Great PPC Campaigns Start by Admitting You’re Not the Expert

Pay Per click search experts typically have all kinds of tricks to make help their client’s campaigns succeed but I have found that many times the best tool you have are your clients themselves. Whenever I start a new project I push for two discovery meetings with a client before launching any campaign. This is not always easy and in the case of some recent campaigns my requests for discovery meetings have been met with an attitude of “we hired you so we wouldn’t have to work on search marketing”.

Whether you are tasked with creating PPC campaigns internally for your company or you are an outside consultant, getting your team or client to contribute to their own campaign is invaluable. You may be an expert search marketer but admitting that the client or a colleague has more expertise on their own industry is paramount to building a truly successful campaign. Even if it feels like a dirty trick, play on a client’s ego expressing them how critical it is to leverage their expertise. This will help the campaign in two very important ways

1. Obviously their expertise will be helpful is in uncovering important key phrases, and in understanding how their customers think, search, and ultimately connect with them.
2. It gets them involved in the process. While this can be painful at first, having your clients involved will make every step from keyword approval to reporting easier and more meaningful going forward

To insure that your discovery meetings are fruitful it is important to come prepared and to provide direction. If you don’t these meetings can become open ended free association sessions that are at best time wasting and worse they can distract from the focus of the campaign. I typically use a discovery survey as a written tool to guide the process and to make sure all of my questions are answered by the end of the first discovery meeting. Doing a focused meeting with survey type tool also allows you to open up the process to several team members without the meeting degenerating into to brainstorming chaos.

Along with the survey I normally ask for copies their site logs to see what terms they are already being searched for as well as access or reports from historic ppc or other marketing campaigns.

Once I have this information I will go off an do exhaustive keyword research including even the most obscure and tangential terms in my first keyword list. After this is complete I sit down to review this list with the client in a second discovery meeting. While this process can be arduous the focus that out of these keyword review meetings is amazing. Clients almost always come up with critical additions to my keyword research and obviously help to weed out many terms that are too far off target to include in the campaign.

Like any good boyfriend-girlfriend relationship if you start by listening you will be amazed at the insights you will gain. And like those relationships letting your partner feel like the expert is never a bad thing!