Happy New Year! This year I am starting to use several new marketing tools, which are: Adbase Emailer, Facebook Ads and a portfolio directory service (ie Production Paradise, Dripbook, Workbook, PDN Photoserve, etc.). The main active marketing tools I already employed prior to adding these services are: google adwords, social media sites (twitter, facebook) and direct mail pieces. I am starting several posts to discuss how all of these marketing tools have been working for me. And I am going to start by discussing Google Adwords.
Google adwords has not been a successful marketing tool for me thus far. After $500 of adwords, I have gotten maybe two inquires for services, but no one has actually hired me. I believe that this is mostly because I did not know what I was doing with adwords; how to bid properly for ad placement, interpret analytics, keyword and target my ad properly.
My previous ad was too broad and keyworded for every type of photography I do. This meant that my message could not be compelling to a particular potential client, like a bride or photo-editor. This broad message probably contributed to a high bounce rate and very low ROI. I created my ad with a broad message because I was thinking adwords was going to be a cheap way to advertise–and to maintain adwords “cheapness” I decided I needed to minimize the number of ads I was running. Oops.
The other problem with my ad was that it was always placed too low on the page so that I got a lot of impressions (meaning the ad was showing on the page) with very few clicks, again leading to a low ROI (ie lots of paying per-impression with no click to website and therefore no chance of catching someone’s eye).
So I have now learned much more about Google adwords and am going to do the following this year:
1) Create compelling well targeted ads. For example, create separate ads for brides and photo-editors.
2) Give the ad-target a compelling reason to click on your ad–maybe by adding a discount for brides, or show unique imagery.
2) I am going to create ads using images, as opposed to pure text ads.
3) I am going to bid properly so that my ad appears in a favorable part of the page near the top.
This was definitely an expensive lesson, however, I think I have learned from it. If not let me know!
