Display + Search

Off and on for the last year or so I’ve been talking about Display and Search. All along, I’ve wanted to actually put all this theory into practice. To get my hands dirty and really see if what we’re talking about actually works and is true.  So in 2011, I’m going to do that and, if you like, you can follow along.  I’m actually going to design and run a digital marketing program, run it, and share it all with you.  Full disclosure, I got this idea from Adexchanger’s post on how his remarketing campaign went (so thanks John!)

Now no big advertiser would allow this to happen. It’s all too proprietary and super-secret.  So I had to go local.  Luckily, besides my day job selling MediaMath’s TerminalOne, I also act as informal digital CMO of Carroll’s Florist in Staten Island (I get paid in beer).  My cousin, Chad, owns and operates this 60 year old family business.  It’s a successful and profitable business that has all the building blocks to do this (eg, a website, some budget to spend, a pretty well defined target, etc).

So we’re going to run marketing for the florist and show you what we’re doing and what happens.  This will have the added benefit of letting us really explore what’s out there in local and social.

In late 2010, we started to do some basic online marketing (Adwords and Facebook).  We fixed some things which were broken.  For example, Google Analytics was not tracking properly and there was no real obvious flow on the website.  As we got close to the holidays we stopped spending, though, because the florist was just too busy to accurately track results of what we were doing.

So here is what we’re going to do:

1. Build the plan (next week or two)
2. Lay out a schedule – what will we do and when
3. Continue to work on some of the issues we face. A big one being that our true success event happens offline (generally at the store)
4. Take your input – if anyone has ideas or input, please comment.  We’d also be more than happy to test your product, if we feel it can help us meet our objectives and you’ll let us disclose the results.
5. Execute

A few housekeeping items:

• We’ll only use channels that are available to a small local advertiser
• We’ll disclose results but I wont get into the real nitty gritty (eg, what keywords worked).  We do have competition, you know!

So we now need to build the plan. Stay tuned.  That’s due February 1.  If I don’t get it in, I don’t get my beer.