In his 1989 best-selling business and self-help book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey outlines a series of “true north” principles that help individuals attain their goals and adapt to change.
More than 25 years later, do these tenets still ring true? And, what if we applied them to today’s search marketers?
Be Proactive
From a marketing perspective, proactivity has become a central characteristic required for organisations to thrive in the evolving digital landscape. Marketers who can look ahead and make informed predictions about the future of the market and their investments will be best poised to stay ahead.
But it’s not just about future-proofing. Given the search space’s constant flux—algorithms updating, policies changing, and technology sharpening—marketers need to be able to adapt to the dynamics from an execution standpoint in order to achieve desired outcomes. This means becoming more agile to course-correct when needed, optimising on the fly, and keeping budgets and strategies a bit more fluid.
Begin With the End in Mind
Start by aligning your goal with your organisation’s overarching business objectives. Goals provide a framework for aligning your campaigns and measuring performance so you can adjust over time.
Take a cue from your HR department and make your goals SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound.
Not sure where to start? Consult historical data and use industry benchmarks as a guidepost. And don’t think that just because you set the goal, there’s no adjusting it. Maintain that agility by creating short-term targets, such as budget pacing goals, in addition to longer-term milestones, such as overall business objectives.
If we’re talking about highly effective search marketers, success will be measured beyond proxy campaign metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversion rates, with KPIs focused on revenue, profit, or customer lifetime value growth.
Put First Things First
While flexibility is needed in PPC management, there must also be a semblance of orderliness and structure. This is why campaign setup is key.
Whether you’re building an account from scratch or simply restructuring, be sure you are asking the right questions. Each element – from tracking to targeting to ad rotation and landing pages – factors into performance, and spontaneous modifications could help or hinder you.
Think Win-Win
When developing your ads, always look to achieve a win-win situation: positive outcomes for you and your audience. This means meeting your audience’s expectations by being visible when they search near a store location, including site links to assist navigation, optimising your inventory feed for accuracy, or serving a responsive experience on a mobile device.
Small steps like these will pay off big time by creating a more relevant experience that consumers are more likely to engage in.
Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
Now, it’s time to get philosophical. Believe it or not, search marketing isn’t about you, the advertiser; it’s mostly about the consumer. So, understanding your key audiences, how they search, their challenges, and desires is an essential state of mind to consider.
Beyond understanding the consumer, tune into industry trends and competitors. Don’t manage your search program in a vacuum—understand the implications of the greater market.
Synergize
Is it possible to do the impossible maths of 1+1=3 with your search marketing? If you remove the walls around your search program to no longer view the activity in isolation, you can begin to see and derive cross-channel synergies to improve your marketing and garner more value.
Leverage CRM and first-party data to execute more sophisticated and specific targeting and re-marketing. Search performance can inform social optimisation tactics, so pay attention to the signals. Running concurrent and complementary campaigns across channels can help bolster your message but also help create momentum and improve performance.
Sharpen the Saw
Hone your practice, and do not let your programs become stagnant. Test and learn, and apply changes to improve your campaigns and program. As Covey described, it’s an “upward spiral” – you learn, commit, do. If you don’t commit to regularly monitoring and auditing your programs, you risk not being able to scale and take advantage of your next big opportunity. You should be thinking: where would my next dollar be best spent? Could we quickly capitalise across our search program if more budget were available?
While some of the skills needed to succeed as a modern marketer are evolving, keeping in mind these tried-and-true habits will make you a highly effective search marketer.
