Using Google Adwords to find your hot marketing buttons

I stumbled on this idea while reading up on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and building a good website.

One of the primary concerns of any marketing staff or business owner is finding out what people will respond to.  I refer to these as “buttons”.  The reason they are called buttons is that once a button is pushed (meaning once the word or phrase is said), it will produce a reaction in the intended audience.

As an example, consider the button “terrorism”.  When I say that word, most likely it evokes an emotional response.  When creating a marketing campaign, advertising piece or even a simple sales or marketing email, a key feature in the success of the advertisement is what buttons are used and how they are used for a specific type of audience.  But how do you know which buttons to choose?  Or how do you know if the buttons that were successful last year will be successful this year?

The answer is keywords.  Keywords are the words and phrases that people enter into search engines like Google or Bing when they are looking for something.  Keywords are the most important factor in building an effective Search Engine Optimization strategy for a website.  If your website has a high concentration of a particular word or phrase, it will generally rank higher in search engine results when people type in those keywords; all other things being equal.

In order to find out what buttons to use in a marketing program, consider using popular keywords.  If a lot of people are already using a particular work or phrase to find things in search engines, it stands to reason that these words are already on their mind.  By using these same words in your marketing, you stand a better chance to evoke a response to your marketing piece.

Google Adwords is a paid form of advertising that appears on the results pages when people search for related topics.  One very helpful (and free) tool that Adwords provides is a keyword suggestion tool.  If you type in adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal into your web browser, you will be able to find out what phrases people are using to find similar products, services or information when they search on Google.

To give you an example of how to use this process, my company is running a special on promotional products this month, and I want to know which words and phrases people are using to search for promotional products.  I enter in “promotional products” into the keyword tool, and I get 100 top keywords and phrases that people use in Google.  By doing this, I found that people use “promotional advertising products” and “Cheap promotional products”  more than others.  I then incorporate the words “cheap” and “advertising” into my marketing.

This tool works best for marketing to a broad audience.  If you want more targeted uses, such as limiting to regional markets, you may want to add the region you’re marketing to in the search phrase above.  So, in my example I would enter “promotional products dallas” to try to get more locally targeted results.

To your success,

Jim Kurtz