But it’s really only a matter of time before marketers begin to figure out the social media conundrum and actually make it pay off. And we might have those first glimmerings in the “State of Inbound Marketing report” released this week by HubSpot and reported by eMarketer.com.

HubSpot’s study indicates that lead generation spending is 60% less among companies that dedicate at least one-half of their budget to inbound marketing tactics like search, blogs and social media.

Now, this doesn’t surprise us—at least, not the part about search. We’ve had a lot of success using cost-effective AdWords campaigns leading dedicated landing pages to generate leads for clients. Pay-per-click ads and SEO strategies fell below or near the average cost-per-lead 65% or 83% of the time, respectively.

But we were a little surprised to find that 63% of companies rated lead generation through social media as below average in cost-per-lead. And being skeptical journalist types, we wondered about the quality of the leads (leads mean nothing unless they turn into customers, after all)—until we looked at the chart that showed that, for business-to-consumer businesses, seven out of 10 companies had found customers through Facebook. (For business-to-business companies, LinkedIn was the most effective social media customer acquisition tool.)

So, apparently, there’s hope for social media as a marketing tool. But the lessons we’ve learned along the way—that campaigns that can’t be measured against concrete business objectives aren’t worth the investment—still hold true. If you aren’t realizing a positive ROI from your online marketing—or if you aren’t tracking your ROI in the first place—you’re wasting money, regardless of whether you’re investing in PPC ads or Facebook fan pages.

Well, yes—although we don’t bill ourselves as an SEO shop.

And when we ask clients about their objectives for their website, their answer is usually “Lots of traffic.”

Sure. We help with that, too.

The problem is that most people stop right there. They figure with enough keyword-loaded meta tags and thousands of visitors, success will inevitably follow.

Sorry—it just isn’t that simple. (And, by the way, loading your meta tags with keywords is pretty ineffective and, well, just old-fashioned.)

SEO’s not a silver bullet

There is no silver bullet in internet marketing. Traffic’s only the first step down a much longer road to sales.

SEO is one small part of search engine marketing (SEM), which in turn is only one component of your overall online marketing strategy.

Think of it this way: your prospects go through stages as they decide whether or not to engage with your products or services. Generally, those stages are:

• Awareness

• Interest

• Consideration

• Acquisition

• Retention

• Advocacy

Now, look at those stages, and think about what SEO is designed to do. Sure, high search rankings will definitely increase awareness, and compelling meta descriptions might spark interest in your site. And prospects who see your ranking may click through and consider what you’re offering.

But if all you’re doing is SEO, how are you going to move your prospects through the next three steps of the funnel?

Once they get to your site, how are you going to keep them there? And how are you going to convince them to engage any further beyond a click and a bounce?

SEO just isn’t enough.

SEM isn’t magic, either

Search engine marketing—that is, pay-per-click ads, link-building initiatives and similar strategies—will help take your prospects a little farther along the funnel. If you’re running a lead generating campaign, for example, you’ll be acquiring leads, some of which will lead to sales.

And because SEM campaigns offer infinite opportunities for optimizing your messaging, you’ll increase interest and consideration as well, simply by saying things that people want to hear.

But even SEM, on its own or combined with SEO, isn’t enough.

That’s because too many people put SEO and SEM campaigns into place, then forget about them—thinking, wrongly, that they’ll continue to generate traffic, leads and revenue with no further work.

Nope. That may work for a while, but search engine algorithms change and messages become less compelling over time. Your system just can’t continue to work without constant tinkering.

Strategy (and constant optimization) is key

For your sales funnel to be truly leak-proof, you need a comprehensive strategy in place to attract prospects, turn them into customers, then hold them close, keep them happy and get them talking.

And for that, you need to go beyond SEO or SEM. You need an an overall, continuously optimized online marketing plan that aligns with your business’s objectives—one that grows and changes with the demands of your market.

Yes, it should include SEO and SEM.

But it also has to include things like:

• Clear, concise copy that’s been optimized for the way people read on the web

• Regular content updates

• Community-building initiatives like a blog or discussion group.

And it must include a way to track your online performance—so you can tell where your funnel may be leaking, and improve accordingly. (And, just in case you couldn’t tell from all our previous posts, we like Google Analytics.)

SEO is a start to your online marketing—but it certainly isn’t the end.

If you're new, you've likely never heard such terms as "swipe file" (a file of others' effective copy you keep for "inspiration"), and never searched back issues of magazines to research competitors' ads. If you're a veteran, you likely find it hard to restrain your creative impulses. After all, it's the innovative campaigns that win awards, not the "me too" copycats. Right?

But if you care most about results, the fastest way to success is to imitate before you innovate. In short, to let competitors do the hard work, then copy their success and experiment to exceed it.

With a looming recession, results are paramount. And in this holiday season, competition is tough. With that in mind, this post guides you step-by-step through a process you can use right now to leverage competitors' Google ads to optimize your own ads' success-a process that can work even better in highly competitive markets.

Step one: Know the theory

The theory's simple: do what works, and let competitors pay to find that out.

In direct-response marketing, advertisers constantly analyze ads to find the best-performing words and phrases. The goal is to get the best return on investment for every dollar.

In print, direct-response copywriters can determine a competitors' best-performing copy by identifying the ads they've run most frequently-thereby pinpointing which content delivers the most cost-effective results.

Google AdWords—the most popular and important search marketing system—is just another form of direct-response marketing. Ads rank higher on a page depending on factors like the amount an advertiser's willing to bid for a click, and on the ad's overall quality-judged in part by the percentage of people who click when it shows up.

Bottom line? In AdWords, a highly ranked ad is more likely to be an effective ad. This is for two main reasons. First, highly ranked ads typically cost advertisers more per click. So you can be sure they've made the necessary effort to make every click count. Second, highly ranked ads achieve high ranking in part through quality. So bad ads slowly fade into obscurity.

There are certainly some confounding factors that I won't go into here. But in general, it's safe to assume that in AdWords, higher ranked ads outperform lower ranked ads.

And typically, the more competitive the environment, the more this applies. For this reason, you can learn a lot about AdWords by simply reviewing results for highly competitive keywords like "insurance" and "weight loss."

Step two: Google your keywords

So let's exploit this knowledge to help you optimize your ad content.

Next time you Google keywords you're targeting, pay attention to the ads that show up.

In particular, pay attention to the ads at the top of the page, or the top of the list on the right.

For example, here's a screenshot for a search on "life insurance"—one of the most competitive keywords:

[insert screenshot here]

Here, the ads at top (in beige) and the top ads at right are likely the most effective at driving clicks for the keyword you're searching.

Again, there are confounding variables (like some advertisers actually wanting a lower position), but in general you can assume that ads appearing either in beige or-for a highly competitive category like this-anywhere at right are effective.

To be more certain, repeat your search a few times and see which ads show up most often.

Step three: Analyze high-performing AdWords text

Now that you're seeing some high-performing ads, you can:

• Subjectively review the results based on your understanding of your market and your marketing. With this approach, you can quickly identify copy that might perform well for you. Your biases, however, might undermine your review. For example, you might not want to consider applying the word "free" to your marketing, even though it's making your competitors money.

• Objectively review the results using a statistical text analyzer. With this approach, you can quickly find words and phrases that effective ads use repeatedly. While density alone doesn't guarantee success, it certainly helps guide you in the right direction.

Let's talk about the second approach, which in my opinion and experience is one of the best ways to start an ad-writing campaign. (If you're going with option one, skip ahead to step four. But you might want to read this before you do.)

For example, I fed the ads from four separate "life insurance" searches into the free (and fun) Textalyser, filtered out brand names and stop words like "and," and found these to be the most common words in top-ranked ads (note that "canadian" and "canada" are due to a search from a Canadian location-and highlight the importance of location to insurance quotes):

• insurance
• life
• quote
• affordable
• canadian
• term
• rates (tied with term)
• canada
• save (tied with Canada)
• get

Step four: Create control ad with high-performing text

After performing your analysis, you'll want to write an ad to serve as your control for future testing-so you can create variations and test their effectiveness.

To do this:

1. Use what you learned from your analysis.
2. Filter it through your knowledge of web writing and persuasion.
3. Adapt it to your offering.

For example, if I were writing a life insurance ad, my analysis above might lead me to a control like this:

Free Life Insurance Quote
Affordable Canadian Term Insurance.
Save on Rates-Get a Quote Now.
www.canadainsurance.com/LifeQuote

Every word here, with the exception of "free" (which almost always drives up clicks) and stop words (like "on" and "a") comes from my statistical analysis of high-performing life insurance ads.
Step Five: Test Variations Against Your Control

While your control might perform well, it might also just be an average performer-after all, if you used a statistical analysis, it's built from an average density across all ads analyzed.

So you'll want to test it against variations. And here's where you can get creative.

For example, a variation for my insurance ad might look like this:

Fast Life Insurance Quote
Affordable Canadian Term Insurance.
Save on Rates-Get a Quote Now.
www.canadainsurance.com/LifeQuote

The switch from "free" to "fast" might have an impact on performance, and if the variation beats the control then I might want to add "fast" to my word arsenal.

When we started writing search marketing ads for ourselves and clients, very few guides existed. So we experimented and read everything we could on the subject.

Since then, we’ve seen several credible, research-based guides published. A number of them are excellent. But for newbies and the time-starved, most are overkill.

So we set out to create this easy guide to help you create insanely effective AdWords. It’s by no means the most comprehensive. But it is the simplest quick-start we’ve seen. Read it once and write better ads through osmosis. Follow it step-by-step and watch your click-through rates rocket.

Either way, walk this path to greater search marketing success:

Step one: Target your keywords

It may seem obvious. But since keywords trigger your ads, you should positively obsess about which you’ll target—and how your ads will relate. In developing your keyword-targeting strategy, follow these steps:

Choose your keywords

What are your customers searching for? In our case, they’re typically searching for writing or editing. So we target related keywords, such as "marketing writing" and "copywriting."

But your best-performing keywords aren’t always apparent. Study your analytics reports to determine what keywords bring visitors to your site organically—particularly visitors who stick around and visit several pages. And use Google’s keyword recommendation tool to find additional possibilities.

Doing this, we discovered two successful keyword phrases that we hadn’t previously identified, "writing agency" and "professional writing." Looking at them now, they seem head-slappingly obvious. But we missed them. Some more tips for choosing keywords:

1. See what keywords your competitors target; they might know something you don’t.
2. Consider common misspellings of keywords that you’re targeting; they can generate additional traffic at lower costs, since fewer people bid on them.

Group your keywords

Once you’ve identified your keywords, you’ll want to group them into categories. For example, we group all of our "copywriting" keywords separate from our "writing and editing" keywords. This step helps you organize your ads, refine their targeting and identify keyword opportunities. Once you’ve created your keyword groupings, you can convert them into ad groups, then target distinct ads at distinct keyword groups.

Identify negative keywords

As well as keywords that trigger your ads, you’ll want to identify keywords that, when present, prevent your ads from showing. Then use the negative keyword tool to exclude your ads for these words. Why? Imagine that you are selling a cancer-preventing cocktail online. If you simply targeted the word "cancer," astrology buffs born in July might see—and click—your ad when looking up their horoscope, but be unlikely to convert. So, in this case, you could improve your ad performance by excluding the keyword "astrology." In this way, negative keywords might reduce your clicks. But they can improve your conversion rate.

Step Two: Write your ads

Now that you’ve developed and grouped your keywords, you’ll need to write your ads. Follow this simple process:

Boil down your benefits

Often, clients call us to improve their website’s performance and we find it full of product features and very few benefits. Many people fail with AdWords and other search marketing initiatives for the same reason. Prospects care only how well your offering meets their needs. They don’t care what it does. They care what it does for them. So what’s the difference between features and benefits? Consider these two examples:

Large Coffee Mug
Ceramic With Round Handle.
Holds 16 Ounces of Liquid.

The Mug for Coffee Lovers
Insulated, Easy to Hold.
Easily Keeps Two Cups Fresh!

The latter should feel more appealing, because if (like us) you love coffee, it converts properties of the mug into things you actually care about, which resonates at an emotional rather than rational level.

Admittedly, communicating benefits in the tiny space available with search marketing can be a challenge. But if you don’t try, you won’t achieve your greatest possible success. So make it easier on yourself:

1. Write out your offering’s benefits in a paragraph.
2. Refine this paragraph into a sentence.
3. Refine this sentence into a search ad.

We used this simple process to create our own search ads for Mastercopy, our outsourced copywriting service. Continually refining our benefits lead us to this top-performing ad:

Outsourced Copywriting
Inform. Educate. Influence.
You Speak. We Create. They Buy.

Write to keywords

With your benefit-touting ad and your keywords, you’re ready to take the next important step to a higher click-through rate. For each of your keyword ad groups, you’ll want to create highly targeted ads. Google lets you to do this dynamically, using the structure {keyword:backup word}. But there are dangers to this approach—for example, if you target a misspelled keyword, you probably want the correctly spelled version appearing. Regardless of how you do it, though, you’ll want to be sure that your keyword-targeted ads attract the attention of readers by reflecting their search queries. For example, for users searching for "editing" services rather than "writing" services, we would display:

Outsourced Editing
Inform. Educate. Influence.
You Speak. We Create. They Buy.

Choose your approach

Got a few keyword rich, benefit-touting ads down? Great. Now experiment with different approaches exploiting different means of attracting attention and influencing action. Here are some common approaches:

1. Question: "Like Hot Coffee?"
2. Command: "Get a Better Mug"
3. Story: "I Once Drank Cold Coffee"
4. Secret: "Latte Secrets Revealed"
5. Extremes: "1000% Stronger Espresso"
6. Authority: "9/10 Baristas Agree"
7. Compare: "Better than Starbucks"

Consider your audience’s emotional state

Finally, let’s talk state of mind. What’s your audience thinking while searching? How do your prospects feel? Considering their emotional state will help improve how your ads resonate. Prospects in a rush? Focus on time-savings. Comparison shopping? Focus on variety and price. Consider, for example, the difference between these hypothetical ads:

Last-minute Gift?
Perfect Mug for Coffee Lovers.
1-click, 30-sec. Checkout!

Perfect Gift for Coffee Lovers?
Our Overflowing Inventory Makes
Finding it Easy. Don’t Miss Out!

Okay, these aren’t the greatest ads in rotation. (Heck, they may not even fit within word count limits.) But you should see, at a quick glance, the importance of considering emotional state.

Step three: Optimize, optimize, optimize

Now that you have keyword-targeted ad groups and several ads to test, it’s time to optimize. For those obsessed with words and measurement, this can be quite fun, as AdWords provides almost instant feedback on the effectiveness of your changes. So what can you do to increase performance? Try a few of these changes at a time to see which will rocket responses:

• Use title case: For some reason, possibly because it appears to increase authoritativeness or simply because it catches the eye, title case tends to beat proper (sentence) case. For example, don’t write "Our coffee tastes great." Write, "Our Coffee Tastes Great."
• Insert quotes: Using a headline with quotes around it catches attention, in part because it can appear like an endorsement. For example, "Tastes Like Heaven."
• Convey an endorsement: Similarly, endorsements—even in such a small space as AdWords—can compel action. "Doctor Recommended," for example, can work just as well in AdWords as it does in other media.
• Use your display URL: While most AdWords advertisers typically use just their headline and description to promote products, they miss out on additional opportunities to market within their display URL. Don’t just put your company’s website, such as "company.com." Use the display URL to back your proposition and drive clicks. For example, "company.com/FreeCoffee."
• Use numbers: Rather than write out numbers—such as "eight"—use characters—such as "8." This allows you to convey information in less space and adds visual variation that can attract the eye. Find ways to get interesting, compelling numbers into your copy. For example, "100% Guaranteed," "1/2 Price," "9/10 Experts Agree," "Buy 1 Get 2 Free." But, unless you’re marketing text messaging, you should probably avoid cheesy attempts such as "Try it 2Day!"
• Use symbols: Just as numbers provide visual variation, so do symbols. When your ad’s up against many others, this variation can often provide an edge. It can also add to your credibility and authority. For example, insert a trademark (™), registered trademark (®), copyright (©) or similar symbol.
• End with ellipses: Research has shown that adding ellipses to the end of your AdWords description can increase click-throughs, possibly by making people realize that there’s much more information on the other end. For example, "See Results Now…"
• Use trigger words: There are many emotional trigger words and phrases that can, through simple inclusion, dramatically increase your click-through rates. Here’s a list to get you started:
  • Advantage
  • Amazing
  • Astonishing
  • At last
  • Breakthrough
  • Download (because it often implies "free")
  • Free
  • Easy
  • Ends soon
  • Enhanced
  • Guaranteed
  • Immediately
  • Innovative
  • Instant
  • Irresistible
  • How to
  • Limited time
  • Money back
  • Now
  • Phenomenal
  • Powerful
  • Proven
  • Revolutionary
  • Sale
  • Scientific
  • Secret
  • Shocking
  • Special offer
  • Spectacular
  • Time-sensitive
  • Tips
  • Today
  • Tricks
  • Try
  • Unbeatable
  • Unique
  • Unforgettable
  • Unlimited
  • Urgent
  • You

And there you have it: a quick-and-dirty guide to a higher click-through rate.

Of course, getting clicks is just the start. Once you start generating traffic, you’ll want to be sure that your landing pages are performing and converting visitors to customers.

But that, of course, is a topic for another article.