HETIC 2008 official Online Marketing Challenge Blog

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 ?

The four teams are in position, ready to takeover PPC marketing fortifications. A tagging guidelines was sent to our business partners in order to set-up analytics solutions.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS, has been set-up to gather relevant data that help us to improve day after day our global bidding strategy, Ads, keywords management, etc.

In the meantime, we sent our professor the two first parts of our reports. Each team that has interviewed its business partner so they are able to define what their communication strategy is, what their industry is and which marketing tools they use as an action leverage.

Studying in HETIC, we are daily in touch with advertisers willing to communicate on the Web. Therefore, finding a business partner in the Google Online Marketing Challenge purpose appears to be much more laborious than we had thought.

After considerating every opportunities within HETIC’s partners network, we quickly realized that few of them were meeting our main criteria : an advertiser acting on a niche market.

To find the perfect candidate, we started our searches with the help of websites directories such as DMOZ, with no success. That’s why we successfully decided to seek within our respective social networks (family, friends, business contacts, etc.).

Finally, signing-up business partners for the four HETIC teams wil have taken a whole month that made us modify our planning by reducing time initially dedicated to strategy brainstorming.

Teams creation is one thing, finding business partners is another one!

Heticians teams are now facing their first real challenge : find a business partner that meets GOOGLE expectations including the fact that:
- is a business with a website,
- has never used ADWORDS
- ready to get a campaign in a challenge purpose.

We decided to extend those criterias by looking for e-tailers playing on a low-competitive or niche market.

How hard it is to find an advertiser that meets these requirements!

After exhausting their contact book with no success, Heticians had to show incredible talent and creativity in order to find the appropriate advertisers.

Finally, the four winning business partners are:

• Natural glam
• Source of music
• PN Store
• L’Âne gourmet

What will be the next challenge for our teams?

As the first confrontation is about to begin, troops from all over the world are getting organized around the strategy which will lead them to victory.

Japan, India, China, Nigeria, South Africa, the USA, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, the UK, etc… Very rapidly, students from most nations around the globe got involved in the GOMC.

France is no exception. Day after day, many prestigious schools are joining the fight.

Among them, the HETIC Batallion has enrolled 4 sections, led by Mr. Bataille, a veteran in marketing.

Highly motivated and prepared, their only goal is to do everything they can to become the first school to win the first online student World War.

Get to your keyboards! And let the battle begins!