Internet Advertising / Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Below you are going to find some specific channels for driving traffic to your website. At the end of the day its about setting a budget and a realistic ROI that fits into your cost per sale. Stick to that and its our job to make the numbers work with the various forms of online advertising and media.
some numbers:
Advertising Budget / # of Sales = Advertising Cost Per Sale
Advertising budgets are usually around 10% of sales
How Many sales do you want?
We will evaluate your market, your competitive advantage, propose a budget and projected Return on the first 30 days. FOR FREE! If you don't like what you hear than we don't advertise. its that simple. After we start the program and its not working out.. We STOP Evaluate, correct and start again.
CALL TODAY! 603-617-3877
We have conducted many Search Engine Marketing campaigns with great success. SEM should be part of all online marketign strategies to various degrees. Running a campaign on a new website will give you insight into what your customers are looking for and how they find you. This information is used to incorporate keyword into your content to build your organic (Free search rankings) listings. Below I have provided some statistics from a campaign for an example.
Google Adwords / Yahoo / Bing PPC Advertising
Affordable Granite
New Englands Best Price on Granite
15 Color Choices $37.99 Installed!
www.AffordableGraniteNH.com
This particular client is price centered from a marketing perspective. They offer Granite, Marble, and Quartz but Granite is the focus since it is the most desireable of the products currently. This text ad has been running for 1 year and is teh best performing ad of 36 text ad attemps over a 12 month period. This ad maintains a 3.17% Click Through Rate (CTR) on 300+ targeted keywords.
This being a brand new website when we started we did not have any organic listing in search. All traffic was generated through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. 12 Months later this website manages over 5,500 Visits per month. (A Visit is One user landing on the website and viewing website content). Do the math thats over 60,000 opportunities to sell your product or service that you would not have if you did not advertise online.
60% of the traffic to the website is through Organic Search engine listings targeted to specific keyword search results.
Classifieds
Go to where people congregate. People love internet classifieds. If your product or services is attractive to the price consious internet user be sure you are there. Craigslist is a great forum for marketing your business. With some specific techniques this one channel can ad signifigant traffic to your website with well places and crafted ads.
If you are not monitoring your advertising efforts then dont bother.
It is imparative to the success of the variaous campaigns to monitor your user activity from each sources. you will learn a lot about many things for example.
You will learn how much website traffic is coming from each source.
Compare this to the price you pay for the traffic source and you are starting to be able to see a ROI (Return On Investment)
Compare this to the level of effort to manage each source.
many other factors are involved but thats a few.
We are also able to see, of each source, some qualtiy factors of the traffic. is the audience engaged? do they stay a while.. visit some pages or do they leave right away. reporting can answer many of these questions and help to refine your efforts.
Social Media
Social Media is a tuff nut to crack and does involve more time. This is our take on social Media Marketing. As long as you make the attempt you are going in the right direction. What is worse than not doing social media marketing is neglecting the channel that you choose to start. Use twitter, facebook and others to open a communication channel between you and your customers. Use services like twitter to post offers and incorporate the content feed into your website. this allows you to benefit twice from this data. Once any potiontial traffic from the tweets themselves but also to provide a way to update your website from anywhere you choose with ease. Communicate specific offers and build an audience for your offers. Use facebook and myspace to build a more open relationship with customers. Provide them insight into other facets of your business they might not be aware of. Again like craigslist ... go where your customers are.
Blogging
Blogging enables you to create content around your possitioning and keywords to generate traffic from deeper in the web. You always have to be careful to maintain your image with this type of communication and a good strategy is to be sure this content is incorporated into your website. Search Engines LOVE fresh content so be sure that it is incorporated into you website.
Below is a list of factors involved in runing and maintaining a online marketing campaign.
Product: your product or service must be set up so that you are able to reference it all the way to the impression on a particular site or email.
Placement: The ability to study the placement of the ad and its effectiveness in that placement is very important to future placements and choices made in a campaign
Media Buying: Understanding all the different pricing structures of CPM, CPC, GCPC, CPA, etc can be a bear but with a good media buyer all of your placement will be based on a unit of measure that makes the most sense to the business for measured success
Predicting: The ability to read the information provided by the vendor of placement and to scope the Insertion Order as well as to negotiate the price are all essential parts to purchasing placement
Audience Analysis: When building creative it is important to build understand you audience and be able to work the message of the different forms of online advertising. After a creative is performing to expectation then an interesting step is then to change the message slightly while running a simultaneous creative to see the effectiveness of such small details. Example Carloanauthority.com Creative
Guidelines: Each Vendor will have different parameters of size dimension and placement so understanding these factor is very important to be flexible and have the ability to make changes easily to the source files are important to managing the creative portions of a campaign.
Creative: The creative comes after audience analysis and guideline research but is not least important. Understanding the competition and the messages of others will help to put the right twist on your creative and set you apart from the rest. The great thing about building creative for Internet advertising is the instant gratification you can receive from putting a campaign together that works.
Tracking: the ability to measure the effectiveness of a campaign is one of the most important aspects of tracking. With out it you would never know if you are spending money in the wrong place. With the Internet instantly you have access to the effectiveness of the campaign and have the ability to make changes on the fly to maximize the performance. In this day an age Vendors will give "Guarantees" that with out tracking on your side you would never be able to validate the effectiveness of a particular campaign.
Accounting: This is the factor of ROI for the campaign. Vendors are looking at your numbers and ask for payment based on your original buy. If you buy 100000 impressions for $1000 on a network and got a click through of 1% and you sold 10 products at $100 you would not work with that vendor again. You would go through some sort of negotiation and they may ask for new creative because they "know their audience"
So for the same cost you the have a 3% click through rate now you have tripled your revenue for the same cost.
