Skiing Business

Ryan Dionne
2011-05-10 13:15:47 | 3449 views SHARE

(Editors note: This is the last of a three-part series looking at different marketing techniques. The first week we looked at how events can boost business, and the second week we spoke with CP+B ad exec Chuck Porter.)

Playing in a reported $30 billion industry, Trada Inc. takes the fear out of pay-per-click advertising campaigns. That kind of advertising is the all-text, 25-character headline, 70-character body ads that show up when searching for something on Bing, Google or Yahoo.

While pay-per-click advertising can seem complicated to the average small-business owner, Trada’s service makes it easier to implement by letting someone else do the work while the client gives as much or as little input as he wants. And whether using the Boulder, Colo.-based company or not, PPC campaigns can be scaled up or down any time, so ski-related businesses can change with the season.

Skiing Business sat down with Bill Quinn, Trada’s marketing and product management vice president, to find out more about the company and PPC campaigns.

What’s Trada’s story?
We focus on pay-per-click campaigns to get advertisers listed on the right side or top of search engine results when someone searches using Bing, Google or Yahoo. Big companies like The North Face have a budget to hire people to set up paid-search campaigns for them, but we focus on small and medium businesses because they typically don’t have that budget.

So what exactly is a pay-per-click campaign?
It’s a performance-based marketing campaign where advertisers only pay when their link is clicked - but only the links on the search engine’s sidebar or the ones that are set apart on the top of the results.

PPC campaigns get a business’s name in front of potential customers when customers are searching for products that relate to the business. If someone searches for “ski jacket,” they are looking for a jacket, so ski retailers or jacket brands that have a PPC ad may end up having their ad shown at that time.

How does it work?
Advertisers purchase individual keywords - which are sometimes three or four words long - that directly relate to the products they sell. Those words, like “Mountain Hardwear ski pants” or “Salomon skis,” help determine whether the business’s ad shows up when someone does a search on Bing, Google or Yahoo. One nice thing about PPC campaigns is that advertisers can target their ads to geographic regions, so a ski shop in Golden, Colo. doesn’t show up as an ad to someone in Taiwan.

And because more input is better than less, Trada has numerous people come up with keywords for each ad campaign. We have about 2,000 paid-search experts who come up with keywords, and an expert only gets paid if his keyword garners an acceptable sale.

This sounds like it has potential for brands of all sizes, but who, really, is your target market?
Our target market is really broad. We work with everyone from small and large retailers to software companies trying to generate leads instead of sell products. We generally serve what I categorize as small and medium businesses, though, because like I mentioned, large businesses often do this internally. Our clients typically spend at least $3,000 per month on marketing.

Why should a business focus on search-engine marketing over any other type of digital marketing?
It’s extremely ROI based. Running a display ad you’ll pay on a cost-per-impression basis, so whether or not the person is interested, you’ll pay to show them that ad. With search-engine marketing, people see what they are interested in.

But with the prevalence of customized banner ads that appear based on a user’s search history, isn’t an all-text ad and PPC campaign outdated?
Not at all. Paid-search advertising is growing more all the time, partly, I’m sure, because there’s a low barrier to entry. Smaller businesses can create text ads without hiring a graphic designer to create those banner ads.

How would a business get the ball rolling with a PPC campaign?
First, they need to understand their financial goals and their target ROI. They need to figure out how much they want to spend per keyword in order to make a sale. Then, they should sign up for something like Google AdWords (Google’s PPC platform) and start learning about how it works and what it does.

After getting started, businesses need to measure and evaluate what works for them and play with the things that don’t.

How can a specialty ski shop pick the right keywords that will get them traffic without breaking the bank?
The best way is using “long-tail” keywords instead of “short-tail.” Short-tail keywords are things like “ski jacket,” whereas long-tail keywords are things like “lightweight backcountry waterproof jacket.” The latter are cheaper than the former, but they also don’t get clicked as much because people have to do a pretty specific search to have your ad pop up. So there’s a tradeoff for sure. The nice thing about long-tail is that if you only sell down jackets, you may not want your ad to pop up if someone searches for shells.

How many keywords does an average small business have?
It depends on the number of products and SKUs the business has, but generally they should have between 4,000 and 5,000 to make it effective.