Meaningful ROI in Online Marketing

Written by on May 17, 2012 in Blog - No Comments
seo cheltenham

When running an online advertising campaign, it can be difficult to quantify results. How effective are your efforts? Is your marketing budget sufficient to meet your goals? This article is not about measuring ROI directly, it can be very difficult to estimate your actual returns from an online campaign. Instead, I hope to explain the differences between traditional media and online advertising. Despite not being able to measure ROI accurately you still want to know if your campaign is having an effect.

When analyzing a campaign, it helps to stand back and look at the big picture. A campaign will likely be composed of several discrete elements that work together to deliver a consistent message. The most important elements for reaching a new audience are: Organic search results, social media and PPCadvertising. You should strive to understand how these elements work together, and how your customers interact with your message. Online advertising is different from traditional print advertising primarily because a customer can find your message at any stage of their buying cycle.

What does that mean? Well, consider a printed ad in a newspaper. A potential customer will see it, and if they like the message presented they will remember it. Next time they visit a shop, they will be presented with several products to choose from, and perhaps they will select yours.

In online advertising, the process is often very different. A potential customer will see a reference to a product, and will want to know more about it. This does not have to be an advert in a traditional sense, it can be a reference in an online blog, or a Facebook post. Finding more information on the Internet is easy: you type your product name into Google’s search box and see what comes up. This process often repeats several times, as a potential customer refines their search with more specific terms. Each stage of this process is another chance to reinforce your marketing message! Unlike print media, your message can be repeated many times in different formats to reinforce its effects.

ORGANIC SEARCH

Let’s take a look at organic search results. Your business probably has a website, perhaps even an online store. If your site is optimised for SEO, it will appear higher in organic search listings for your preferred keywords. If your website appears on the first page of Google results you will get substantially more visits. By using analytics software installed on your website it is possible to track how many visitors you have each day. You can see how long they stay, what pages they visited and in the case of e-shops you can estimate the conversion rate. A certain percentage of visitors will end up buying from your store. Higher organic search rankings will increase the amount of visitors to your site, but not necessarily the conversion rate.

PAID SEARCH (PPC)

Pay per click advertising is pretty simple. There is a list of adverts that have a chance to appear for a given search. You can add your own adverts to the list, and if someone clicks on your ad you are charged a predetermined amount. These search results appear alongside the organic search results, but they are ranked independently. This form of advertising provides you with a method to attract people directly to your website. After running a PPC campaign for a month you will likely notice more new visitors coming to your site.

SOCIAL MEDIA (Facebook, Twitter and many others)

Social media are a very good opportunity to engage potential customers, and to retain existing ones. It is also a chance to convince an audience that your products or services are great! People often visit Facebook out of boredom; if your message is consistently entertaining then more people will end up seeing it. Getting more Facebook followers is always a good thing, but it’s harder to judge how much revenue this process generates. A potential customer may be aware of your offers for some time before deciding to purchase. Your Facebook followers often become repeat customers, although it’s hard to track exactly when this happens.

The same principles that make online advertising effective also make it difficult to measure effectiveness. The only real benchmark available is your long-term sales figures, although you can infer some patterns from your web analytics and facebook followers. You can also compare campaigns against each other to judge their effectiveness, but the usefulness of this data is limited. Instead of measuring ROI directly, it’s more viable to identify the separate parts of your campaign and how they work together. Analyze the separate components individually, and improve the ones that are not working as well as you’d like.

How do I plan my marketing?

Written by on February 14, 2012 in Blog - No Comments
seo cheltenham

To make marketing work, to make it work well and efficiently, you need a plan. Good return on investment is essential, the idea is to get more money back than you spend. So, how do you go about developing a marketing strategy?

Determine your Objectives

Having a realistic set of goals is the first step. You need to determine what you want to achieve, as precisely as possible. Are you aiming to get more customers or to increase the amount your existing customers spend? Do you want to focus on promoting your brand or your company image? Determining your objectives is important because it will let you determine how to proceed. In addition you need to estimate how much time and/or money you are going to invest to make this happen. Your time counts as an investment too!

Find your Targets

Once you know what you want to achieve with your marketing plan, the next step is finding the target audience. It helps to do some market research here, you want to know who will be interested in your products or services. Once again, the more information you have the better. If you know your target audience really well marketing becomes much easier, because you know what will grab their attention. Getting people’s attention is the hardest step, and the most effective way to get their attention is by using well-targeted advertising.

Plan of Action

You have an objective, and you have determined your target audience. Now, you need to plan your campaign! After having evaluated your target audience it should be clear which methods are more likely to work. If your target age group is 60+ then a social media campaign is unlikely to yield results. Focusing on social media will be more effective if your target age group is teenagers.

Reality Check

So, you have your plan, you have your target audience, and you have some idea on how to proceed. Now, you need to ask yourself, is this going to yield good return on investment? If you do not think that your plan will allow you to meet your goals, then you need to go back to step 1. If you do not think you will get good ROI with your marketing plan, then think of another plan! If you end up spending more money than you get back from it you might as well forget about the idea.

Implementation

However, if everything is looking good up to this point, if your ROI predictions look positive, then its time to proceed. When it comes to communicating with your customers, there is one message that stands out in business: Give people what they want, quickly, and without fuss. If your marketing effort gives the image of a company that delivers exactly that, a company that gives customers what they want without difficulties, your marketing will succeed.

How to Retain More Customers

Written by on February 10, 2012 in Blog - No Comments
seo cheltenham

Customer retention is extremely important for most businesses. Without repeat customers, it’s extremely difficult to grow your business. For many small enterprises, failing to retain customers spells disaster. Keeping more customers and encouraging them to return often requires a strategy. The correct approach to take will vary from one company to another, and picking the right solution is important.

This is a very good post, written by Ed Goodwin, about customer bonding and customer retention:

How to Retain More Customers

It covers customer tracking, customer analysis and some suggested strategies to keep your customers coming back.

Dealing with 404 errors

Written by on January 6, 2012 in Blog - No Comments
web design cheltenham

A 404 error occurs when someone requests a page that is not available on your site. The link to your page might be wrong, or perhaps the page has been moved. These errors can be particularly problematic when moving your site to a new domain. Spotting these errors is the first step. Google webmaster tools provide a handy link fo test your site for 404 errors, just click it and you should get a list of all the broken links on your site.

What do you do about these broken links? This depends on your site and on the importance of the page. If you have a large site, you may end up with thousands of these errors when you move domains. What’s more, more errors will creep in over time. You can, of course, use 301 redirects to fix them all, but that approach is not always practical.

  • You may have hundreds of errors to fix, that can be very time consuming.
  • Too many 301 redirects can slow your site down! Slow page loads will in turn affect your search engine rankings, an undesirable result.
  • The broken links could be providing very little value. Not all links are equally useful, sometimes its best to just leave them broken!

Google’s site-crawling algorithm will eventually disregard broken links and they won’t be indexed. This is why you can just leave 404 errors on your site: If the page is not important it will get removed from google’s indexing automatically, you don’t need to do anything. A 404 error will not affect your site’s performance, while a 301 redirect can slow it down.

Having said that, there are some pages that you definitely want to redirect. If your page is getting good links from other sites or indexing well, you definitely want to keep it. Incoming links are good to have, you want to keep them wherever possible. If your page is an obscure one which doesn’t get indexed, it may be best to let it 404.

How to format your Marketing Email (Part 2)

Written by on December 27, 2011 in Blog - No Comments
seo cheltenham

Carrying on from part one of this article, I will continue on the subject of marketing emails. Part one covered the subject line and the sender, part two will go into more detail and cover the actual content of your email. First, a warning. None of this is set in stone, what works for one company may not necessarily work for their competitor. There are, however, some things that should be avoided (unless you are really really sure it’s a good idea!).

Unexpected content

The content of your email should match your subscriber’s expectations. I cannot stress this strongly enough. If I sign up to a newsletter about pet health care, that does not mean I am interested in “20% pet food discount massive sale”. Similar, but not the same. If I did not ask to be informed about your pet food discounts there is a good chance I will view your company as spammers and unsubscribe from your newsletter, or simply mark it as junk.

Failed personalisation

Using custom fields in your email can be a good thing. More often, it’s completely unhelpful. Adding “Dear customer” to the start of your email might seem like a good idea, but most of the time it gives an impersonal feel to the email. “Dear customer, 15% off final offer” is even worse. The message looks like spam even before you put “Dear customer” on the front.

Getting too personal

Don’t put anything in an email that you would not say to your customers in a face-to face conversation. This is even more important if you products/services are quite personal in nature. Don’t alienate potential customers by pretending to be their friend, this strategy may work on a few people but will quickly alienate the rest of your customer base.

Misuse of segmentation

Segmentation, when used well, can be a very powerful tool. Unfortunately, it’s rarely used well. If you have access to detailed information about your customets, it’s possible to send tailor-made newsletters. This is usually done as a 2-part arrangement. First you get your customers to take part in a survey, so you can segment them into interest groups. You then use the results of this survey to send targeted marketing to a subset of your customer base. Don’t be tempted to guess! If someone has not taken your survey, if you don’t actually know what their preferences are, don’t try to sell them a subset of your merchandise.

Neverending Offers

You’ve probably seen these before… its a common strategy used in retail outlets. “Closing down sale” does not necessarily mean that the store is closing down. Some stores I could mention have been “closing down” for years. This approach is considerably less effective when applied to email marketing. If you keep bombarding people with the same offer, they will quickly learn to ignore it. If a high street retail store is having a “closing sale” you may not be aware that the same “sale” has been going on for the past 6 months. Perhaps you will be tempted to come inside and buy something before it’s “too late”. However, bombarding someone’s inbox with sale promotions will not have the same effect, its very easy to see when a retailer is trying to mislead you.

If you manage to avoid these common pitfalls, whatever remains is probably quite good. Good luck with your marketing plan!

Tweaking your Tweets

Written by on December 7, 2011 in Blog - No Comments
seo cheltenham

How can you get more traffic out of your tweets?

Many businesses use twitter as a promotional tool, to keep customers updated with recent developments. However, twitter can also be used to bring traffic to your site. The search volume on twitter is massive, the trick is in getting people to look at your tweets and then go further, to follow a link to your website. So, what do you need to know to use twitter as part of your online marketing strategy?

Hash tags

To reach a wide audience of people, using hash tags correctly is essential. Your followers will see your tweet anyway, but you also want other potential customers to see it. If you add a #vegan hashtag to your post, people following that hashtag will also see your tweet. Furthermore, people serching twitter for that hashtag will also be able to see it. Your tweet with #vegan will also be indexed by search engines for that result, which is also very good for you if you are marketing vegan products.
You don’t want to overdo this technique, twitter recommends no more than 3 hashtags per tweet and most of the time one is enough. Any more and your tweet will begin to look like spam, that discourages people from finding out more.

Keywords

Keywords are good to have, but you should not use too many of them at once. That is called keyword stuffing, a practice which is now mostly ineffective. Use only keywords that fit your tweet, and not too many of them! One or two is generally enough.

Hot topics

If there is a trending topic related to your site’s content, you can use that to your advantage. Hot topics can appear and develop very quickly, get a tweet out quickly if you spot a relevant one! If you can associate the trending topic directly with your site’s content, post a link to it. This can be avery good method to spread your content to a larger audience, potentially getting more customers.

In conclusion… keep your tweets short, current and use a hash tag. If the topic you are writing about happens to be trending, even better. If its not, dont’ worry. Use a hash tag to increase your audience and carry on tweeting!

Google Freshness update

Written by on November 25, 2011 in Blog, SEO - 3 Comments
seo cheltenham

The Google Freshness Update went live on the 3rd of November 2011. This change aims to push recently created content higher in the rankings. Not all types of searches will be affected, the main changes are to current events, breaking news, hot topics and product reviews.

Recent Events

For news, timing and relevancy to trending topics timing are important. When people search for news they often want the most recent information available. High-quality pages with frequent updates will now rank higher.

Regularly Occurring Events

Some events happen regularly, like elections and major sports events. Google will now prefer more recent results, so searching for “Olympics” will now display more results related to the most recent/upcoming Olympic event.

Frequently Updated Information

There is a class of searches for information that can change often, but is not necessarily a regular event. Product reviews are a good example of this: if you search for “digital camera” you would expect to find reviews of this year’s models.

How Does This Affect Brands?

The majority of brands should not be visibly affected by this update. If your SEO strategy focuses on generic terms like “garden design” or “postcards” this update will have very little effect on your ranking in google.

If your strategy focuses on key phrases that constantly have new content created for them, such as product reviews, you may be affected by this. When people search for a specific product, they often want to know more about it and generally prefer to get unbiased information from third-party reviews. Recent netbooks are a good example of this. If you search for “asus eee pc” (a recent netbook released by Asus) the first page will include recent reviews of the product.

A lot of online outlets already give their users the option to post reviews for their products, so why is this important? Well, consider the case where a retailer has a selection of good reviews for a certain product, and third-party sites write a lot of bad ones. When customers search for your product, you will not be able to keep all the bad reviews off the first page.

However, this update also presents another opportunity to raise awareness of your brand, simply by publishing news updates. Recent news will be prioritized over old news, so even topics not directly related to your business can bring in more traffic.

Registration fears and how to avoid them

Written by on November 11, 2011 in Blog - 1 Comment
seo cheltenham

Generally speaking, visitors to your site will not want to register. Why would they? It takes time and effort. Most people will have some idea of what registration involves, because they would have been prompted to register on other sites. Many websites want the benefits that come with registered clients, so more and more of them try to get you to sign up. Unfortunately, a bad registration form is easier to make than a good one. What does the average consumer think about online registration?

  • Registration is a complicated process, it will take me time to complete
  • I will have to provide a lot of information
  • My email inbox will fill with spam

Registration is complicated:

The word “registration” is associated with something that is complex, laborious, or time-consuming. Often, online forms do not behave as you would expect, fields that are required are not marked as such. Then there is the problem of intractable CAPTCHAs. Unfortunately, they are necessary to stop your site getting overwhelmed with bot spammers. But the CAPTCHA also presents a barrier in its own right. If you don’t guess the word correctly, you may have to retype some or all of your information, costing you more time.

How can you avoid this issue of seeming complexity? Well, for starters, you could check that your registration process is as simple as it could be. Are all the required fields marked as such? If the password has to be a certain length, is that explicitly stated? If the process involves creating a unique account name, is it possible to check whether it has already been taken?

If registration on your site is already quick and easy, look at ways to reassure people that this is the case. Instead of an imposing button called “register” You could replace it with a link that says “Sign up in under a minute!”. This is a much better way of inticing people, not only do you avoid the word “registration” and all its bad associations, you also inform your visitor how long the process will take. A minute is a minute, right? Its probably not going to be that complicated.

They want to know everything:

To complete a registration process, the bare minimum of information should be required. If you are sending out a newsletter, all you really need is a list of emails. Asking people to fill in their address, date of birth and other seemingly irrelevant pieces of information only puts people off. Many of them will say, “Why does this website want to know where I live? All I wanted was a newsletter…” and then proceed to leave.

How do you get people to give you their information? If you can avoid it, don’t ask for more information than you need! If you want more details for marketing purposes, it’s a good idea to compensate people for their time. In exchange for filling out a longer form, give them access to an offer or a discount. If you present the signup process in a positive light, as something that benefits both parties, more people will go for it.

Sign up for more spam!

Email marketing is a very effective way to sell stuff. It doesn’t cost the earth and it reaches a lot of people… So many in fact, that the technique is still effective despite its low conversion rate. How many times have you received e-mail offers, promotions or adverts that you were completely uninterested in? Perhaps you’ve even had to start a new e-mail account because your old one got filled with spam. Many online outlets are particularly guilty, since they always ask for an e-mail address in order to place an order, they tend to use that address for e-mail spam, whether you like it or not. They may even sell your details to third parties.

How can you avoid this particular barrier? Convince your customers that you are different. First of all, people should opt in for e-mail marketing, not opt out of it. Your signup form should have an option, “Send me your newsletter” and that option should be de-selected by default! Very important point. Don’t try to trick people into signing up, it does not benefit you or your customers. It is also good practice to state what the information will and will not be used for. If you have no intention of selling the customer’s personal data, then say so.

Conclusion

Registration forms represent a key point at which potential customers can be converted to paying customers. To maximise conversion rate, we should:

  • Make the registration form as short as possible. (Remove all but strictly necessary fields)
  • Not waste the user’s time by forcing them to re-enter data. (Use client-side validation)
  • Be honest and unambiguous in stating what we intend to do with their data. (Have a privacy policy)

Optimising your e-shop checkout

Written by on November 2, 2011 in Blog, SEO - No Comments
seo cheltenham

Checkouts are an essential part of any online retail system, and most of them are very similar. Unfortunately, that means that a lot of them also make the same mistakes. There are a few ways to organise your checkout, deciding which layout to use is very important. The retailer should focus on making the shopping process as simple as possible. With so many low-quality e-shops around, many people have come to associate online shopping with something complicated, even when it doesn’t have to be. If you take steps to reassure visitors that your shopping process is quick and easy, more potential customers will end up becoming actual customers.

So, what should your checkout look like? There are a few variants in common use, let’s have a look at them one by one.

Two choices

  • Register/Create Account (for new customers)
  • Login (for registered customers)

Registration is mandatory. You have to give your details away in order to buy something. Although this approach allows for agressive marketing to repeat customers, some visitors will see it as spam. Others will see it as a barrier, they view registration as something complicated, something to be avoided if possible. If you adopt compulsory registration, you may have a harder time convincing visitors to buy.

Optional Registration

  • Register/Create Account (for new customers)
  • Guest Checkout (for new customers who don’t want to register)
  • Login (for registered customers)

Optional registration caters to one-time-buyers. For example, people buying gifts don’t necessarily want to receive marketing emails about these products for the rest of their lives, so adding the option to skip registration saves their time (and yours in the long run).

Hidden Registration

  • Guest Checkout (for new customers)
  • Login (for registered customers)

Same as above, except the option to create an account is removed from the options and instead moved to the login page. Why is this a good idea? Well, two options is easier to consider than three. Simpler and easier. The best part is: no matter what option people click on, they end up in the right place. If they clicked login, they will be prompted to enter their details or register, and if they opted for the guest checkout they proceed straight to payment details.

Enter your email

  • Your Email adress (one option for all customers)

This layout forces the user to start the checkout process first, and then make decisions on how to proceed. After entering an email adress, previously registered customers can log in and proceed to checkout. If the email address is not recognised, they will be prompted to either register or proceed directly to the checkout. By removing choices at the start, the whole process is streamlined, there is no ambiguity about how to proceed.

Conclusion

Picking which layout to use is up to you, it depends on how much focus you want to place on new customers. Marketing to existing customers is a reliable source of sales, but forcing the issue is not necessarily a good idea.

  • The customers may not be buying your products for themselves.
  • They may be uncomfortable with giving out their private information to an untrusted company.
  • They may be short on time, and unwilling to complete your registration process.

Since the registration process DOES take time, you can offer incentives for online sales, for example by giving them access to discounts or special offers. This needs to be clearly labelled! “Register now to receive a wide range of discounts!” may get more clicks than just “Register”.

Integrated Communication For The Holiday Season

Written by on October 24, 2011 in Blog - No Comments
seo cheltenham

The Christmas season is an important time for retailers. With sales increasing, online stores are also faced with increasing competition.

Providing something unique to your brand is a very good strategy. If you have something no-one else offers, you’re more likely to get new customers, and more likely to see previous customers returning. As an online retailer, opt-in campaigns are an important part of your marketing. This commonly includes e-mail, SMS notifications and social media (Twitter/Facebook) campaigns among other methods.

E-mail is the most important of these, but to use it effectively requires a targeted list of recipients. The more data you have in this area the better. If you have a segment of your customer base that prefers certain products, it may be worthwhile to market to them directly. For example, a group that buys new shoes regularly should be sent promotional email for shoes. This offer should be time-limited to the holiday season, the time when you expect to get an increase in sales.

The more relevant your promotions, the more likely they are to drive sales. Integrating your email campaign with other forms of advertising will also increase its effectiveness. Combining e-mail, SMS and social updates into one unified message can be extremely effective when aimed at the right target audience.

Merry Christmas Marketing!

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