Looking at Paid Search with a Beginner’s Mind

January 20, 2009 |

“SHOSHIN” IS A Zen Buddhist term for ‘beginner’s mind’. In Shunryu Suzuki’s book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind there is a famous quote that reads “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the experts mind there are few”. Think about that for a moment. If you have found this blog you may be an expert at paid search or online marketing or maybe on your way to becoming an expert lean practitioner. You may have mastered campaign organizations or have become a certified AdWords Professional or maybe you’ve become a lean belt of some color, but what does it really mean to be an expert in these subjects? Are you expert enough to know when to stop and take a step back and look at what you are doing with a beginner’s mind?

Looking at paid search with a beginner’s mind sounds easy but, from experience, it takes a lot of discipline. It is easy to think too high or too low and forget about the path that got you to where you are and remember the simple basics of this craft. One of the things I enjoy about working in this industry is working with new people who are new to paid search. They are the ones with the true beginner’s mind and look at a campaign structure or keyword list or destination URL and ask the obvious and not so obvious questions. Having the right type of person in a new position with the right amount of curiosity is refreshing. They often find the mistakes that us ‘experts’ glance over because we are too busy to pay attention.

At a high level working with people new to the industry reminds us of the possibilities. At a lower level, thinking about search with a beginner’s mind should help ensure that we are doing things that add value and grow the business and doing those things right the first time. Was the site tagged right? Did you use the right landing page? Did you separate keyword match types into separate ad groups? Are you targeting only one network type per campaign? Those are the types of things that are easy to overlook and make mistakes when thinking with an expert mind. Thinking with a beginner’s mind allows you to slow down and explore all possibilities and perfect all the details and ask the questions - Are you doing the things your customer cares about? Do those things change the account and grow the business? Did you do do those things right the first time? If you cannot answer ‘yes’ to those questions then you are wasting your time and your customer’s time. Be curious about the strategy, tasks and the results - look at the data with the beginner’s mind and you may start to see things you’ve never come across before.Slowing down to eliminate the mistakes, rework and review allows you to speed up the process and provide you customer with more innovative ideas.

As you do your work - build campaigns, write ad creatives, test landing pages, provide reporting and results, etc., stop and ask yourself if what you are doing is an effective and efficient use of your and your customer’s time. Revisit the customer requirements because they may have changed and you may not be aware of the situation that made them change. Are you providing the right information at the right time. Too much or too little? Taking a step back and asking the questions from a beginner’s mind point of view can help open communication, strengthen the relationship with your customer and exceed their requirements.

This post is dedicated in honor of President Barack Obama who will lead the much needed change in the United States with a beginner’s mind.

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