Why do companies invest in web marketing? The internet is becoming more and more ingrained in our daily lives, its so convenient! You can usually find what you are looking for very quickly, sometimes in seconds. If you want to find the nearest pub to you, an emergency plumber or a good deal on airplane tickets, the internet has the information you need. You dont have to be at home to access it, many people have phones that can connect to the internet and search for what they need from anywhere.

This section of our blog will look at the most important things you need to consider when marketing on the web. We will show you how to reach new customers more effectively, and help you keep in touch with existing ones. If you want your business to get noticed, perhaps we can help.

More and more people are searching for stuff online, in preference to other methods. So if your business is easy to find, you will get more customers. If you are difficult to find, then you will be overtaken by those who are more accessible. Convenience plays a very important part in this: nobody wants to spend a long time looking for information.

Meeting Business Needs with your Website

Does your business have a website? If you are a startup and you havent set one up yet, you should look into setting one up at the earliest opportunity. Most established businesses have an online presence, even local tradesmen are listed in online directories so they can get more business. If you have a website already… is it doing what you want it to? A business will usually set up a website with a view to getting more business out of it. However, some approaches are more effective than others. If you want to evaluate the effectiveness of your website, first you should look at your web stats. Most professional websites come with a data evaluation package, something that tells you how many people visited your site recently. That gives you some idea of how many people looked at your website, but it doesnt give the whole picture. Some of the visitors would have ended up on your website by accident, when they were actually looking for something else.

Search Engines & Keywords: Where to start

The next place to look is usually with search engines. They tend to be the first port of call if people are looking for information, so being easy to find is very important. More and more searches are related to location, and being ranked high for local search criteria is a lot easier than achieving national rankings. For example: Its easier to get to the number one ranking for “restaurant in Bude” compared to “restaurant”. Since the Bude search is local, there are less results to choose from. Restaurants that are not in bude will have a lower rank. Identifying the local search terms you want to rank highly on is key to your marketing strategy. In some cases the decision is obvious, in most cases a business will want to have a high ranking for multiple criteria. For example, a plumber in durham may want to rank highly for “fitted bathrooms in durham” as well as “plumber in durham”. Most businesses provide more than one type of service or product, if you know what people are likely to search for advertising becomes more effective.

What do people search for?

Finding out how many people search for your criteria is very easy, Google stores a lot of data on past searches. They provide a handy keyword tool to search and filter the data, so finding out how many people search for “plumber in durham” is really easy. It pays to do some research at this point, and find out what combinations of words people would use to search for your services.

Does your website come up at the top of the list? If it doesnt, you could be getting a lot more business out of your web presence. This is where SEO (or search engine optimisation) comes in. Once you know what keywords you want to focus on, you can start promoting your business. You can insure that your website ranks highly for all the important search terms, and increase the amount of business that you get out of it. There are various techniques to accomplish this, I intend to cover them in detail at a later date.

Organic Search

A Google search will result in the main ‘organic’ results that the search engine deems most relevant, and a set of paid, targeted advertisments. Sites listed near the top of the organic results will receive the lion’s share of clicks, and getting your site there will be the focus of any competent SEO agency.

How is it done? We’ll cover that in future posts, but it boils down to:

1. Keyword spam – include your search phrases in your content often
   
2. Moderation – not too often! Abusing your chosen search term can hurt your rankings and content readability
   
3. Linkbuilding - Google will take you more seriously if other websites link to yours
   

For example: when someone searches for ‘hotels in London’ they will see a list of websites related to hotels and London. There are quite a few hotels in London, so Google tries to show the most relevant and popular at the top. Hotels that appear at the top of the list will see more visitors. In fact, many people only click on the top link, and if it’s relevant they look no further. This chart shows the proportion of clicks each of the top results receives.

This graph is based on Webmaster Tools data across 2700 keywords. If you’re not sure what all these terms mean, dont worry. There is only one important conclusion: The websites at the top of the search list will get more customers. If you are not on the first page of results for a quiery, you will probably get overlooked. Hopefully this illustrates why organic search results are important. So, how can you improve your ranking?

The easiest thing to start with is your site. Does it have enough information on it? Are the headings relevant to your search criteria? What about the links and images, do they all have appropriate tags?
I could go into the specific techniques that website designers use to make your site more transparrent, but its not the subject I want to discuss. If you have a professional website, you probably have most of these covered already.

Headings

The most important thing to check are headings. Search engines place a high priority on title text, so if you want to be found for searches related to “chairs” you should have a title somewhere on your website that says “chairs”. If you have a small section of content about chairs as well, even better. You often dont need to rework your whole website to improve rankings, small targeted changes can also bring immediate benefits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

First Impressions count

When an email arrives in someone’s inbox, initially they only see two things: the sender’s name and the subject line. Recent studies have shown that personalised emails are more likely to be opened. So, when sending out your newsletter, mark the sender as a person rather than a company. So, instead of using marketing@companyname.com use the CEO’s name, or the name of another employee.

The content of your subject line is even more important: simple rewording can have a significant effect. The subject line should be clear, straightforward, and it should avoid looking like an advertisement at all costs. If possible, the subject line should describe the content of your Email. This may seem like a very obvious statement, but many marketers try to form the subject line into a sales message. Book now for a 10% discount! That makes the message look like spam, and the open rates suffer as a result. Mailchimp have published
a handy list of the best and worst email subject lines.

* Study only included campaigns sent to at least 100 recipients.

You’ll notice the “successful” subject lines avoid selling anything. They merely describe the content and give the company name. This doesnt necessarily mean that you should avoid creative titles. Creative titles that look like sales messages are the ones to avoid.

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!

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.