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May 15th, 2012
After many years of Internet marketing hype, latest data suggests that e-mail marketing is still the top earner for many businesses. It’s not a surprising statistic really, especially when it comes to businesses that follow the e-mail marketing protocols of double opt-ins and easy opt-outs. Most e-mail recipients are viewing e-mails because they want too – they are already interested in the business and the products they sell.
What’s often hidden in these statistics is how a business comes by their e-mail marketing list. Search marketing and social media marketing both play a big role in helping businesses build their e-mail lists. Potential customers have to find your site somehow, they don’t just magically appear in an e-mail list. Just as importantly, your business reputation, prices, and your web site in general all help to convince visitors to then sign up for your e-mails.
Having a well planned coordinated marketing approach will pay dividends. Rating well in search results (both organic and paid), and having an effective social media marketing plan will help to deliver potential customers to your door. You then need to sell them on the idea of signing up for a regular newsletter. Your newsletter (or marketing material), then needs to be designed to engage readers and to bring them back to your website (or shopfront) to spend their money.
The mistake many businesses make is to target sales and nothing else. Often, visitors to your site are still in the ‘looking’ stage of a purchase. Rather than targeting a sale all of the time, consider changing some of your marketing activities to building an e-mail marketing list. That list will reward you many times over, and keep your customers coming back for more. If you can’t sell, don’t lose them, convert them to readers of your e-mail marketing material – more people spend from an e-mail than they do from either search or social.
Tags: search marketing, social media marketing
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | 7 Comments »
May 13th, 2012
One of the biggest benefits to social media marketing is the low cost. At least, it’s one form of marketing that doesn’t need big dollars thrown at it. This really does level the playing field between big business and small business. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that small businesses sometimes have a clear advantage over larger businesses. How so?
The bigger the business, the more hands off an owner tends to be. Rather than engaging in social media marketing themselves, they are more likely to delegate this role to someone else – often the person responsible for computer maintenance or SEO. For smaller businesses, the owner can become personally involved in social media marketing – this becomes marketing from the soul rather than marketing from the monthly pay check.
Although it doesn’t take a lot of money to run a successful social media marketing campaign, big business has shown that you can buy support – that doesn’t always equate to brand loyalty – give me a decent freebie and I’ll sign up, it doesn’t mean I’ll ever buy your product – and there are tens of thousands who think the same.
If you can personally attract, engage and interact with both your existing and potential customers, you’ll find they’ll feel far more comfortable dealing with you. If you can help potential customers with their research and decision making processes, they’ll be ten times more likely to make an online purchase with you once they arrive on your website. In most cases, their decision has been made before they click the link to shop with you – that’s the power of social media marketing – and it’s not always the kind of relationship customers receive from big business!
Tags: social media marketing
Posted in Social Media | 8 Comments »
May 12th, 2012
Blogging can be hard work, especially when it comes to delivering good quality content on a regular basis. The key phrases there are “quality content” and “regular basis.” We’ll leave it up to you to decide on the timing of your content. Some small business blog writers find that two or three times a week is sufficient. There are others who publish two or three times a day. If you aim for daily, you’ll at least have the search engine visiting your site daily, and we know that fresh is best if you have the quality.
The main issue then is quality content. Quality can be looked at in several different ways, chiefly in style (language, spelling, grammar and layout), topic, and voice. We’ll assume you have a reasonable education and that you use a spellchecker when writing. Voice is you – the way you approach a subject, the tone you take. For most small business owners, the final ingredient, topic, is often the real stumbling block (and you’re not alone there). How many times have you sat down and wondered what you should be writing about today. Some call this writers block, however, the reality is different. If you have covered your business inside out in previous posts, you may feel you have covered every base.
I can tell you now, you won’t have, however, that won’t stop your “writers block.” There is an answer, and you’ll find it through the various social media channels. Search those channels using some of your keywords. You’ll be surprised with the results. Look for questions, issues that are affecting people, or news. Use that as the inspiration to create new content. Where possible, be different, take a new angle to that already used, then your content will stand out from the crowd on a topic that is on people’s mind. Writers block solved.
Tags: content creation, Social Media, writers block
Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 5 Comments »
May 10th, 2012
When monitoring a pay per click advertising campaign there are several sets of numbers that are important. Click through rates (CTR) are one area that many advertisers concentrate on with the theory being the more visitors you receive to a site, the more opportunities their are for sales. However, your click through rate needs to be seen as a comparison to several other sets of data, in particular conversion rates and costs per click. Your campaign may be receiving a thousand clicks per day, and the cost may be as low as a dollar a click, however, if you are only converting at 1% with a profit per sale of $10, you’re actually losing $900 per day.
On their own, click through rates are a false statistic at the end of the day. You are much better off with lower click through rates if they are targeting better keywords and achieving higher conversion rates. Away from the statistics, one problem that many advertisers fail to deal with is the relationship between their advertisement and the landing page.
If your PPC ad unit promotes widgets, yet your landing page is dedicated to red widgets, then you are going to lose a lot of customers. Your ad unit has failed to deliver. If advertise widgets, then you need a landing page dedicated to widgets, not just red widgets. If you only sell red widgets, then your ad should specify red widgets.
By being more precise with your ad unit, you will see a big drop in the number of click throughs. However, people who do click through will do because, in the example given, they are interested in red widgets. If your landing page is well designed, you should see a considerable change in your conversion rates for that ad unit as well. The end result, less traffic, possible at a higher cost per click, but with a much improved conversion rate. If you marketing plan is costed effectively, you should be in the black and making a reasonable profit as well. PPC for small business is not about generating as much traffic as possible, it is all about generating quality targeted traffic that converts/
Tags: click through rates, conversion rates, cost-per-click, Pay Per Click
Posted in PPC for Small Business | 2 Comments »
May 9th, 2012
The new Facebook fan page setup, while looking good, has also made it easier for businesses to keep a watch on their competitors. When visiting a fan page, there is a box that has the number of “Likes” noted. If you click on that box, you will gain an insight into a raft of analytics related to that page. What can you learn? Do any of these numbers give you any competitive advantage?
- The number of people who are talking about this particular fan page
- The trends related to new Likes and the number of people talking about that fan page
- Popular age groups, cities, and even the most popular week and the most visited week.
If you want to look around a little more, you can see what issues your competitors considers to be important. You can create sticky content, that is, a post that is pinned to the top. You can also ‘star’ important posts. These become prominent spanning columns on the fan page. Finally, you can check to see how they are using their custom tabs.
We don’t recommend copying what your competitors are doing. What works for them may not work at all for you. However, knowing how they do things, what they think is important, and what their fans like, can help you to streamline and make better use of your own content. Knowing where your competition is in the online marketplace is important if you want to succeed. Social media has made a lot of this knowledge easy to collect – you just need to review it and make some sense of it for your own business.
Tags: analytics, competitive intelligence, facebook, Social Media
Posted in Tools for Small Business | 4 Comments »
May 8th, 2012
The Panda and Penguin Google updates have certainly spooked a lot of people. The slightest move in website traffic volume is now being blamed on either one (or both) of these updates, and whilst significant drops in traffic are a worrying sign, a closer inspection sometimes shows the opposite to be true. I recently looked a website that had seen a 50% drop in traffic, and that drop coincided with the Google Penguin update.
Google Analytics is a great tool when used effectively. Using this tool, I could drill down into the various statistics for the both the day before the Penguin update, and for the day after when there was a significant drop in traffic. What I found to be interesting was that Google’s Webmaster Tools showed there was not a significant change in the average search rankings for the targeted keywords. So why the huge drop in traffic? Surely people didn’t suddenly stop using those search terms?
In this case, the drop in traffic came from two sectors, mobile, and Europe. For some reason this website had been ranking highly in search results in Europe. It was also ranking highly in mobile search. Neither of these two sectors were important to this business. They were not geared to provide a service to European customers, and being net based business, mobile traffic had tiny 0.01% conversion rate, so the loss of that traffic wasn’t harming the business.
Whilst there was a distinct drop in traffic numbers to this site, the number of sales were the same both pre and post Penguin. In fact, the post Penguin conversion rate as a number almost doubled – and so it should, half the traffic for the same volume of sales. When looking at traffic numbers from search results, it’s important to dig to find out exactly where you have lost traffic. Is it one page, is it site wide, is specific to a region or connection method?
If this business had kept a closer eye on their search analytics, the fact that almost a third of traffic was coming from Europe may have opened doors for new business. That window has closed now, however, they can look at much improved conversion rates.
Tags: mobile search, search rankings, search results
Posted in SEO for Small Business, Tracking & Analytics | 4 Comments »
May 7th, 2012
You need killer content to survive! I bet you have read that a hundred times. What exactly is killer content? If you can create content that catches the attention of the masses to the point that it is shared, then you’ve produced killer content. That content could text based, videos, images, or the latest fad, an infographic. So why publish killer content? Here are five reasons to consider:
- Social - killer content will be shared and in so doing, will help to build the number of people following you.
- Branding – the more often your content is viewed, the more it exposes your brand.
- Sales – the more visitors you receive to your website, the greater the opportunity to build sales.
- SEO - killer content gets shared, and the more often it is shared, the more inbound links you are likely to receive.
- Trust – when your content is shared, it’s similar to a recommendation. This can help to build your reputation and that all important trust factor.
You don’t need to publish killer content everyday. Timing is important – as one piece of killer content starts to wane in popularity, that’s when you publish the next piece. This keeps your business and your brand in front of people’s eyes. It also has people talking about you for an extended period of time.
Creating killer content isn’t always easy and it should be created as part of your overall online marketing plan. If you have the marketing dollars, you can always outsource your contents creation. Most businesses outsource video productions, and it makes sense to do the same if you have an idea for an infographic. There’s no reason why you can’t have text based content outsourced as well if you don’t feel confident in your own writing skills. Produce that killer content and you business will reap huge rewards.
Tags: killer content, SEO
Posted in PR for Small Business | 7 Comments »
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