SES San Francisco 2011 Revives Your Marketing Drive

This morning, Susan Bratton, Co-Founder and CEO of Personal Life Media kicked off SES San Francisco with a tour de force of online marketing related to persuasion marketing and conversion triggers.  She quoted some of my favorite marketers when discussing what makes people convert, including the great Joe Sugarman.  Joe Sugarman is to copy writing what Benjamin Graham is to value investing – they are both brains worth picking if you want to get ahead of the competition.  So, what did Susan suggest could help you in finding better quality and converting traffic?

One of the items that came up was so basic yet  so often overlooked; ask your customer what they are looking for via an “Ask Survey”.  At it’s simplest, we should all be asking our customers what it is that they are searching for when thinking of our business or service in their own words.  One website that I find invaluable for this type of survey is called AskYourTargetMarket.com.  It has never been simpler or faster to find your target audience and ask them simple questions that will help you to build your ad copy and keyword selection for your PPC campaign or even to refine your product or service offering.  Of course the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool is great for finding keywords for your adCenter campaigns as well.

The second half of Susan’s presentation revolved around her “Revive Her Drive” product, which she acknowledged as a tad risque for a group of professionals at a business conference at 9:30 in the morning, but nonetheless, the marketing lessons flowed.  The lessons learned from her product marketing included an extensive amount of keyword research including references to Frank Luntz's “Words That Work” to help market your product.  She discussed how she was able to make 84 variations of PPC ads for the same product and tested multiple landing pages.  At its heart, you can tell that Susan truly gets online marketing just by the sheer degree of research and testing she puts into it.  Marketing is never perfect –it can always be better and time and testing is the only way to refine your campaigns and improve your performance. 

To learn more about Susan, visit her site, ConversionTriggers.com.

So, why not take some of Susan’s tips and revive your marketing drive with adCenter!  Try some new ad copy, a new landing page, new images, or offering and see how your customers respond today.

Thanks for reading,

Phil Greenwood, Global Web & Community Manager, Microsoft Advertising