We’ve recently made some changes to our corporate branding, product naming, and available features that we’d like to share with both our existing and prospective customers.  Before we jump in to the individual changes, it will be helpful to explain why we made them in the first place.  There are several reasons, though two come to the fore.

First, despite the economy that surrounds us, we’re growing.  And, as we continue to grow, continue to win business from large preeminent brands, and continue to be relied on by media and analysts as experts in our field, we needed to establish a corporate presence beyond the brand names of the products we sell. Though many know us as “BoldChat”, that is simply one of the brands we manage.

Secondly, our growth has been fueled by two types of customers – small to mid-sized entrepreneurial businesses and significant enterprise engagements.  As such, the feature sets each of these customers require has changed over time.  We needed to react and build offerings appropriate for each.

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To understand why offering whitepapers as part of a Pay-per-Click strategy works, you’ll have to get inside Google’s head. Scary thought, I know, but surprisingly easy to do.

The first line on Google’s corporate site is: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Why do people use Google? The question is perhaps pedantic (though amusingly alliterative), it is important not to lose sight of the answer; people use Google to find things. Most often, they are looking for information –as Google themselves states. As such, offering Whitepapers front and center as part of your Google ads seems to fit in with the very philosophy of search – providing information and making it accessible.

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A decent chunk of our marketing expenditure goes to paid click advertising and the vast majority of that spend is through Google’s AdWords system.  While many conversion types are possible on our website, the only one that matters with Google is a successful paid customer conversion. This is, in fact, the only conversion we track using the AdWords ‘conversion tracking’ feature. Over the past year or so we have systematically attempted to drop our cost per conversion by implementing and testing a variety of methodologies. We have relied most heavily on the advice from Perry Marshall and his AdWords course. Just a few of the things we’ve done include:

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