The ABC's of Internet Marketing

Ok, so you’ve designed and built your website, and ensured it is ready for customers.  It is intuitive, leads prospects through the process of finding what they are looking for quickly, delivers a targeted message and offer, and makes the conversion process simple and easy. Now what?

The average adult is the US spending over 13 hours per week on the internet, and almost 9 out of 10 people using search engines for shopping online.  With your website in place, it’s time to start making your target market on the Internet aware that you exist and that they should visit your site.  Most people will use the major search engines as a starting point for finding the products, services, information, and locations they are looking for.  There are three parts to a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) that you can utilize to become visible to your target market.  In the following example I searched for “carpet cleaners in Sacramento”. 




1.)    The section of the page numbered 1 represents the sponsored links by carpet cleaning vendors.  This section, both across the top of and down the right side of the SERP enables vendors to bring awareness to their products and services by placing paid advertisements that appear whenever someone searches for a particular key word phrase, in this case “carpet cleaners in sacramento”.  Advertisers pay each time a person clicks on the ad and lands on the advertiser’s website.  This is called a “click thru”.  On the major search engine, the cost of a “click thru” is based on a bid amount. The ad with the highest bid generally shows up first, though additional factors such as ad quality and relevance can sometimes come into play. This type of Internet Marketing is also knows as Pay Per Click (PPC).  There are three primary benefits to initiating a PPC campaign immediately. 

• They are easy to set up and you can quickly start an ad campaign
• Ad campaigns can begin to generate qualified prospects landing on your website immediately
• They enable you to test and prioritize your keywords, which enable you to continuously improve your campaigns, as well as provide you with insight you will use need for one of the other Internet Marketing technique we will discuss below.

2.)    The section of the page numbered 2 represents the Google Local Business Center, or Google Maps.  This part of the SERP was created to focus on small and medium sized business that target a specific local geographic area.  Google LBC enables you to establish a profile of your business including location, categories of services offered, an extended description of your business, images and video, coupons and special offers.  Google then uses this information to place you on the first SERP, next to a Google map, with a group of other companies offering similar products or services, all based on a geo-targeted keyword phrase.  This is a free service offered by Google.  One note, Google Maps do not always display for all keyword phrases and searches.  To learn more, or set up your Google LBC profile, go to http://www.google.com/lbc.

3.)    The section of the page numbered 3 represents the organic search rankings of a SERP.  An organic search ranking represents the natural rankings or sequence in which companies appear when some searches for a keyword phrase.  This is considered the most important location to be visible in.  Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.  The Internet Marketing technique to achieve a high ranking is knows as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  There are both “on page” and “off page” techniques that if executed properly over a period of a few to several months, will begin to yield consistently high rankings in the search engines, bringing more qualified prospects to your website, enabling you to convert them into customers.

There are a few challenges with SEO—it is time consuming, somewhat technical, and requires a meticulous, consistent, ongoing, comprehensive effort to be successful.  But the potential benefits are high.  Additionally, the search engines do not make any money on organic search rankings, and periodically change their algorithms, impacting search rankings.  This highlights the need to take a holistic approach, using all three parts of a SERP to provide your business with the broadest exposure and the greatest opportunity to be visible and attract more qualified prospects to your website.

To learn more about the different methods of search engine marketing, contact me at Lou@wsiMarketBuilders.com or visit our website at www.wsiMarketBuilders.com.

As more companies transition from traditional marketing to online marketing as the core of their go-to-market strategy, they want to jump right into driving more traffic to their website and converting those visitors into customers. 

Unfortunately, too many companies have websites that are not ready for customers.  At some point in the past, they made the decision to put up a website, without a clear view of the ultimate value of the site and it’s role in their overall business strategy.  So the website ends up being an online brochure and not optimized for conversion marketing.

A company can spend tens of thousands of dollars moving their site up the Google rankings, and on pay-per-click advertising and Email marketing campaigns to bring visitors and prospects to their site.  But if the site is hard to use, has little information, has a poorly defined layout/color scheme or has no way for the customer to take the desired action—you might as well take that money to Las Vegas and gamble it away.

Some companies will insist that it is not their website that is the problem, but that they just don’t have enough customers visiting it.  But a poorly designed and functioning website can have the opposite impact of what it was intended to do.  It can harm your brand image, waste thousands of dollars in marketing spend, scare people away from becoming your client and even cause them to tell others of their experience.

The good news is that your website does not have to be perfect.  But it does need to follow some conventions that will ensure it is pleasing to the eye, intuitive, leads prospects through the process of finding what they are looking for quickly, delivers a targeted message and offer, and makes the conversion process simple and easy. 

Once your site is ready for your prospects and customers, then a comprehensive Internet Marketing strategy will not only bring more qualified traffic to your website, but ensure they become a satisfied, lifelong customers.

Click here to learn more about our complimentary WebScan website and competitive analysis, and how it can help you determine whether your website is ready for your customers.

Building on my previous article (Achieving Your Business Objectives Requires a Holistic Marketing Strategy), achieving your operational objectives using Internet Marketing techniques has a number of significant benefits, including being:

It’s Targeted-- you can delivered specific messages to your target market, or any segment of your target market—by virtually any demographic dimension.

It’s Measurable--you can track all aspects of your marketing spend and campaigns, whether monthly, weekly, daily, or in real time. There is no more wondering whether your marketing spend is achieving the ROI and benefits you anticipated.

It’s Flexible--you can plan and execute campaigns more quickly, with shorter durations, with far less up-front costs than with traditional marketing

It’s Adaptable--with web analytics tools, you can identify trends as they are occurring and react quickly to modify your campaign, thereby saving significant marketing dollars and taking advantage of a new opportunities.

It’s Cost Effective--typical Internet Marketing campaign costs are 20-25% of those of a traditional marketing campaign.

With these benefits firmly in mind, let’s take a look at the major elements of an integrated Internet Marketing strategy.

An Optimized Website—this is the foundation of your Internet Marketing efforts. I firmly believe that your website should be the center of the universe as it relates to your business. By combining relevant and frequently changing content with targeted messages and offers, you will build a community of prospects and customers that will return frequently. Add an architecture based on maximizing conversions, and you have a solid platform to build your Internet Marketing strategy around. For more ideas on setting up your website, see Questions to Ask Before Setting Up Your Website.

Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website—A website alone is not an integrated strategy. It is a place where content resides, where people come to when they are searching for something, and where they will hopefully take the desired action. Your website may be a fantastic testament to your company, but if no one knows it exists, it’s value is limited.

One of the most important aspects of your Internet Marketing effort is to drive targeted traffic to your website. There are a number of different techniques to accomplish this, including paid search marketing or PPC, organic search marketing or SEO, and a variety of Social Media opportunities.

These and other Internet Marketing techniques can be deployed simultaneously, but it is essential to understand how and where your target market looks for your product or service, so that you can create a plan that combines the right balance of these techniques to reach your audience with a targeted message and bring them to your website.

Convert Prospects into Customers—Getting your visitors to take the action you want once they land at your site is the closing step in the online process. This could mean registering as a lead, requesting a proposal, making a phone call, downloading a white paper, making a donation, signing up for your newsletter, or purchasing a product.
 
An aggressive Internet Marketing program that drives qualified traffic to a poorly designed website so that prospects don’t take the desired action is a waste of marketing dollars. Success is getting your prospects to land on a page specifically designed to drive a conversion and to take the action you want them to.
 
In a later article we’ll talk in depth about the elements of a website designed to promote conversions.

Create Lifetime Customers—the old adage is that it is 8 times more expensive to find a new customer than to keep an existing customer. The expensive “courtship” process is over, and you have “consummated” the relationship. A key benefit of Internet Marketing is the ability to continue to engage your existing customer base periodically with relatively little cost and effort--enabling you to retain them as a customer so you can cross sell, up sell, and even sell them new products and services as they become available
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Email Marketing can help you accomplish this, while also enabling you to stay in touch with and develop prospects who have not yet become customers. Email marketing is a fine vehicle for continuing to stay top-of-mind with your customers, and bring them new content and new offers.

Another effective tool is Re-marketing, using techniques like Display Ads to retarget your message or offer to customers who have previously expressed interest in your business by visiting your website.

Measure, Analyze, Improve—perhaps the most straightforward adage is “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”. A strong analytics tool and a commitment to use it religiously is an essential part of your Internet Marketing strategy. You can measure every aspect of your campaigns, at any point in the process, enabling you react far more confidently and quickly to changing conditions than with traditional marketing techniques. This will have a direct impact on the effectiveness of your campaigns while far more effectively utilizing your marketing funds.

A successful Internet Marketing strategy is made up of all of these components—an optimized website, campaigns to drive targeted traffic, the right path, message and offer to make conversions easy, a commitment to nurturing your customer relationships, and the use of analytics tools to measure and manage you progress and results. And by taking an integrated approach to marketing your products and services over the internet, not only will you achieve the benefits above, but you will also increase the likelihood of achieving your operational objectives for 2010.

To learn more, go to www.wsiMarketBuilders.com, or contact us at (916) 933-7414 or Lou@wsiMarketBuilders.com.

 For those of you who don’t know me, I am passionate about two things—fly fishing and Internet Marketing.  So when I get a chance to talk about both of them in the same conversation, I jump at the opportunity.  I had been thinking lately about the parallels between the two, when to my delight, Ryann Price at Hubspot wrote a great blog post today titled “A Fly Fisherman’s Guide to Catching New Customers with Inbound Marketing”.

I’d like to touch on a few of his observations, as they are great reminders for small and medium-sized businesses that are thinking about or starting to embrace Internet Marketing as a key driver of their business success.

The Importance of Having a Guide

Fishing a river for the first time is challenging.  Figuring out where the fish are and what they like to eat can be hard.  I find that hiring a guide who is familiar with the river can make my fishing experience much more productive. They’ve fished the river many times before, know the best places to fish, and the best flies to use.  They know the river’s quirks and take you past all the water you might have fished by yourself that just doesn’t hold fish—no matter how good the water looks.

 In his blog, Mr. Price points out “Where you THINK the fish are and where they ARE can be totally different.  It’s best not to leave it up to guess work and actually listen to and follow the guidance of the experts. “ 

An Internet Marketing consultant knows the landscape, understands the process, and is equipped to help you identify where your customers are and how to reach them.  As Mr. Price says “You have to go where your potential customers are by determining which persona you are trying to reach. Are they on FaceBook?  Twitter? Yahoo Answers? or LinkedIn? You can assume, like many people do, that your target customer isn't using social media or the blogosphere. Or you can measure where your traffic is coming from, identify your referrers, track your leads, and close the loop on which new sites and content produced the most leads and customers.”

Choose Your Fly Carefully, or Match the Hatch

One of the most important aspects of fly fishing is “matching the hatch”—determining what insects live on the river that fish will eat, and at what stage they are in their lifecycle.  Figuring this out enables you to identify the right “offer”, and if you place it correctly and in the right location on the water, fish will check it out or even eat it.

Once you know where your customers are and what they are interested in, you can create the right message to reach them, a compelling offer that they cannot resist, and put it in front of them using the most effect delivery mechanism.

Keep Your Fish on the Line

When learning to fly fish, the first time you hook a fish is incredibly exciting.  And as you gain experience, the good news is that feeling never goes away.  More important than hooking the fish is landing it, and here is where Mr. Price makes a couple of good points about hooking and landing customers.

“When you're fly fishing, you need to keep the line tight; any slack in the line gives the fish an opportunity to free itself.  You also want to keep your angles on the fish.  As the fish swims, the position of the hook changes. By keeping your angles, you reduce the chance the hook's position will change and he'll get away.  It's the same with lead nurturing--you need to make sure your angles are right.  If the person came into your site with an interest in social media, you would keep engaging them with social media material.  It's all about catering the material to their interests and engaging them with it when they're interested. “

I love fly fishing, and I love helping businesses attract more prospects to their website and convert them into customers.  A good guide can help you on the water by catching more and bigger fish.  And a good guide can help you grow your business on the Internet by catching more and bigger customers.  I strongly suggest you use them for both.   

You can read Ryann’s full post at  http://bit.ly/5na5vL
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