Meet a Landy Award winner: Quick on its feet, Point It wins Best B2C Enterprise SEM Initiative

Katy Tonkin (left) and Maddie Cary of Point It accept the Landy for Best B2C Enterprise SEM Initiative.

The mission they chose to accept: to build and activate paid search campaigns to promote the surprise product launch of the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book on the US Microsoft Store website — in less than 24 hours.

Mission accomplished. For its quick execution of tailored, targeted campaigns that exceeded expectations, Seattle-based Point It Digital Marketing took home the 2016 Landy award for Best B2C Enterprise SEM Initiative. This was Point It’s second consecutive Search Engine Land Award win.

Not only was time not on their side, but once the campaigns were launched, Point It faced stiff competition from other authorized sellers and retailers carrying the new Surface products.

Point It focused their campaign structure and keyword strategy on reaching lower-funnel prospects who knew about the new products and were searching on brand keywords that signaled purchase intent. Negative keywords were added to funnel target prospects to the right products.

Ad copy was crafted with product specific description copy tailored to keywords in tightly themed ad groups. Callout extensions highlighted specific product details and sitelinks provided easy navigation to product selection in the respective campaigns.

The team also initiated RLSA campaigns using BlueKai to pass audience segments into Google for targeting that proved to be highly successful. Overall, the campaigns exceeded their targets.

“This award win is a reflection of the way our paid search team executes every day,” said Maddie Cary, Director of Paid Search at Point It. “We try to think ahead and set up account management processes that allow us to scale or move with agility and efficiency. So when our client had a surprise product launch that needed to get turned around ASAP, we didn’t panic. We brainstormed, formalized, and delivered within 24 hours on a paid search plan we were proud of that capitalized on critical window of revenue opportunity for the client.”

“This is one of the most heroic SEM stories ever told,” said Search Engine Land Awards judge Matt Van Wagner, president and founder of Find Me Faster. “Point It was uniquely qualified to take on a new product launch, but to build, test and deploy within 24 hours is the equivalent of NASA’s first landing on the moon!”