Cesare Marchetti
- Online Marketing Coach and Consultant for SMEs (Small & Medium Enterprises)
- Conception, set-up and lecturer of the Social Media & Online Marketing Manager course at the WISS Business Informatics school
- M.S. in Computer Science and Economics (University of Zurich)
- Google Ads Specialist (Google certified)
How it all began…
My girlfriend, Claudia, likes to tell people my Google Ads and online marketing consulting business for SMEs was born out of frustration with her. The kind of frustration where you’re so upset with your partner, you refuse to talk to each other for days.
And you know what? She’s right.
What my girlfriend forgets to add to that story is her own successful business, metabolic4you GmbH, only became successful thanks to that same frustration.
It all started 7 years ago when I began teaching a new course at WISS Business Informatics school. The course was very narrow in scope (SEO and Google Ads), but went really deep into the subjects. Around the same time, Claudia was trying to start a nutritional consulting business and needed clients to come to her office and buy her services.
Since I had the expertise, and she was my girlfriend, I offered to help market her business online. I put up a website, bought keywords and began spending (her) money using Google Ads for promoting the website. This brought traffic to the site, but the phone still didn’t ring often and no clients were knocking on her door.
What was wrong? Why were visitors to the site not converting into customers? My frustration became her frustration. This went on and on and on until one day, my frustration got the better of me. I said some things. Wished I hadn’t. Slept on the couch a few nights.
Then we kissed, made up, and mutually agreed to blame the problem on the customers – they couldn’t see what a great deal she was offering (which was very close to the truth – but not like we thought).
Still no clients! We decided to blame it on Google Ads. That didn’t help either. Seeing no other suspects, we blamed the Internet. After getting tired of playing the blame game, I finally got smart and dug into the analytics. And Eureka! There it was: the landing page was our problem.
In my excitement to leverage the power of paid search (Google Ads) and organic search (SEO), I totally overlooked the innocent landing page. While only one component of professional online marketing, for a campaign to deliver visitors AND convert them, everything needs to work together like a well-engineered machine: keywords + optimized landing page + site layout + design + content + white hat SEO.
Once I recognized my error, I went over all the online components and optimized everything. Within 3 months, traffic doubled, then tripled and kept going up. Conversions shot up from <1% to 4-5%. Claudia finally had clients coming to her business.
Looking back, you could say we were lucky to get frustrated – and fearful we’d never find out if her business idea could succeed or not. But luck favours those who keep trying.
A year later, we were amazed to learn how much demand there was for nutritional services. So much in fact, it allowed us to set up a new company with 4 employees and offices in Zurich, Baden, Basel and Chur. When I’m asked by new clients, “does online marketing really work?” I smile and tell them it helps if you get frustrated.