Here’s a neat eBook of marketing quotes – for those days you need a little marketing pick-me-up.
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Here’s a neat eBook of marketing quotes – for those days you need a little marketing pick-me-up.
Specialize in optimizing website designs to improve conversion rates, banner click through rates and internet direct marketing (AKA: Sales Funnel A/B Testing). I also focus on Search Engine Optimization tactics and affiliate marketing to achieve the best possible ROI. Including landing pages, jump pages, ppc landing pages and conversion rate optimization.
Sales funnel design, conversion rate optimization, web marketing, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, direct response web design, user interface design, css, flash, html, xhtml, cold fusions, netsuite, crm, small business, erp, landing pages, landing page design, ppc, seo, sem, landing pages, jump pages, ppc landing pages, landing page designer, conversion rate improvement, lead gen, lead generation
Acquire an FTE (Full Time Employee)
The question isn’t IF a good online marketing employee will help increase revenue. If they are good they will. But there is a question as to if the cost of this person will exceed the revenue they bring in. For example: $100,000/year salary and benefits for a good online marketer is a good deal. If this employee helps you bring in an incremental $200,000/year in revenue this is a no brainer. If the market will only let them bring you in $50,000/year there is probably a problem.
Acquire PTE (Part Time Employee)
A part time employee may also be considered and may cut the salary requirement in half. You may also reduce the quality of the person you are seeking. You are probably seeking (or at least hoping for) Organic Search, Paid Search, Display, E-mail, and Social Media marketing skills in one person. Your chances of finding all these skills in one person are slim in the first place. This effort is further hampered when you only have a part time position to offer. Two reason for this: 1) you screen out the best people and 2) you limit the time they have to devote to doing a complete job each month.
Hire an Agency
Acquiring a GOOD agency will address the problem of expertise. They will most likely have expertise in Organic, Paid, Display, E-mail, and Social Media. Unlike your perfect employee they will most likely be multiple individuals who focus on their core competencies. The problem with this scenario is you will probably go from $100,000/year salary and benefits for a full time employee to $200,000/year to engage a good agency. You may also find you will not have an employer/employee type relationship. As hard as they may try not to do so they will probably come across as a bunch of arrogant know-it-alls that will insist on doing everything their way with little input from you. This may be justified in some cases but will be unacceptable in many situations.
Hire a Virtual Agency
This is the best of both worlds and more. You have a) at your disposal expertise in Organic, Paid, Display, E-mail, and Social Media, b) part time “virtual” employees while maintaining the quality and coverage of a Full Time Employee, and c) a cost that is closer to the cost of the part time employee. The expertise gained by engaging this virtual agency is further enhanced with years of contacts, available online marketing tools and techniques at their disposal, and economies of scales that simply can’t be enjoyed by companies that don’t have online marketing as their primary business.
What You Should Expect From A Virtual Agency
Virtual Agencies are usually smaller than the traditional online agency and will restrict the number of clients that they service at one time. They purposely remain small to maintain control and that personal relationship with the owners. They limit the client load to ensure that the quality remains in each relationship.
Contact Steve Thompson at 816-587-8880 or e-mail him at steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com if you would like additional information on the Virtual Agency program offered by siteEDGE Agency.
Technorati Tags: Online Marketing, Online Agency, Internet Marketing, Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization
Twitter Effectiveness
In a previous blog posting I discussed your effectiveness with Twitter as measured by your Retweet Rank. A Retweet Rank is a representation of the number of times a user has been retweeted by others. I argued that this rank can be used to determine how much self promoting you can get away with.
Beyond Measurement
This time I talk about how Twitter may be used to emulate, in my opinion, the most successful marketing tactic in the history of marketing. If you haven’t guessed it already I’m talking about search marketing. Most people are familiar with search marketing. You go to Google, or some other engine, and search for what you want. The results are displayed in either the organic (free) or sponsored (paid) listing results.
Search Marketing
I argue that search marketing is the most successful tactic because, from the marketer’s perspective, you can market directly to the people who are specifically looking for your product or service. And you can tailor your offers and call to action specifically to the prospect. What still amazes me is you can “automate” the process to track your success (conversions) and adjust your activity to improve results even more. Yes, I think this is the greatest invention since slice bread…but wait. The market is getting saturated. Click costs are going up. Too bad there isn’t another tool that could work beside it. Well maybe there is. Twitter!
Twitter has Context and is Free
Twitter has two attributes that could help accelerate the growth of advertising in the mobile market. Like Google, Tweeter has context and is a free service. With Twitter you can determine the hot topics (keywords). Additionally, since people tell Twitter about themselves through their account or through their tweets, Twitter can layer on demographic and behavioral targeting.
Twiter as a Search Tool
This is where it gets similar to Google AdWords. Advertisers could buy keywords or phrases that are tweeted. This could be based upon geographic location and a Twitter profile of previous Tweets. If you want to get real fancy, assuming that the GPS location is turned on, a retailer, say, in a mall could send offers to the mobile device of people walking in front of their store, or generally in the mall.
Beyond Just Search
I’m excited, but is it just me? There is nothing better for a retailer than the ability to know that John is looking for a new WII game and getting him an offer before he begins to shop. How about Sue with a broken windshield that would appreciate the convenience of getting a fair price and mobile service without having to ask.
Is it just me? I don’t think so.
Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com .
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Social Media, Online Marketing
This was intially published in the Eyeing Marketing blog as written by Carrie Aker. You can go there for the full detail but I want to get your juices flowing with a high level mention of the tips.1) Let your customers determine the content.
Allow your audience to post photos, comments (rants and raves), articles, and stories to the site.
2. Build online communities
It’s very easy to assume that one general online community would be sufficient. However, that’s not the case. Remember, every person has different interest and it’s important that you tailor to each of those individuals in order for this to be more effective.
3) Offer something new everyday.
Give tips, new coupon offers, advice, or anything that might be of interest to your audience.
4) Contests
Be creative with your contest and try to come up with a unique concept.
5) Interactive Product Designs
Have your customers design their own product on your site.
6) Provide a useful tool
Sites that offer some form of calculator to calculate loans, currency exchange, BMI (Body Mass Index), etc. get bookmarked and referred to frequently. Look to see what sort of useful long-term tool you could provide your audience.
Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com .
Technorati Tags: website design, website development
I have to admit that I didn’t come up with this headline or topic. Erik Holladay, Global Marketing Director for Intertek blog positing of the same name talks about the importance of negative keywords. You can read his blog by clicking on the following link: http://erikholladay.blogspot.com/2009/06/negative-is-positive-with-google.html
I agree with Eick on the importance of negative keywords but added my additional comment below:
Erik,
You could also stick to “Exact Match” search terms but that may be restrictive in some cases. What you didn’t mention was how to determine the negative keywords. With Google new “Search Query Performance” report it becomes convenient to view what search terms are actually being picked up in Broad and Phrase match. This is after the fact but may be worth periodically reviewing and making selective parts of these search queries negative keywords.
Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com to discuss further.
Technorati Tags: Paid Search, PPC, Google Negative Keywords
…or how you can generate more business than you can handle.
It’s as simple as following these steps:
1. Resolve to put your ad dollars into getting internet traffic
2. Use the “marketEDGE Technique” to develop 6 to 8 ads
3. Use an approved Campaign Optimizer to identify the top producing ads
4. Use the “marketEDGE Technique” to develop 2 to 4 offer pages
5. Use an approved Campaign Optimizer to ID the offer page that delivers the most prospects/customers
6. Use approved Campaign Tracking to tie every single customer generated back to the source
7. Continuously narrow the source of the internet traffic until you are only paying for the traffic that is producing customers.
You now have the Marketing System That Never Fails and all you have to do is repeat these steps until you have more business than you can handle. It typically takes 3 to 4 months to perfect the process.
You can do all this yourself but the “marketEDGE Technique” is the key to its success and it is proprietary to siteEDGE. Don’t worry it’s not that expensive. One of my customers paid the Yellow Pages 20 times what they paid me. References are available upon request.
Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com to discuss further.
Technorati Tags: Paid Search, PPC, Analytics, Campaign Tracking, google content network, google site targeting
Search Retargeting has been around for a while. You may recall that this is when a visitor to a site page is tagged based upon the keyword they clicked on and is re-engaged on subsequent websites with pre-designed offers and messaging.
An Example of a Previous Implementation of Search Retargeting
Yahoo’s Implementation of Search Retargeting
While this technology has been available for several years, Yahoo has recently introduced its own version. Yahoo implementation is notable in several ways:
Yahoo has had its challenges over the past few months but, in my opinion, this is a step in the right direction for them. My experience with Search Retargeting, along with personal touches that Yahoo brings to the table, leads me to conclude that, if done correctly, this could be a gold mine for many companies.
Feel free to contact Steve Thompson at 816-587-8880 if you would like to discuss how Search Retargeting might help you.
Are Businesses Doom?
If you believe what you hear in the news your business is doomed because “the economy is worse than it has been since the great depression.” My advice is not to follow this defeatist philosophy.
The Crux of the Problem
If you are not getting as many customers as you were before the economic downturn you may need to do something different. If you sell cars, for example, there may only be ten people in your area purchasing automobiles this month when there were a hundred this month last year. This is a problem but the answer is simple. Instead of giving up you should go after the ten people who are buying.
Reasonable Expectations
Of course the effort and cost of getting these ten customers must yield you a reasonable profit. This means you must first determine how much a customer is worth, and should know within a reasonable doubt that your effort will at least cost less than this. Contact me and I will show you how to do this. For the purpose of this article we will assume we are reasonably certain that the effort is worthwhile.
The Four Steps Revealed
Just about everyone uses the web. We all know about search engines and e-mail marketing, and many more are familiar with terms such as social media and viral marketing. Many, however, do not fully understand how powerful this internet tool can be. As powerful as television, radio, newspapers, yellow pages, and the US mail is, they lack interactivity.
The one major difference between old and new media is interactivity. Television, for example, is not yet able to allow consumers to search for what they need; nor does it support an environment where businesses can tailor a response to the consumers. This follow-up makes the difference in how much control you have in delivering the sale. This is the essence of what the internet offers and is revealed in the following four steps:
1. Paid Search—at this point some of you are probably saying “is this all? I have been doing this for years.” To this I have two responses, speed and precise targeting. There is no better method to quickly and precisely a) target who you want, b) immediately get them to study your offer, and c) begin a back and forth dialog where the goal is to sell your product or service. Unlike other online marketing options, with paid search you can get quantifiable results in hours instead of months.
2. Search Engine Optimization—Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most inexpensive methods for maintaining a constant flow of online customers and prospects. One mistake that is made by many search engine marketers is to target the wrong search terms. Notice in my solution hierarchy that I included paid search first. This is because you used what was learned from the paid search to determine how you should plan and execute your search engine marketing strategy. Where a paid search campaign can be producing results in hours an SEO effort may take month.
3. Search Retargeting—many may not be as familiar with search retargeting as they are with paid search and search engine optimization. Paid search and search engine optimization is the first step to a search retargeting effort. Once prospects show interest in the product or service offered, as indicated by their click through to the site, the site visitor is profiled and the marketing message is evolved. They are then re-engaged with the improved marketing message until they become customers. The actual re-engagement occurs on targeted network sites that the prospect visits over the next 30 days. The re-engagement is an effective method of keeping your offer in front of people who have previously shown an interest.
4. Opt-in E-mail Marketing—Opt-ed in e-mail marketing should not be confused with spam. Where spam is unsolicited e-mails, opt-ed in e-mails are ones that the recipients has specifically said they want to receive. As with search retargeting, the prospect has previously indicated interest. This occurred as a result of their contact through paid search or search engine optimization. Based upon their interest, buying habits, demographics, and a multitude of other attributes, periodic e-mails are sent with the goal of increasing sales. Once the list is in place the cost of a long-term e-mail marketing campaign is extremely economical.
At each step in the process customers are acquired but it is not the goal for one method to stand on its own. If a prospect does not become a customer right away they are re-engaged a second, third, or forth time. The long term goal is to minimize the cost associated with the acquisition of a customer. Moving from an aggressive paid search campaign to a low cost search engine optimization strategy is a means to this end. Once the SEO effort has met the established goals, the paid search campaign is turned down but is still used to fill the gap for the SEO search terms that are not performing as well. Finally, e-mail marketing is also used for re-engagement. The prospect has given you their permission to send them e-mails. You leverage this by presenting them with the right combination of price and offer to turn them into customers. E-mail is also used on existing customers to increase repeat sales.
Get Started Now!
No matter what the economic outlook, if you have a viable product or service, you can go to the head of the line for the acquisition of customers. There may be a drop in the number of people buying your product or service. You simple have to get to the people who are still buying.
As previously mentioned, the first step is to determine if an effort like this will yield you a reasonable profit. All the tools are available and waiting for you. It’s up to you to take the first step to make sure they are leveraged on your behalf.
Contact Steve at 816-587-8880 x102 or at steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com .
Technorati Tags: Paid Search, PPC, Analytics, Campaign Tracking, google content network, google site targeting