Lightning Fast: Reason #68 Why We Love PPC

Yesterday we received a pretty fun call from one of our clients who is the market leader in their field.  Not involving an uncommon situation, but definitely providing a nice break to the day that got our paid search team amped.

A pretty huge corporation ate up a quasi-competitor.  They put out a press release and got pretty decent coverage among blogs and more traditional news organizations.  They wanted to show up on searches by people who had heard the news and wanted to learn more.  No sweat sayeth we, but we posed a question:

“How would you like to show up on the same pages as the posts,  news articles, and press releases themselves?”

It took them nanoseconds to decide they were in.  So, using some contextual search campaigns through Google’s display nee content network, we got them up and running.  Within a couple hours for message and campaign development, they were up and running next to these places.  It’s exciting to be so reactive that you can run new ads (search or display networks) within minutes or hours of breaking news that can be used to your advantage*.

So the moral of the story is to take a look around your industry for news – especially if you feel like you’re getting in a rut with your paid search campaigns.  Is someone out there already doing the heavy lifting of generating buzz that you can capitalize on?  There is no faster, better, less expensive ways to test new ideas than paid search.

* This is also the reason we tell businesses when we speak about search engine marketing that they should always have an account open even if not active just for response in online reputation management emergencies. And the company that did a textbook case of this recently?  BP.  Just a brilliant job that generated a draft post that never saw the light of the DOM Blog.