This is the third and final post of a series called “why to trust a (insert stereotype) with your PPC account.” The first post was about Amy, the farmer’s daughter, the second was about Jessica, the life scientist, and this post rounds out our profiles of Hanapin‘s Account Supervisors. Now, introducing Rob, the “hockey player!”
Hockey players are loyal, hardworking, and social: I think these traits are a great recipe for any employee, but especially important for client facing work. Clients want to know that their account manager is doing everything they can on their account. They know you’re working on other clients, but they want to feel that they’re the only one. If you’re loyal and hardworking, you’ll fight for that client and do all you can for them, regardless of the circumstances. If you’re social, you’ll develop a good relationship with them so that when you do have those ups and downs in the account (and everyone has them), they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and see you through those tough times.
Hockey players have to get better individually to succeed as a team: You want a PPC account manager who is competitive and has a desire to constantly improve their own skills, as well as the performance of their accounts and agency team. Paid search is very much like a game. It’s a game for who can write the best ads, generate the highest click-through and conversion rates, and deliver the best results – and not just the best results among the folks on your team, but among all advertisers competing for those same keywords. If you don’t have a competitive fire in your gut and you simply split test for the sake of split testing, you’ll lose out to the person who always wants to get better individually and as a team.
Hockey players build relationships: “It’s been 13 years since my last competitive game yet I run into former teammates, competitors, coaches, and player parents all the time…even in business,” Rob says. The hockey network is strong. Before launching PPC Hero, 100% of our business came from personal relationships or referrals. Now, clients say they’ve been reading our blog for years. They feel like they’ve developed a relationship with us, which makes it easy to trust and hire us if they’re looking for a paid search agency.
Hockey players are accountable: At the end of a tough loss in a game, everyone is down on themselves and thinking about what they could have done better, and it translates into practice the next week. We learn from our mistakes and celebrate our victories. Running paid search campaigns is all about identifying what you’ve done well and intentionally replicating that, but it’s also about identifying what you could improve on and prioritizing that list according to biggest and quickest impact on an account.
We hope we’ve shown through these employee profiles that being a great search marketer is not so much about one’s background or degree – it’s more about one’s personal traits and characteristics and how those translate into account management. We’ve learned this through eight years of hiring new folks to join our team, and we hope this knowledge helps you bring on great search marketers too!
