Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

Online marketing, like many other things in life, has several levels of, um… let’s call it “luxury”, for lack of a better word. You go from your basic model online marketing campaign (which is often someone who simply knows you have to edit some meta tags) all the way through to the most luxurious, no-holds-barred, damn-the-torpedoes, throw-everything-at-it-regardless-of-cost marketing that has everything you need (plus a lot of stuff you don’t).

The question is… what kind of marketing campaign is right for you?

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Your competition should play an important role in your research before you move forward with any SEO, PPC, or online marketing campaign. In fact, it’s generally a good idea to do a fair amount of competitive research before you build a website or even decide what industry or niche to focus your efforts on.

Competitor knowledge isn’t the most important aspect of building a successful online business. You still have to be a good manager, know your product or service, and be able to sell, sell, sell! But, gaining competitive knowledge early on can help you guide your online marketing efforts into the most effective direction.

Do You Know What I Know?

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I’ve started powering through David Szetela and Joe Kerschbaum’s new PPC book called Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day and I really like this PDF they made available online to their readers.  Although it’s about classified ads, you can pull direct correlations to apply to your PPC text ads when advertising on search engines.  Really, search engine results pages (SERPs) are just like classified ads except the page is digital instead of paper.

Here are some of the highlights that I personally took away –

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The keyword phrases to use for your PPC account aren’t always obvious.  A key to great ROI and customer loyalty is to have customers think that you’re the only viable solution to their problem at a given time.  Therefore, the challenge in keyword research is not coming up with keywords.  That’s the easy part.  You just scan the website and use the product names and there you go…a keyword list.

The challenge is in exploiting markets that become successful that competitors may not have thought of.  That’s why it’s important to always be practicing keyword discovery and exploring phrases that might work well by always testing.

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SEO can be a boring, monotonous job. But, it can also be an exciting detective trail of discovery. The hardest SEO jobs are those that are for websites that are already performing strongly and you’re trying to eek out slightly better results. The fun one’s are those that have lots of problems, which even the smallest SEO and analytic edits produce huge changes in the results.

Unfortunately, not all sites are easy to get results for regardless of how much improvement is necessary. Continuing on my theme of using traditional clichés to make SEO points, I hereby provide you with some clichés that will help you be a better SEO.

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If you take your PPC campaigns seriously (why wouldn’t you?), you’re always testing.  Always.  It’s the only way to accomplish long-term growth and gain insights that will translate into all of your other marketing channels.  One problem that has been inherent since the beginning of PPC is the inability to do true A/B split-testing with variables like keywords, bids, ad text, ad groups, match types, dynamic keyword insertion, etc.

Yes, you could test them, but only by comparing metrics from different time periods (except for ads).  For example, you’d have to run ads at a certain bid price for a while, change it, and run them at the new bid price for a while.  Then, you’d have to compare the results from different time periods.  The problem? When you would compare the results, you would be likely to assume the differences in those key metrics to be the result of the changes.  But fluctuations in demand, shifts in competitor tactics, and uncontrollable circumstances (special events, etc.) can complicate things.

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When it comes to getting your visitors to take action, whether that be a sale, download, request, or call, it’s your content that is going to either make it happen or leave people blowing in the wind like a sagebrush through a ghost town. If there is anything that all the years of marketing research has proven it’s that people need to be told what to do if you expect them to do anything at all.

Think about it. If you’re not telling your visitors what to do next, how can you expect them to do it? Sure, they can guess, make assumptions or “figure it out on their own”. But, for anybody that’s doing anything new, directions are a God send.

I recently spent 2 hours putting together a desk that should have taken me 20 minutes. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m generally more destructive than constructive when it comes to these kinds of things, but with a little help (a.k.a. reading directions), I can usually get the job done. But, on this particular desk, the directions actually didn’t help. Not even a little.

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Google’s Display Network has two types of targeting options.  The first, automatic placements, we’ve talked about already.  This is where you create keyword-themed ad groups and Google makes your ads eligible to appear on web pages whose content theme matches the theme of the keywords in your ad group.  Now, we’ll talk about the second – managed placements.

This type of campaign is useful for two purposes:

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So, you’ve come to realize that there’s a whole Display Network out there through Google AdWords that, if utilized correctly, will take your online business to new heights.  But, you’ve also realized that’s a big “if utilized correctly.”  You may have been burned by the Display Network before (formerly called the Content Network).  Maybe you just jumped right into AdWords because you knew you wanted more traffic for your site.  You heard how easy it was to get it by whipping up a few keywords that were relevant to what you were offering and by writing a few ads to entice the searchers to your site.  Then, since you were never taught that the Search and Display networks operate by completely different rules, you went ahead and turned them both on and started getting more traffic.

Man, getting traffic can be so easy…. and dangerous to your bottom line.  The truth is, there is an art and science to getting traffic just like any other vocation.  It takes skill and knowledge to be successful.  So, when it comes to utilizing the Display Network, you need to gather the knowledge that is going to enable you to use the tool correctly to accomplish your goals.

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First, we took a look at types of ads that you can test and then we look at how to analyze the results of your tests and set up new ones.  But, one more thing we must know is when to consider a test complete and ready to be analyzed. If you consider a test complete before you have statistically significant results that prove with great confidence that what you observe is actually true, you may find yourself making conclusions that simply are not.  Therefore, you need to know when you have enough data for this to be the case.

You’ve got two options -

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