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SEM Greenhorns - Google’s Online Marketing Challenge
By Doug Jakobsen | January 17, 2008
In my little world of educating both sales people and SMBs on the value and growth of SEM, we come across a very real and redundant conclusion: “I don’t have the time, knowledge, man power or budget to manage a Search Marketing campaign on my own.” Those who attempt to successfully do so usually fall short in terms of ROI and quality of leads they are generating. There truly is an art and science to this game.
An interesting online marketing push by Google involves giving students in any higher learning institution worldwide (colleges, universities) a crash course in SEM. They are tasked as teams to recruit small local business, under 100 employees, to help them develop their online marketing with $200 AdWords vouchers. An interesting concept considering when I was in college I didn’t even have a cell phone and email was the shiny new toy. There are 8 teams participating from Central Washington University (close to home).
There are some good points to focus on here.
- Getting business students involved in SEM before looking for that first job out of college is a plus for companies looking to hire eager, motivated and educated individuals.
- Further pushes the snowball of awareness in Local search
- Will hopefully show what we in the business preach – it’s more cost effective to outsource your SEM efforts to professionals (in this case college students focused on one campaign, daily) versus hiring a full time employee at 40K per year bringing in the same amount of revenue a 10K per year SEM campaign could produce, hypothetically of course.
I plan to follow the results and report on the findings in later posts. The employee pool just got a little deeper…
Topics: Local Advertisers, Uncategorized |