Improve your company’s sales performance (and your own profile at the same time)

When was the last time were congratulated on a successful marketing initiative where you could prove a healthy return? Nobody likes a Smart-Alec, but introducing search engine marketing to your company's marketing could be one of the best moves you've made all year.

Despite search becoming ever more mainstream it by no means uncommon for the top brass in a firm either to be a bit fuzzy as to what it actually is or more likely, who best to approach to get it going. Traditional forms of marketing from press advertising through to Yellow Pages are proven and ingrained in the corporate psyche and for many the idea of 'trying something different' is a difficult and uncomfortable prospect. Many senior employees and directors may also have been falsely advised that search engine marketing won't work for their particular website or a market sector.

In fact, few marketing initiatives can match Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for results and accountability. Results? Well defining return on investment as the improvement in revenue once the cost of a SEM campaign has been taken into account, can be astonishing. Vertical Leap has known clients reporting a 300% plus improvement. Accountability is another huge advantage. And with Vertical Leap's OnePrice cost structure you can point out there will be no hidden extras. You get the whole campaign including set-up, on-going link building with other reputable website, Search Analytics, monitoring and of course on-going management, for one all-inclusive price.

Vertical Leap's Campaign Management System, Apollo, enables you to track and monitor every aspect of this online marketing in one place. The monitoring service is simple to understand and is known as the clearest in the business. With the Search Analytics programme, you can even see all the enquiries typed into the main search engines being tracked and logged in real time 24/7.

But isn't all this going to add hugely to your workload? That's the best bit! Because Vertical Leap offers a fully managed service, they do all the legwork for you. What about technical ability? Vertical Leap stress that it's important to keep totally focused on the fact that achieving and maintaining high rankings in the search engines with effective phrases and keywords that achieve results is a marketing objective. Nobody commissioning a search engine marketing campaign should be put off by thinking it requires technical skills on their part to make the campaign work. Each Vertical Leap account is assigned a Campaign Manager who explains the process and liaise with each client, but also a Campaign Delivery Manager who whilst approachable is sufficiently technical to work with IT managers on your behalf.

There are many more advantages for managers running a Vertical Leap campaign. A campaign managed by Vertical Leap is a great way to pick up marketing trends in your particular business sector. Search Analytics allow you to see precisely what customers are asking for right now. And that's not just useful online, how useful would that kind of information be for your sales team as well?

So how best to sell the search engine marketing idea to your boss, bearing in mind that it's always easier for anyone to say no. Well, like any sales prospect, relate the search engine marketing option to your boss' current soapbox rant. Does he/she talk about saving money in marketing overall? Reducing the cost of each sales lead? Perhaps he or she is concerned about how hard your current website is working in the first place and how best to evolve it. Vertical Leap can provide you with convincing and worthwhile reasons why launching a search engine marketing campaign can address each and all of these issues.

And then of course there are your competitors. Why is it that Notasgoodasyou Ltd always seems to appear on higher positions than your company in the search engine results? How much business are you losing as those uninformed new customers click on to those competitors as the answer to their queries as you point out that the majority of people don't even bother to look beyond the first couple of pages on any search engine.

Conversely, you could be looking at the your company's biggest marketing opportunity for years if your competitors are nowhere to be seen in everyday rankings.

Like any appointment you will be able to present your boss with a cohesive plan defining the kind of return that can be reasonably expected; you can show what tasks need to be completed to set the campaign up and how it will be monitored. Vertical Leap for instance adheres to a set structure that you can see achieved and signed off in the easy to use monitoring suite.

In short, suggesting and initiating a search engine marketing campaign could be the smartest career move you've made to date! And in the same way that Vertical Leap provides on-going managed support, you can expect all the advice and support you need to get the campaign up and running.

Nobody got fired for recommending Vertical Leap….