• ppc advertising
• the customer journey
• sales forecasting
ABOUT ROSS DAWSON
Starting when proper computers weighed more than a car, Ross spent most of his career in the software industry, primarily in senior sales, marketing and general management roles at home and overseas.Moving on from 'heavy duty' database and application development software, he began creating online businesses at a time when Google was just a small, cult search engine and Bing a sonic pulse for detecting submarines.
Ross started using Google Ads, (then 'Adwords'), to promote his online businesses back in May 2003. He's put £££s tens of thousands into Google campaigns and received £££s hundreds of thousands in revenue back. "Google Ads was a lot easier back in 2003. You dreamed up some relevant keywords, wrote a couple of two-line ads, gave Google your card details and off you went. They didn't even have conversion tracking so you'd little idea what worked and what didn't. Even so, unless you were a complete idiot, it was difficult to fail! It's not like that now."
Then, puzzled that the commonly used 'modern' marketing funnel (Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Purchase) had made little progress since the 19th Century AIDA model, he set about redefining the customer journey based on interviews and conversations with professional salespeople, marketers, consumers and company buyers."Ever since we got pocket-money as kids, we've made hundreds or thousands of purchases, large and small. We don't need some vast academic study to tell us what a customer journey looks like. In the era of the internet and the smartphone, what's needed is a detailed plan to communicate with customers throughout their journey, so they choose us and not someone else."
Formerly a scratch golfer and private pilot, in his limited free time and when it's raining Ross plays the violin and writes articles for aviation and falconry journals.