Launching a campaign on Google—whether it’s through paid search, display ads, YouTube pre-roll, or one of the company's many other options—is one of the best ways for PR pros and communicators to reach targeted, interested audiences. While most people don’t need to be convinced of the power of Google for PR and marketing, knowing where to start, especially for your first campaign, can be difficult. And the road to a successful campaign—from audience identification to measurement—is full of challenges.
This morning at PR News’ Google Workshop at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Amelia Burke-Garcia, director of the center for digital strategy & research at Westat, and Adam Finch, digital and social media specialist at Westat, shared some tips on getting started with and executing a successful Google campaign.
- Know what you want to accomplish. Identify what your digital goals are. Think through what success looks like to you and how you can get the metrics to support those goals.
- Have compelling content. After you choose a campaign method, you need to work with your creative team to develop content that will resonate with your audience. Who are you trying to reach and what will be most interesting to them? Figuring out what content works well in a particular environment is the main idea.
- Think broadly about who your target audience is. Think about the subsets that compose the audience that you think you want to reach. Identify how those subsets will search for information.
- Be present and optimize based on real time data. Measure the metrics that matter; digital, including Google, will give you more data than you know what to do with. And don’t let a campaign run without being active in the process. Check on your campaign regularly and make adjustments.