Sure it does, but you need to know this:
sometimes Google AdWords is NOT the best way for his prospect to reach a new customer! Sometimes it’s a lousy way to reach your target customer. Let me give you some examples:
* Keyword based advertising only works when people know they have a problem and can describe it to themselves and believe that somebody on the Internet has a solution. But many people have severe problems they don’t even realize they have. If that’s the case, search engine marketing isn’t a very good way to reach them. You need to interrupt them instead. So again, direct mail, ads in magazines they read, TV, radio – all of those media might be better. Search engine marketing only gets you people who are proactively looking to solve their problem right now.
* Sometimes search traffic gets you, ironically, the lowest quality, least-interested and least qualified prospects. People who regularly visit specific web sites are much more interested and much more qualified. Here’s an example: Let’s say you are doing fundraising for environmental activism. You could bid on the keyword “environment,” but what you’d probably get is high school kids doing homework assignments and writing papers about the environment. Now it may be nice to reach those kids with your message, but you ain’t gonna get any money out of them. And if you think about it, people who are already active and interested in that probably are not typing “environment” into a search engine. They already have sites they like to go to.
You get much better traffic, and more donations, advertising on those sites. (That’s why, in some categories, AdSense gets you better traffic than Google searches.
For most people, the truth is somewhere in the middle. For most people, Google is a great way to get a certain amount of high quality leads, but there are only so many available. It’s like an oil well that pumps out just so much every day, and no more. Plus you never want to have all your eggs in one basket, that makes you very vulnerable. So you need to explore other avenues.
In conversations I’ve had, people have been using any or all of the following ways to acquire new customers:
Buying space ads in e-zines
Endorsed email blasts from affiliates
Pop-under and popup ads on other sites
Postcard mailings
Direct Mail
Facebook Ads
Twitter
Magalogs – catalogs that look like magazines
Spots in other peoples’ catalogs
FEDEX envelopes to highly-targeted prospects from carefully selected mailing lists
Banner ads
Radio
TV
Telemarketing
Issuing a Press Release
Writing a Book
Being an “Expert” on a Talk Show
Exhibiting at Trade Shows
Flyers distributed house-to-house or business-to-business
Doing a custom teleseminar for another person’s email list
Ads in magazines
Remnant space in local newspapers, purchased at a deep discount rates
Speaking at seminars
Card Decks – i.e. packet of postcards that comes in the mail
Writing magazine articles and e-zine articles
“Buyer advocate” sites like Thomas Register and Globalspec
Flyer inserts in newspapers, magazines or mail-order shipments (that’s called “Insert media”)
“Lumpy Mail” – sending people interesting objects, like one guy I know who mailed out a six foot canoe paddle
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So save this list for the next time you have one of those days when it seems impossible to find a new customer!
Remember that every other advertiser out there has access to some customers, and many of them know they can make a little more money (and not lose any business) by giving you controlled access to their customers. And many times even though those other media may have a higher customer acquisition cost, the customers may be higher quality.
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