One of the sad things about getting older and hitting your 30s is that older relatives are also getting older and dying. I’ve had a to go to too many funerals lately, but that’s the way life goes. People get old and die. No solutions for that one yet. One of the few positives, however, about going to the funerals I’ve had to attend, has been reconnecting with people I hadn’t see in years. Many of these people last saw me when I was a boy or in high school. And now I’m a grown man with a successful business.
Since my self-identity is so wrapped up with my business (see coffee mugs with a picture of my face, via my logo, on them), much of the conversation with these people who haven’t seen me in years tends to go towards what I’m doing for work and my business.
I had one of these catching up conversations after a funeral a couple weeks ago with a long time friend of the family. This guy is a lawyer in his late 50s and has a successful small law office that he runs. He was asking me about my business, how AdWords works, and how it could work for a lawyer like himself. And he was fascinated. He uses Google everyday, but he hadn’t thought about how Google’s advertising business works or how it could help someone like himself.
Particularly, this lawyer was fascinated by search terms and phone calls tracking. He found it fascinating that you can tell what people actually type in Google when they see and click on your ads (search terms) and how you can use match types and negative keywords to control what search terms your ads show on. And he also found the call tracking possibilities amazing. He thought it was great that you can know exactly how many phone calls you get from AdWords and how long those calls lasted. This lawyer had never been exposed to a form of marketing with so much control and transparency, and I could see the wheels spinning in his head. He was saying things like, you mean I can show my ads to people who are only searching for a divorce lawyer and I will be able to find out exactly how many calls I get from my advertising campaign!?
It is always refreshing talking to someone who doesn’t have a lot of AdWords experience and hasn’t been told about the great features that this platform offers. It’s like letting someone in on a great secret.
Life and death is a strange thing. A person dies, and people gather at his funeral, they meet, they console each other, they talk, and they form or rekindle relationships and life goes on. It was great to reconnect with this friend at the funeral, and it was fun to see his reaction to having the most effective and transparent form of marketing explained to him.
