“I have 35 scheduled meetings this week. Think about that for a minute.” – Jeff Allen
Starting this month, veteran PPCer and Hanapin’s President, Jeff Allen will be introducing a new, monthly email newsletter focused on what’s happening in the world of PPC and what you need to know. Jeff’s an extremely busy guy (see the quote above) and we know you are too. He’ll give you a quick snapshot of what’s happening and his to-the-point expert opinion on it.
The newsletter starts next Thursday, July 30th, so if you’re already sold,
click here to subscribe.
Want to know a little more? I took the liberty of interviewing Jeff and getting the nitty gritty details of this new newsletter. I’m sure you don’t want to read a 30 minute blog post, so I’ll “cut to the chase” and get to it (see what I did there).
A. I got into PPC in college. I replied to a classified ad looking for people to answer emails and soon after I was answering 2,000-3,000 emails per day. The emails were awful, so I started rewriting some of the responses. My rewritten emails got significantly better response rates and the owner took notice, he asked me if I wanted to write outgoing emails too. Soon I was writing all the copy. As the business grew and expanded into other things, like developing email marketing programs and a streaming music service, I officially got into PPC. I started doing PPC for the entire company and soon also found myself doing PPC for friends and other businesses. After 11 years I was a partner in the company, however, the company didn’t want to make the necessary investment to grow, that’s when Hanapin came along, and the rest is history. This year marks 15 years for me in PPC
To date, I’ve spoken at a lot of the major conferences – SMX East, SMX Advanced, SMX West, SES, SES Toronto, OmCap, SMX Sidney, and of course, Hero Conf. I’ll be speaking at the Acquisio Summit in Montreal next week.
Q. What is this new newsletter?
A. It’s a much broader view of the industry. PPC Hero talks about changes in the industry, but its focus is paid search, how to content and articles about case studies. This is meant to be a what’s happening in the broader industry, what are the trends and what big things should executives be looking for and thinking about. It’s more about how a change to an engine, and more importantly market shares of engines impact how to allocate future budgets.
I’m also going to try and provide insights on what we are seeing within our accounts, what spend is doing, and how the industry is shifting dollars around. For instance we are seeing clients talking more and more about shifting dollars to Facebook and into native advertising. What are prospects saying? Do they seem to be having different issues today than they did last month? I’ll probably share more details than what we have in the past.
Q. Can you give an example of what you’ll be talking about in your first newsletter?
A. I’m going to talk about Mckinsey & Company and their new survey that says B2B decision makers are thinking like consumers now more than ever because of all the data points they have and all the ways they have to interact with companies. I’m talking about the best practices that Google released where Google is now making claims about what best practices are, which is something they’ve historically been shy to talk about.
It’s really short snippets. It’s meant to be more like, here’s one or two sentences about this topic and then here’s a link to it. You should be able to read it in 5 minutes or less and then be able to speak to it versus having to know all the technical details. It’s going to be more like 15-20 topics per email but short briefs.
Q. Who do you think should read this?
A. Ideally executives, director level and up, VPs, CMOS. If I was in-house and had every digital channel report in to me and my job was just to make sure we are pointed in the right direction, I would use this as the compass for those talking points I should be bringing up. Ideally.
Jeff also went on to mention that this is his point-of-view and his position on things that are happening and its not about reporting. Take it or leave it (or better yet, get a conversation going about it).
