Getting Started in Online Media: Personal Experience

When I began my search for internet clients at the law firm, I was a bit green to the world of interactive marketing. Actually, I was green to web marketing which was the term more commonly used in 2000 (e.g. my title). My marketing background prepared me for the initial phase: goal setting, budget derivation and creative planning, but the strategy and implementation escaped me. I was quite nervous in my first week.

Picking up where others left off (off-budget)...
Since the law firm had a half-completed website, the attorney overseeing its development saw to it that advertising be purchased right away (read: prematurely). For six months, the firm was paying nearly $200 CPM for generic banner terms like airplane. Now, we do handle plane crash injuries, but a) it's not our bread-n-butter, b) there are 5x the number of searches for the word plane + crash than airplane + crash, and c) we did not need $25,000 + our budget directed to such a generically referenced keyword. The search engines and networks had the ball when interactive marketing was new and buyers were inexperienced. These types of buying decisions needed to be evaluated and adjusted (where possible). Task #1.

The second discovery I made was easier to fix. My reports indicated that we had been garnering 5,000 visitors per month from said banner advertising. We had a decent amount of content for each topic we advertised, but we had ZERO conversion pages. Without a case form submission page, potential clients would be expected to call us (I believe dial-up was approximately 80% of residential usage). Granted, the phone number is our URL, but remember what dial-up was like?

The third major issue was the download time of our site. The site was expensively developed using FoxPro database (go ahead and laugh), which was extremely gratuitous for our little website. The site took over 25 seconds per page to download on broadband. I had a fit (and so did the partner). This may have been the first thing I worked on with the design company.

The fourth and final concern was that of an accidental arrangement the law firm made with a large, specialized legal portal. The site was well-optimized (organic listings), but the site lacked any informational value, merely listing three or four local law firms. Further, the site's director prohibited competitive banner advertising. This just made no sense for our diversified practice areas. I helped break that contract in my first week.

Quickly jumping in the fray...

With the freedom to select the search engines and media types I wanted, I stumbled across a relatively new site called GoTo, an advertising network (now Overture). The bid for placement listings seemed like a very sensible way to spend money in light of the $100 CPM AOL, Excite and Lycos asked for their banners. A month later, I was signed up with another new face to online advertising, Google. With negligible competition, I quickly took advantage of extremely low CPC's and targeted, easy-to-change messages. Bravo!

Over the next three years, new PPC networks arose, lead generation opportunities developed, reporting capabilities improved and the traditional banner networks drastically cut CPM. During that time, I have designed a well-balanced and successful emarketing strategy for garnering Internet clients.

One of my shining moments happened when a nameless company pulled a certain drug in 2001...I was one of the first advertisers out on the web and I monitored bids and banners day and night. I capitalized on my swift call-to-action, capturing over 200 client intakes in the first three days of the recall.

Unfortunately, this moment also taught me my first valuable corporate lesson: internal customer processing capabilities of the firm must be able to meet demand. I soon launched a full investigation into process-improvement at our national office...