Successful Pay-per-click Campaigns
Almost 15 years have gone by since I started AndersonPC. With the many transitions we have made from online hardware reseller, to VAR, to break-fix contract services, to Managed Service Provider the techniques we have used to sell our products or services have drastically changed. Almost as fast as our industry changes it seems the tactics for sales and marketing change as well.
In 1996, when we launched AndersonPC, you could manipulate the search engines (WebCrawler & Yahoo) frequently based upon some basic SEO principles. It was extremely effective. Many times when you searched for a particular hard drive, our site would come up more frequently than the manufacture and our sales were a direct reflection of how effective we were that week or day for that matter.
Things changed in the late 90′s as search engines like Google start taking more and more market share and the search engines began to find ways to grow their revenue with all the eyeballs visiting their sites.. The task became more difficult as the search engines changed the way they indexed sites. We had to come up with more effective ways of getting in front of clients. At the same time our business model was changing and we were leaving the hardware business behind for a focus on IT services.
IT Services sales opened up a completely different sales cycle and process. Setting your company apart from the competition is very difficult when your service offerings look just the same on paper. Regardless of what you think, as a VAR or break-fix provider, you compete directly with all the other comparable IT companies as well as the owners brother-in-law, so-and-so brothers’ son, one-man-shops, and national chains, etc. They all take part of the pie and the business consumer has a hard time telling them apart. Their differentiators largely come down to ‘with whom they fell the most comfortable’.
In 2007, AndersonPC, migrated from this business model to Managed Services, and yet again, our sales & marketing practices had to change. While I agree that direct mail, print, TV, radio, etc all have their place, recently we have been aggressively working our PPC (pay-per-click) advertising campaigns. My difficulty in selling IT Services has always been that you need to be in front of the client when they are feeling some IT related pain. Rarely do potential clients shop for IT services when everything is running great and they love their provider. Take that in comparison to the real estate industry. It’s easy to tell who wants to sell their home (of course, nowadays, that may be everyone in the nation but lets forget that part for a moment). If I’m a Realtor, I can look in the MLS and tell which home listings are ready to expire, I can look at “for sale by owner” listings, I can check foreclosure notices, etc. There are an unlimited list of indicators and daily lead opportunities. Not so in our market. No one advertises that, “I’m ready to make a switch.”
Whether you are launching a start-up, or several years into operating your business, you need to continue to maintain an innovative mindset that will allow you to grow your business creatively. This means exercising your creative thinking skills in order to develop and explore new ideas, opening the doors to new and better opportunities. In order to foster a creative mindset, here are some tips to help you stay on the cutting edge of thought innovation:
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