Walker Sands
A new brand identity that underscores our approach to B2B marketing — always customized, never templated
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DanielLaloggia
When you use an outside agency for your PPC program it can be difficult to navigate between being involved and informed and backseat bidding. It’s vitally important that you understand what’s going on, what the short term strategy is, and what the long term strategy is, but it becomes very easy to get muddled in the minutiae of choosing keywords and changing bids by pennies.
So what conversations are really important for you to have with your PPC agency?
What do I need to know:
Business drivers
- If there are a few products or services that drive the majority of your business, I need to know so that I can weight both my time and attention and your budget to the most important things first
The seasonality of your business
- If you offer products or services with a known seasonality to them, let me know. Maybe there’s a yearly conference in October, or everyone buys their widgets in March. I can plan accordingly.
Jargon
- Jargon can end up being really hard to research, but it can be a really successful avenue for PPC, especially for B2B businesses. If your widgets are called gadgets by people who are really interested in buying them, let me know. This will definitely improve your results.
What do you need to know:
What’s the short term strategy? aka What am I doing for you right now?
- Find out what my plan is for this month. What am I trying to learn? What changes am I making? What am I hoping to see happen?
What’s the long term strategy? aka Where is all this work headed?
- What is the end result for the work? Keep in mind that there really isn’t any “end” to the work, but where am I trying to get the campaign to?
Is it working?
- This actually leads into one conversation that’s necessary for both sides.
What do both of us need to know?
What is success?
- This seems like it should be obvious. But usually after the immediate reaction of “am I making money,” you find that there are better metrics for success than just conversions. I'll talk about this more in later posts.
With these conversations, you should be able to stay informed about your PPC campaign without having to worrying about it every day.