“Help”, said the caller one Saturday afternoon (yes, we responded to a customer enquiry on a Saturday afternoon).
“Google have switched our ads off!”
The detail surrounding why does not matter except to say that Google have some very strange and rigid rules – and trying to converse with them to explain reason and sense is not an easy thing to try to do. In this case, Google did not even respond to the concerns of this, their own customer.
Anyway, this Kent based professional services firm were desperate. They were spending £60,000 each month on Google search ads and now had no marketing channel in place and therefore no leads. No leads? No revenue.
By the Monday morning, we had put together and sent a proposal focussed upon volume PR activity that would start immediately. 30 creative ideas were formed and the research for each was begun, in order that by the end of the week the first press release could be distributed to journalists. The goal was to create rapid noise within this company’s business sector so as to attract swift brand attention and thought leadership that would result in website enquiries.
But the ‘side-sauce’ in doing this was the creation of a bigger SEO (search engine optimisation) footprint that Google’s robots (ironically) would see as convincing, relevant content – therefore propelling the client’s website to a higher position when its sector’s generic terms were searched for. These could be ‘best [insert term]’ or ‘local [insert term]’ or ‘[insert term] for sale’ etc.
At the time of writing this, ProperPR are six months into this project and this is what the client has told us:
“We now receive the same level of leads each month that we did when we relied on Google Adwords. These come from a mixture of generic Google searches for specific keywords as well as more searches for our brand specifically, together with traffic to our website directly from press articles that have links to us within them.
But interestingly, the customer leads that we now receive convert better. We’re therefore saving well over £50,000 each month and have increased our ROI by a factor of 15 by shifting our acquisition to ProperPR”.
Want to chat about how this might work for you too?