John Wall: Paid search is one of the easiest areas to get started in advertising for your product. The thing is, you just set up your campaigns. You pay the money, you get the leads, it all happens instantly. Basically, you can have all of your programs running and be done within a day or two, and know what works or doesn’t work. There’s some power tools for this. The idea is you’re going to be setting up ads so that when people are searching for things, your ads will come up in the results. One is using phrases. You know, you don’t have to use single words. You can use entire phrases. So you don’t have to do cleaning. You could do pool cleaning services. And having multiple word phrases in ads is a lot more relevant and targeted. That’s been around for a while.
John Wall: The second thing that’s related to that are negative keywords. Depending on what people are searching for, there may be keywords you want to add to your campaigns that the ads won’t get shown for. So for example, if we’re talking about pools, you would want to have billiards as a negative keyword, right? If you’re selling a pool cleaning service, you don’t want those ads showing to anybody searching for pool table repair or pool table services, because those are irrelevant.
John Wall: The last is geotargeting, and this is a holdover from old direct marketing days. The idea was that, perhaps your product or service is only offered in the Chicago area, so you would target your ads there. There’s actually a whole bunch of demographics that you can take advantage of now, but the principle is still the same. You can actually take a very small, single slice of the overall universe and run some ads and tests and keep your expenses very small. Once you figure out what works, roll it out to other markets and to larger possible prospects. Being able to test and get good results before you spend your whole budget can make you much more effective.
John Wall: Then the final thing to keep in mind is, this area has been hot and delivered great results for over a decade now. But the next step is looking at all of the generative search models, AI search functions and chat functions. All of these are starting to bake ads into their process. It’s too early right now to talk too much about it, but you do have to keep an eye on this. The fact that basically the same ad systems that you’ll be using, you’ll also be able to make it so that your placements show up inside of queries for Gemini, Copilot, whatever the AI tool is out there. And normally, there’s a great opportunity to have success and for a lot less money, get a lot more results, because as those markets mature, the prices keep getting driven up and the competition gets more fierce. So as these come onto the scene, this is your chance to kind of get more than your fair share for the first year or so.
