HETIC 2008 official Online Marketing Challenge Blog

Being student at HETIC, we are in constant relation with announcers that want to communicate on internet. And though, the search of announcers seems to be more drawn – out than predicted.

After having studied the possibilities into HETIC network, we realized that every announcer doesn’t fit our waiting. That’s why we had to find solutions in order to discover websites that fit to our criteria.

First search criterion: Find an idea of a niche market in which we could make research to find the right announcer. In order to help to our research, we used directory like Dmoz. However, dissect the web is still a vast mission and we had to be lucky to find the real gem.

These research being inconclusive, it was our duty to make appeal to external relations: internship, teacher and friends… In fact, this method allows us to get contact with potential announcers more quickly.

In the end, one month was what we needed to take up this challenge. This event forced us to rework our schedule and then encroach upon our campaign work-time. Fortunately, our schedule allows us this light incident.

Once we had found the advertiser, and convinced him of the advantages that he can drag out from Adwords, the campaign could be released… However, some serious precautions had to be taken in order not to be roughly ban from the competition…The website “Ane gourmet” is the perfect example of one of our clumsiness. Our team chief had testified, since the first contact with our client, of the virtues and advantages of Adwords, as the benefits deriving of its setting-up.

This being so, across our team’s brief, one detail concerning an anterior participation of an Adwords campaign had been overrode. In fact, one rule of the Google Challenge is to choose an advertiser that had NEVER done Adwords since its creation!
Imagine our shock to discover that during our work of keywords optimization that our client had launched, behind our back, his own campaign in parallel! A communication error that could cost us our participation to this competition!

After negotiating with the advertiser, the tendentious campaign had been totally stopped and Google, already in the know, showed great comprehension to our problem.
Morale of this misfortune: clearly list points to get onto in the client – brief and respect it at the nearest single comma…

After a long research, we finally found our 4 business partners (www.lanegourmet.com, www.pnstore.com, www.naturalglam.com, www.sourcesofmusic.com ). We now have to meet them in order to conclude our partnership.

Business partners challenges

The interview consists to explain the details and the milestones of the competition, the challenges for them and for us. Indeed, it‘s important to explain what challenge can provide them:

. Visibility on the largest search engine
. 200$ marketing budget
. Strategic recommendations concerning their online communication
. Four young IT skilled professionals

Letter of Commitment

The other point is to sign-up GOOGLE’s letter to businesses which legally involves the business partner. In case of problem, I may have to use it.

Questions

Several questions are asked by the students to understand more closely their partner’s core business in order to not only write the report asked by GOOGLE but also create relevant campaigns.

Two companies embarrassed by questions concerning financial aspects of their business asked us to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

If there’s something for sure about the GOOGLE ONLINE MARKETING CHALLENGE (GOMC), it’s that the competition will be tough! Indeed, more than 20,000 students, from 61 countries have taken part in the GOMC.

The main particularity of this challenge is that it’s open to all students. No need to be a marketing guru!!!

As testimony of the huge range of universities or colleges:
College of Aviation And Management Studies (Nigeria)
University of Otago (New-Zeland)
National Hotel and Tourism Institute (Yemen)
Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (Peru) …

It’s pretty hard to find information about other competing teams. It seems that they’re not much talkative about their participation. While searching the Web (obviously via Google) I discovered GOMCHA, the unofficial social network for international teams competing in GOMC. In this website, I found out that most of the teams have already started their campaign.

I got in touch with a member of the social network (and also member of the Global Academic Judging Panel, but I wasn’t aware of it at first!), I learnt that about half of the teams have already accomplished their campaign.

I don’t really know how they managed to finish so fast because, while writting this post, we’re still working on our pre-campaign report!

Anyway, as the proverb says: “To win a race, the swiftness of a dart availeth not without a timely start“!

The main challenge in an ADWORDS campaign consists in finding the right keywords to bid on. Everyone has his own idea concerning the most relevant ones. Between team members, advertiser and suggestion tools, opinions are divided.

Furthermore, keywords choice is endless. Do we have to use website’s name ? Can we use brands names ? Is it relevant to use generic keywords ? How to get the most of our budget ? Discussion remains open. We now understand why strategy initially defined is so crucial. But the main question is : which keywords are the most relevant ones considering advertiser’s goal ?