Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ask a Marketer: Paid Search

Posted by Andy in Uncategorized and tagged with , , , ,

Last week we started the “Ask a Marketer” Series with Email Marketing tips from Elizabeth Case. This week we shift to paid search, with Local SEM Expert Rick Read.

Q1: Companies seem to be moving almost all of their Paid Ad budget to Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. What are you seeing from clients?

Rick: Yes. Paid media dollars are being moved to Search (Google//Bing), Facebook, and LinkedIn. Search always seems to be a steady driver of clicks and usually if examining the whole funnel search usually plays a role in influencing end clicks elsewhere in the funnel. FB and LI, have great results because of their ability to deliver more engaging content/creative and have powerful targeting capabilities. For all channels I would recommend leveraging custom audiences and re-marketing where you can.

Q2: What kind of landing page work should you do before starting a Paid Search campaign?

Rick: We see best results with a Clear top of page/above the fold CTA. If you at driving to leads to gated content, I recommend testing that to see if it works with your audience and campaigns. Search works best with as few steps to an end action as possible.

Q3: What is the minimum budget you need to make a Paid Search program worthwhile? How much for media, how much to hire help?

Rick: This is a difficult question as it has a lot of dependencies. Vertical, Keywords, brand awareness, and competition. depending on your KPI. You can allocate your funds in equal proportion and as your campaign runs you begin to shift budgets to media that perform better. But avoid the “last click” measurement model, try to measure and take into consideration the value search has on a FB click, even if search doesn’t get the last click.

For search you can use Google’s keyword planner and get an idea of search query volume and average CPC and then project that over the QTR then year. initially you want use this figure and add an additional 10-20% to it and run for 3-6 months and measure the results. You may find you cannot spend the money, or it may not be enough and will require additional investment. As far as staff resources, depending on account size, you may need a minimum of two people. one for PPC and one for Social. One can do it but they are two different practices that are involved enough to be a challenge for a single individual. But there are plenty of Agencies that handle any size business, so that is an option.

Q4: What are some ballpark Paid Search CPC and CPM rates these days for different industries?

Rick: Again this is a difficult question to answer. You can find a lot of info here https://trends.google.com/trends/ . CPC is effected by brand/non-brand keyword mix, Brand power, competition and quality score. etc. We have $40 keywords and keywords as low as $1 on branded terms. so again these are hard numbers to pin down.

Have more questions for Rick? Shoot me an email or find him on LinkedIn..

Should We Provide Free College Tuition

Posted by Andy in Uncategorized and tagged with , ,

I’m seeing this topic brought up more and more. College is too expensive and even the middle class can’t afford it anymore. And those who come out of school with a mountain of debt will never be able to own a house, much less have enough discretionary income from the low paying jobs they’ll earn with their degree.

So the easy answer is to make college cheaper – or even provide college for free. It works in countries like Sweden, so could it work here?

Well the 1st thing that would have to happen would be a gigantic increase in taxes. Someone still has to pay the professors, administrators, janitors, etc… who make the school run.

But suppose in the short-term, we had a hybrid model that solves a specific problem for one sector of U.S. Business.

Let’s provide education that is free – but on loan – to people who choose to enter a track specific for math, science, engineering or computer programming. Here’s how it would work.

  1. Test into a program for aptitude or potential ability in the subjects, not existing grades or knowledge. Any age.
  2. Choose a specialized track includes some General Education but really focuses on the technical subject matter.
  3. Like the military, mandate required service time to pay off the loan. One suggestion: within 8 years of graduation, require 2 years of part-time teaching at a community college, high school or workshop level. This will help with the burden that we have a lack of professionals who can teach these subject matters. It also gives graduates a full 6 years to get their career situated and mature as adults who can mentor others.
  4.  If the graduate has made enough money to pay off the loan, they can spend money rather than time in service. That money would be able to hire others who wanted to teach.
  5. The tech companies would be asked to underwrite some portion of the project. You’d want to make the numbers work so that overall, the cost of recruiting technical talent would decrease even after their financial commitment. They’d be investing smart money to grow the labor pool rather than paying premium salaries and recruiting commissions in a battle for scarce resources.

I don’t know how the numbers would net out, but I’m not in government. Maybe someone will read this and see if the math works.

Any other thoughts? Email me.

My Facebook Feed’s Predictions for 2017 (Part 1)

Posted by Andy in Uncategorized

It’s the time of year when I get to reflect and think about the years immediately behind and ahead of me. I like to try to make some predictions to myself; not for clickbait or blog views, but so I can try to avoid being in a state of surprise and reaction as the year unfolds.

This year, I don’t have to do that. Thanks to the election of Donald Trump, I can simply look at my Facebook feed and see what everyone believes will happen. Between my friends and the media, 2017 has already been decided. So according to Facebook, here are some things the consensus has agreed upon will absolutely happen.

  1. We’re all going to become Russians: Apparently we already are Russian, we just didn’t know it. Russia controls our elections and our President. The policies that will be implemented in 2017 will be strictly designed to benefit Vladimir Putin.
  2. The KKK will reign supreme: According to my Facebook feed, a Trump Presidency means that it will be gosh darn near socially unacceptable for me to associate with members of different races. It stinks that I suddenly won’t be allowed to hang out with my friends who aren’t white.
  3. The Supreme Court will have 3 new members who believe Hitler was too liberal: It seems to be widely agreed upon that a Trump Presidency will surely lead to a new Supreme Court makeup in which 2 older Democrats and an empty seat will be filled by people who hate freedom and promote persecuting personal freedoms. That is certainly disappointing.
  4. No one who makes less than $120,000 a year will have Health Care: From what I’ve read on Facebook, with the repeal of ObamaCare almost everyone will lose their Health Insurance, even people who have other types of Health Insurance.
  5. Nuclear war with China is imminent: Now this scares me a lot, but makes the rest of the list pretty irrelevant. I live on the west coast near a Navy base. We must be high on the early target list. So, I guess the other things won’t matter since I’ll be part of a giant mushroom cloud.

This all nets out to a pretty depressing look into 2017. But I like to be more optimistic than this. So I think my resolution in 2017 is to ignore Facebook and watch channels like Bloomberg instead.

Explaining Why the Sounders are Playing Tonight, in 30 Seconds or Less

Posted by Andy in Sports, Uncategorized and tagged with , ,

The Sounders play their 1st game of the MLS season on March 6. But today is February 23 and they have a home game that matters against a Mexican team called Club America. For you non-soccer fans, I will attempt to explain in the fewest words possible.

1) In 2014, while the regular season was being played, the Sounders won a different tournament called the U.S. Open Cup. That made them one of 4 American teams to qualify for yet another DIFFERENT 24 team tournament in 2015 called the Concacaf Champions League (Concacaf = Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football.)

2) In 2015, they played the “Group Stage,” where the 24 teams were split into 8 groups of 3, with the winner of each advancing to the next round. So the Sounders played 2 games against a team from Canada and 2 games against a team from Honduras. They won their Group, thus advancing to the final round of 8.

3) HOWEVER, due to the weird schedules of U.S. and Mexican leagues, you can’t actually play the quarterfinals, semi-finals and finals of the 2015 tournament in 2015. So these rounds are being played in February, March and April of 2016. In each round, the teams will play two games against their opponent, one at home, one on the road a week later. Most goals after two games wins.

4) Out of the 24 teams that qualified for the tournament originally, 4 were from the Mexican League and 4 were from the U.S. The other 16 came from all over Central America; Honduras, Trinidad, Guatemala, etc… All 4 teams from Mexico and all 4 teams from the U.S. advanced to the final round of 8. So if you are a math wizard, you are able to quickly see than ZERO of the 16 teams from the other countries made it past the U.S. and Mexican teams. In fact, when you look at the overall records in the Group Stage, U.S. teams were 10-5-1 and Mexican teams 10-4-2. Yes, in 32 games, U.S. and Mexican teams lost a total of 3 times.

Now, you might ask the question, “Well if the U.S. and Mexican teams are the only ones to make it through the Group Stage anyway, why do they play meaningless games in 2015 and delay the Knockout rounds until a full 2 seasons after the teams qualified? Why not skip the Group Stage and just have an 8 team Knockout in the right year?”

That’s a question I don’t really have a better answer for than, “Well, it’s soccer.”

Adding to the lunacy of the whole thing, because each group has 3 teams, by mathematical definition all the teams in the groups can’t play in the same 24 hours, like every other tournament in the world would schedule games. So in a quirk of fate, last year the Sounders won their group BEFORE the other two teams in their group had played their final game. Thus, Vancouver had to fly to Honduras in the middle of the week to play a game that didn’t matter, wasn’t on TV and no one wanted to go to. I think they sent like 13 of their youngsters and were in and out in 24 hours.

So that’s why the Sounders are playing tonight.

The Problem With Expectations

Posted by Andy in Uncategorized

Today is a day for long-time Mariners fans to do some reflecting. Yesterday seemed like a re-run of something we have seen before. A game against the Yankees, that we should have been won, and yet somehow turned into a loss.

Let’s look at the Mariners record since 1977 and then this year:
+ Going into 2015, the team was 2,822-3,209. That’s a winning pct of .468 which gives them an average of 76 wins per year.
+ In 2015, the Mariners are currently 24-28. That’s a winning pct of .462, which would project them to win 75 games this year.
So by all accounts, the 2015 Mariners are performing ALMOST EXACTLY in line with the 1977 – 2014 Mariners. And yet this season feels like a failure.

So why did this defeat feel so much worse? Why did this loss feel like the end of a season?

It’s simple really. Expectations.

I think you can break the Mariners into 3 eras. Pre-Lou. Lou. And Post-Lou. Lou was the Manager from 1993-2002, but for the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to start the “Lou” era 2 years after he got to Seattle (to account for the time it took for him to make his impact) and end it the year after he left (to account for the residual effect he may have had.)

Pre-Lou (1977 to 1994) – Record: 1,215-1,595 (.432). Avg record: 70-92
Lou (1995 to 2003) – Record: 802-637 (.557). Avg record: 90-72
Post-Lou (2004 – 2015) – Record: 829-1005 (.452). Avg record: 73-89

So if you became a Mariners fan after 2003, your expectations are nil. I mean you *may* remember 2009 when they rang up 85 wins, but more likely 2014 was the first time you realized their season actually extended into September.

But if you were here from 1995-2003, well there are EXPECTATIONS. We had 4 playoff runs in those 9 years and were over .500 every year except two. Making the playoffs 4 out of 9 years seems about right for a team with the best pitcher in the game, a beautiful ballpark and access to a ton of cash.

So many people hoped that with last year’s results, the Post-Lou era could be officially closed. We could make 2014 the first year of the new “Cano” era. 2015 would be EXPECTED to improve upon the last.

And thus last night felt like the end of that hope.

The Mariners can play 24-28 baseball the rest of the season and perform in line with the average history of the franchise. But this year the expectations were bigger – that the team had broken out of the Post-Lou funk. And thus this year’s “average” performance will bring with it disenchantment and disappointment. That’s the problem with expectations.

Get Your B2B Questions Answered Tuesday Night

Posted by Andy in Uncategorized

There will be no Super Bowl Commercials featuring dogs and horses promoting a B2B brand this year. Liam Neeson won’t be doing voiceovers Sunday about Enterprise software.

B2B Marketing is the quiet opportunity. Its success is not measured on fluffy numbers like “Followers,” “Retweets” or “Net Promoter Score.” B2B is about leads and sales. Not $.99 sales. $99,000 sales. B2B is sexy in its own unsexy way.

This Tuesday, some great people from the B2B Marketing world will get together at Moz World Headquarters and each share 15 minutes of wisdom. At the end, I’m going to get to ask these experts a few questions panel style. I’m looking forward to it, and if you are into B2B Marketing, I hope to see you there.

www.B2BNowAndNext.com

MKTG 555 Students – Here’s What You Need to Know

Posted by Andy in Marketing, Personal, Uncategorized

One difference between graduate school today and 10 years ago is that you can go to Google (or Bing) and find out a little about your instructors before you show up for class. And when your instructor pays his mortgage by helping clients with their marketing strategies, then he’ll probably be pretty easy to find.

So excellent work in finding this blog. This is the kind of entrepreneurial drive that will make you successful in the class. If you read enough, I bet there are some things that can be helpful. Like, you’ll probably learn that the quickest way to a low grade is to say anything positive about the Oklahoma City Thunder in my class.*

*Legal Disclaimer – This is not a true statement. I will not alter your grade based on which NBA team you support. It’s more correlation than causation.

It’s should be another fun quarter. I’ll do what I can to introduce you to the people and events that make Seattle a vibrant scene for start-ups. And we’ll all look at a ton of entrepreneurial marketing strategies that can be emulated. I’m looking forward to meeting all of you.

PS – Here’s a reward for being proactive. The first trivia question for determining group priority is this: What is the name of the City of Seattle’s Startup Liason?

A Visit to MakerBot

Posted by Andy in Entrepreneurism, Technology, Uncategorized

Everyone has different ways to enjoy time visiting a foreign city. Some people love trying restaurants. Some like museums and sightseeing. I like going to cool companies I have heard about and talking with the people who work there.

I think 3D Printing is one of the next big things and will eventually have a huge effect on the global supply chain and how we produce and purchase everyday materials. Sure, it’s still in its infancy today, but the potential opportunities are limitless.

Makerbot Screenshot

So when I was in New York and found out an old colleague of mine worked at Makerbot, a leader in 3D printing, it was like someone else hearing they could get a private tour of the Louvre.

Makerbot Prototype

I was under NDA when I was there, but I think I’m allowed to say that there are now more than 600 Makerbot employees (and they’re hiring a ton more.)

Makerbot 3D Printer

I think I’m also allowed to say that people are doing more than just printing little toys. People are designing and printing their own iPhone cases at home, theatre companies are printing custom masks, architects are printing full scale models and industries across the board are coming up with their own ideas.

Makerbot Spool

So if you are a doubter in the technology, I’d ask you think about 3D printing the way people looked at cell phones in 1980. Back then it may have been big, slow and only apply to a few people. But look at how the world has changed now that everyone in the world can have a mobile broadcasting and computing device in their pocket.

Makerbot Large Machine

Thanks for the tour of the office. Lots of cool stuff is coming from them soon.

World Cup Round 1 – Continent vs Continent

Posted by Andy in Uncategorized

Only 32 teams are invited to the World Cup finals that you are watching now. How did the 190 or so teams get whittled down to these? Well, there are 3 years of intra-continent tournaments that deliver a few finalists. Here’s how the allocations break out:
1 Host Country
13 European Countries
5 South American Countries
5 African Countries
4 North American / Central American Countries
4 Asian Countries

So, is Europe deserving of 13 spots? Is Africa worthy of 5? Let’s look at the first round of games. (For this comparison, we’re putting the host Brazil with the other 5 South American teams)

North/Central America (4): 3 wins, 1 loss. Vs Africa 2-0-0. Vs South America 1-0-0. Vs Europe 0-1-0.
South America (6): 4 wins, 2 losses, 0 ties. Vs Europe: 3-1-0. Vs Asia 1-0-0. Vs North America 0-1-0.
Europe (13): Total record: 6-6-1. Record vs non-European teams 3-3-1: Vs South America: 1-3-0. Vs NA: 1-0-0. Vs Africa 1-0-0. Vs Asia: 0-0-1
Africa (5): 1 win, 3 losses and 1 tie. Vs North America: 0-2-0. Vs Europe: 0-1-0. Vs Asia 1-0-1.
Asia (4): 0 wins, 2 losses, 2 ties. Vs Africa 0-1-1. Vs Europe 0-0-1. Vs South America 0-1-0.

So what does this tell us?
– The only African or Asian team to get a point against a non Asian or African team is South Korea, with a tie against Russia.
– South America has been as good as advertised, other than Uruguay.
– North America has been pleasantly surprising.
– Europe could not be more neutral.

Clearly the African and Asian teams are struggling, while Sweden and Ukraine are sitting at home. Maybe we should be allocating some of their spots to Europe.