy.