When it comes to online advertising, one of the most valuable benefits is the ability to collect and analyze data about the campaign. Data is neither positive nor negative in and of itself, but you can use that data to give you more information about your potential and current customers - information that should be a vital component of your marketing and business decisions.

Our client, Convergent, works with universities, medical centers, and government agencies to deploy or upgrade their VOIP / unified communications systems. They can act as a carrier liaison and project manager for these telecom deployment projects, which can often span multiple years. Large projects such as these naturally have a long sales pipeline, so Convergent approached Grid for help in creating very targeted online marketing strategies that focus on specific midwestern and east coast prospects.

We began our work with an in-depth discorvery process to determine what the ideal Convergent client looked like. From company size and location, to how much previous exposure to Convergent this ideal client would have, it was important to understand exactly what this customer looked like. Once we could “put ourselves in their shoes,” we developed groups of targeted keywords and natural language phrases that mimiced what this ideal client would search for online if they were in need of the services and solutions that Convergent provides. Next, we used these groups of keywords to help us build search advertising campaigns that focused on each individual topic. For example, if a potential customer searched for “how long should telecom deployment take,” we wanted to serve up an ad that focused on how working with Convergent could reduce your overall time of deployment. Alternatively, if someone searched for “how to plan a voip system,” the ad should instead focus on Convergent’s extensive experience in implementation strategies.

The first few months of a search marketing campaign should be considered your base line, and should be used to test your campaign in a few different ways. For Convergent, we used the first three months to refine the campaign by optimizing the bid strategies (identifying which keywords are resulting in traffic that we would consider more valuable than others, and adjusting the bid strategy to reflect that increased value) and adding negative keywords (disassociating our advertisements from any searches that contain certain words or phrases). For example, after implementation we learned that the phrase “carrier liaison,” which for Convergent refers to a consultant that interacts directly with a provider, is also used in trucking and logistics, in reference to dealing with Customs and Border Patrol.

We also use this time to assess if our assumptions about our potential customers were or were not correct, and make adjustments based on those results. Did we assume potential customers would use technical language, when instead they are using layman’s terms, or vice versa? Did we expect potential customers would be searching for information during the work day, when instead the data shows they are browsing early in the morning before standard work hours?

Lastly, we use this time to establish goals for the flow of our website traffic. Is it proving more valuable to have your website visitors pass through your pricing page before they reach your contact page? Or do you have a better conversions if people visit one of your case study pages? This sort of analysis can improve your search engine marketing campaign by telling us which information is most important to your traffic, what page of your website your advertising traffic should be pointed, and what we should encourage the visitor to do once they are on that page.

After several months, one of our major findings for Convergent was that we could safely decrease their average bid amount by over 50% with nearly no impact on the overall traffic volume!

At that point, we worked with Convergent to identify their specific website traffic trends, and use that inform their offline marketing efforts. For example, we were able to identify that a segment of traffic to the website was originating from an a network/IP that could be traced to a specific educational institution. This allowed Convergent to reach out to that institution with a more targeted marketing campaign, which included mailing their decision makers a “first aid kit” to help them “repair” a telecom deployment strategy that may be languishing under another provider!

We also set up custom reporting that would notify Convergent if there was a significant amount of traffic coming from the areas centered on the physical location of key potential customers.

At Grid, we believe that it’s better to target your marketing campaigns to a handful of highly qualified viewers, versus spamming your ad to hundreds of people who have no interest in what you do. This is one example of how we’ve put that targeted ideology into effect for Convergent. If you are interested in search engine marketing or how a highly targeted marketing approach could benefit your business, contact us today!