Brilliant Thinking

I’m not going to beat around the bush with lots of theory, background, references and all that jazz - just get straight to the point. There is a simple model which can help you plan your next pay-per-click campaign (or for that matter approach any of your online marketing campaigns) which is completely business focused.

All businesses exist for a reason, and, as time passes, become more focused on a particular niche. I say as time passes because some businesses start out generalists only to later specialise in one area based on demand. However, many successful businesses start out with a clear focus to shorten the “experimentation” time. Let’s assume you’re at the point where you know your business and can write down a few key things about it. Here’s what you need to write down (for B2B):

• Your Vertical Markets (What most of your clients do)
• You Horizontal Disciplines (How you help most of your clients)
• The Benefits you offer, or the Pains that they experience

or for B2C:

• The types of customers you want to sell to (age, incomes, etc - demographics)
• What area of their lives you can affect (health, lifestyle, affluence, etc)
• How your product or service helps them in these areas

Now, this provides us with a great cube/matrix - the verticals are on one axis, the horizontals on another, and the benefits on the third. When you join them up in 3D space, each intersection point, or cell, equates to a specific campaign you can run. You don’t have to run them all, but at least you can assess which ones you should run - you can perform keyword analysis on each cell and determine a return for that cell. Armed with this knowledge you can move forward and plan the campaigns you should run instead of a scattergun approach that many people adopt.

This might sound like Marketing 101 to some, but it helps you define your core messages that allow you to reach your ideal prospects. And then you need to stick to them religiously throughout everything you do - and that includes online marketing.

I haven’t seen such a simple model used anywhere else as this one that we use at Emissary, but I would recommend it to help in generating effective results. If you decide to adopt it, I’d also like to hear your feedback too.