Search industry leaders look to each other for pearls of wisdom and advice to help make better decisions and achieve success for their clients. Usually these leaders present at conferences and often, they also author articles in key industry publications.
Since beginning her leadership journey ten years ago, Amanda Farley, Accounts Director and partner at SSDM, has become an expert in search marketing. During the past 12 months, she has presented twice at SMX West and also at FoundCon, a conference devoted solely to search techniques and best practices.
Add “author” to Amanda’s resume
While presenting at SMX West 2019, Search Engine Land asked Amanda to attend a few other speakers’ presentations and summarize for the publication, which is read religiously by search marketing practitioners everywhere.
In February, Farley provided insights from SMX West, recapping three key presentations for those unable to attend or those seeking a fresh perspective. Now, she is a regular contributor to the publication’s blog.
Content marketing is all about matching
Farley’s first article recapped an SMX West presentation from Ted Ives and Adam Seybold, suggesting modifications to match types and account structure for better performance after updates by Google Ads and Bing Ads. Key takeaways, including intelligent use of ad groups and match types can be found here.
Optimizing YouTube ad campaigns
YouTube knows its audience as well as any other medium. By refining your search properly, it can be one of your most efficient campaign strategies. Amanda provides a very thorough review of the topic as presented by Clix Marketing’s Joe Martinez at SMX West.
Facebook performance management
If any social-media channel knows its audience better than YouTube, it’s Facebook. Comparing Facebook audience volume targeting to a spaceship’s narrow opportunity for re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere, Michelle Morgan of Clix Marketing notes that traditional search structures do not work inside of Facebook.
By managing conversion actions, ideal conversion volume and custom conversion options, though, you can control budget, messaging and other critical factors. In her Search Engine Land article, Amanda distills this complex topic into bite-sized chunks.
The ever evolving customer journey
While at SMX West, Amanda also recapped her own presentation for a podcast on the program Innovations in Digital Marketing, hosted by Joe Kerschbaum, a leader in the paid-search industry.
Farley shared insights about the buyer behaviors she has witnessed while managing search campaigns – both paid and organic – which cause necessary shifts in strategy and technology. In her SMX West presentation, called People do not Live in a Silo and Neither Should Your Strategy, Farley notes that the perception of a linear buying cycle – from awareness right straight through to advocacy – just isn’t realistic.
“The buyer journey looks more like a tornado,” she says. “Prospects come into the funnel, swirl out, return for more info, swirl out again, and so forth, until they have the information, the inclination and the investment resources to purchase.”
But wait … there’s more
Farley also was asked to explore marketer sentiments toward marketing automation and her article for Marketing Land covers appropriate technology platforms as well as the challenges facing digital agencies to build teams who understand the strategies and properly manage the data and analytics.
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