Press: Getting Your Money's Worth

Let's say you are a beleaguered CAD CEO and are trying desperately to move your company ahead in these tough times. Marketing is a good place to start. Let us examine the prevailing marketing guidelines that seem to be emerging.

DO:

1. Spend your advertising budget on Google ads
2. Befriend an already popular blogger

DON'T:

    Develop and invest in a marketing campaign.

Let's look into this a bit further.

Google ads

Very cheap, and you only pay when someone clicks. So what if Google can't tell the difference between Computer Artery Disease and Computer, Computer Aided Dispatch and Computer Aided Design? You can get rid of your high price marketing VP and most of the marketing department. It takes little skill to create Google ads and manage the campaigns -- except you do have to get your message into 3 tiny little lines. You can get tons of empirical data... immediately.

Befriend a Blogger

A popular blogger is like gold. A blogger gets popular because he/she is probably a subject expert, writes intelligently and often. Best to fly them to headquarters -- economy class is fine.  You can pitch to them all day but leave plenty of time for fun stuff, take in the sights of you town -- make sure you go to a good restaurant and let's not forget the power of alcohol. Altogether, this creates a warm fuzzy feeling -- and it can be had for a couple of thousand dollars, tops. Any blogger worth his salt will document his newfound knowledge of the company and its products. After all, a blog must be fed.

You can do this with press, too, but with less success. You could get old and die waiting for an article.

Marketing Campaign

In contrast to above, a full fledged marketing campaign takes planning and execution, often requiring careful consideration at the highest level. They take time to run and worse of all, can run into tens of thousands of dollars. Results are not as easy to gauge.. in the short term.

Comments

[Just some marketing guy]

This post is laughable.

1) It's not advertising *revenue*, that's what you would get if you had ads on your site. Real companies spend advertising budget.

2) Google, if not the most popular, is one of the most popular, cost effective, and measurable ways to get quality traffic to your website. You clearly have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

3) Having a Google Adwords campaign is easy. Having an effective one that is highly optimized to both drive a high volume AND a high lead quality level at a low cost is not. Especially in a saturated market like CAD. Not to mention all the A/B testing, multivariate testing, trend analysis, heat map analysis of landing pages, etc. Of course, you know that since you're a CAD blogger and are clearly keen on what it takes to be a successful marketer.

4) Google has 2 types of advertising mechanisms. One is called AdWords, the other is the Content network. On one, you pay per click. On others, you pay per impression. Of course, you know that.

In summary, you're a CAD blogger. Stick to that. The analysis was cute though.

[Joan Naidish]

I'm sure you know that your two DOs are a "marketing campaign." As a matter of fact, one of our marketing/PR firm's clients is a GIS software business that is conducting a successful blogger & Google ad campaign. However, it's MarkeTech's press releases that have yielded 17,500 hits for them on Google search from a single press release(a result that doesn't happen with Google Ads). Each of those hits cost the client only $0.06. The first release resulted in a feature article in Defense News. Your perception that results of marketing campaigns "aren't easy to gauge;" that they "take time to run;" and "run into several thousands of dollars" are conclusions that aren't supportable.

[Sunith Babu]

Hi,

I agree with you, some CAD - Autodesk Inventor 3rd party developers have made profits from advertising in my blog . . .