Josh Kerbel

Now let take a look at Sungard

Here is their PPC ad.  The were bidding on this term in such a way that they don’t attract the random clicks associated with the top positions.  I would suspect this ad has a high click through rate

They talk about the benefits and offer a free white paper.

And now their landing page

The copy on their landing page could be a bit more compelling, well as compelling as bank software can be, but most importantly, the page is well laid out with very little to distract the user from signing up and submitting his contact info in exchange for the white paper….. and Sungard scores another prospect.

If I was in charge of setting up this program, I would have the information capture visable in the top half of the screen.  In some situations it is not possible, but here it is.  If most companies were as consistent as this in their execution, the internet would be a much cleaner place………

I suspect that IBM and Sungard have some really tight cost controls in their marketing department or maybe they hired someone who actually understood the whole concept of direct marketing.

So why would IBM and Sungard run PPC ad campaigns?

Because they know, despite their own size and resources, the time needed to find the right person to talk to at the right company at the right time is takes, well, a lot of time.  And in the corporate world time is expensive.  Time is salary, time is business trips, time is health benefits.  Basically everything you pay your sales people for them to bring in revenue.  So, if they could have a system to identify the right contact person at the right company at the right time in the purchasing process and do it a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods……I think you get the picture.  Salespeople are for closing deals, not screening prospects

So lets take a look at IBM’s ad – it is from their Cognos division.

The only real point I can raise about the ad is that it talks about features rather than benefits of the dashboard.  I don’t really care if there are 4 or 49 dashboards, I’d like to know how they benefit me.  But they definitely say who can benefit from their products – banks.  See below:

And now their landing page.

You can see there are very few links to distract the user, a robust form field capture and an outline of what you will learn in the white paper.  Think how much money IBM would normal spend through a traditional marketing channel just to be able to reach out and speak to the person who ended doing an Internet search for an industry relevant term as part of their research in the purchasing process.  IBM now knows who to talk to at a prospective customer.

Next up, we will take a look at how Sungard attracts leads.

its probably good enough for your business.

If you need proof that the everyone does online research during the purchasing process, this should do it for you. Lets take a look at bank risk management software. You know, the software that runs the banks (we can argue whether or not this software actually works at another time). Essentially what you have in this vertical are giant companies selling to other giant companies. Think IBM and Sungard selling to JP Morgan and Bank of America.

And IBM and Sungard still use the on line channel to generate sales leads. Shall we take a look?

We will do a Google search for “bank risk management software” and see what we get.

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Now if you look at the ads, you can see that some were written by automated software – or at least the keywords were compiled by automated software as you can see by the PPC ads and landing pages for the ads in the first, third and sixth positions.  The copy writing is non – specific to banking and so are the landing pages.  This is just throwing away money.

Lesson to learn here – there is no reason to bid on keywords just for the sake of being there.

This is the landing page for the first position ad.  It talk about risk management for traders – as a landing page, it fails on all fronts

The PPC ad in the third position leads to this page.  Its not even remotely close to banking software.

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You would have thought by now companies would have gotten over the “let’s throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” approach to search engine marketing.

The third ad was more of the same……..not even worth taking up server space posting the landing pages.

In the next post, we will take a look at the two good ads that we found here.