Search Engine Marketing Findings from VMware

Throughout our relationship with their SMB marketing business unit at VMware, where we worked with their Go Pro & vCenter Protect Advanced product lines, we posted some tremendous wins from the search engine marketing (SEM) work we produced.

These wins ran through a gamut of landing page & multivariate testing executions as well as ad copy and keyword bidding strategies that not only helped produce better results for the VMware client but also helped refine our processes for future paid search marketing engagements.

We're fortunate here at MKG Marketing -- being a small Internet marketing agency makes us nimble . We can take past learnings and apply them to present and future engagements, which not only helps future clients but also how we as a search engine marketing agency actively approach and manage work as well.

Here are some learnings that we've taken  away from our working relationship with VMware:

1. Work like every day will be your last for the client

No, this doesn't mean that every work day you need to send out a "farewell" note! It means that first impressions AND last impressions truly count.

Just like in a marriage, you should never go to bed angry... in this case, you should never end your day on a poor note with a client. Strive to keep them happy and work like it's your last day with them.

2. That competitor research you did? It will help you in the future

Don't drag those competitive research docs into the trash bin!

Any and all competitive research that you did will help you in the future, whether a prospective client is in the same industry as said research or not. You can take whatever discovery you found and often apply it in future competitive research, whether it's specific keyword stemming findings that stood out to you, common keyword misspellings with high search volume and low competition, and more.

3. Day parting analysis may surprise you

Before taking a deep-dive into the data and seeing which days of the week and hours of the day tended to produce the best performance, we were fairly certain conversions peaked during the middle of the day (10 am - 2 pm) and during the middle of the work week (Tuesday - Thursday). It seemed like a no-brainer, as both products were B2B solutions.

However, after doing some analysis, we found it was quite the contrary! After implementing these findings, we found that it helped boost performance across the board for their accounts.