Top 5 PPC Pitfalls

I just read a great article on Pay Per Click in the Multichannel Merchant about the top 5 things marketers get wrong in PPC campaigns… thought you would find this interesting – especially if you attended our Google AdWords Webinar.  If you missed this Webinar, just view our on-demand library to get the basics on starting your own PPC campaign. 

Check-out these 5 pitfalls to help you to…

• drive qualified prospects to your site
• improve click-through rates
• be more strategic about your bidding
• lower your costs-per-click

Triggered Communications Webinar & 5 Tips for Success

I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Triggered Communications is a great way to increase your email marketing’s timeliness, relevancy and ROI.   To help get you started, we’re hosting a Webinar on April 15, 2010 at 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. EST — “How to Use Event Triggered Communications to Increase Email Relevancy, Response and Sales.”

We’ll show you how easy it is to set-up behaviorally triggered email messages that deliver the right message to the right subscriber at the exact moment he or she is most engaged and likely to respond using Listrak’s automated event triggered messaging solution.

You will learn how to:

- Add a powerful, automated email responder system to your integrated marketing mix

- Trigger specific email responses according to your customer’s behaviors or targeted events

- Have one-on-one conversations with each of your customers and prospects

- Increase your email’s relevancy, open rates and your sales

Participation in this webinar is free, but space is limited. So, reserve your seat today.

While we’re putting the finishing touches on our webinar, here are five tips from Target Marketing Magazine for Triggered Communications success.

• Thoughtfully defining your triggers – this is the heart of your program
• Prepare your sales team to handle these leads – without making customers feel like “they’re being stalked.”  You want to your customer to be loyal to your brand and feel, “Hey, this company really gets me and understands my needs.”  That’s a big difference from a creepy, “I’m-being-watched feeling!”
• Put contact frequency in your process so you don’t bug your best customer and burn-out your sales team
• Continually improve your triggered-based program using feedback from your best sales people

I’m excited about what Triggered Communications can do to grow our clients’ businesses and I’m looking forward to meeting you online on April 15 for the Webinar!  I hope you can join us!

All Aboard the SEM Bandwagon!

A recent Forrester study shows what all of us already know.  Marketers will continue to shift dollars from traditional media and traditional direct marketing to online direct marketing. 

I like Target Marketing Magazine’s research summary overviewing the growth factors in SEM, SEO, online advertising (a.k.a., Pay-Per-Click) and Email Marketing which are among the listed 16 online marketing trends.

More than 80% of marketers are using paid search and SEO and plan to expand search into more segments. As consumers search more online, Google’s AdWord inventory continues to grow.  All music to marketers’ ears as you expand your paid search and SEO efforts. 

Online advertising, “performance-based” media buys and integrated email marketing are also slated for substantial growth through 2014.

Think “Leads,” Not “Web Site Visitors”

We’re in the process of updating our Web site (well, when aren’t we in the process of updating or optimizing our Web site?) and maybe many of you are doing same right now. Here’s some advice to make sure you’re getting the most out of your Web site: Stop thinking in terms of VISITORS. Think in terms of LEADS.

What’s the Difference? As marketers, we can get into a rut with our buzz words and even use some words interchangeably. This can inadvertently affect our strategies.

For example, you’re going to tackle your Web site very differently if you’re thinking about attracting qualified leads and how to manage those leads versus trying to get the most possible “hits” to your site.

More Leads, Better Qualified, Now What? Well, if you were opening a storefront, you would make sure that everything was organized and setup properly before flipping-on the “open” sign. The same is true for your Web site. You need to make sure that you’re ready to handle those online leads once they’re in your “door.” Make sure your sales funnel structure is ready to handle the leads properly – or you can loose that prospect forever.

Also, I can’t say it enough – INTEGRATION. To get the most out of your Web site and online marketing, you need to integrate across all of the channels that touch your customer – both online and offline.

Tips & Tactics for Launching a Google AdWord Campaign

• How to use online paid search to generate qualified sales leads
• How you can :

                 –         Target geographically
                 –         Control your budget
                 –         Qualify Website traffic
                 –         Pause, resume and edit your campaign anytime

• Tricks for choosing the right keywords, ad text and URLs
• How to track your traffic and ROI
• How to put it all together and ensure success                

ROI-based Search

Here’s a DMNews article about setting-up a paid search budget based on profitability.  I found it interesting for two reasons.  1)  We just broadcasted a webinar on paid search and discussed budget setup and controls and 2) We just happen to be strategizing on how to expand our own marketing success in paid search from one area of our company to other areas – all, of course, while keeping profitability in mind.

It struck me that the author overlooked some important points to keep in mind when setting-up a profitable paid search budget.

In many cases – including ICS’s – the company has a diverse product / service mix.  So when thinking about what to spend on key paid search terms, don’t just look at the price tag of the search term and the profit margin of the product / service you’re marketing.  Consider search terms that may provide cross-over sales opportunities as well.

Also, ask yourself if you’re using the best possible search term that would provide the highest quality sales leads at the best price… and if you can get some cross-over marketing into other areas of your products and services, then even better.

Chances are there are some lesser cost (and higher sales value) alternatives to that high price search term that could blow your budget’s profitability.

And don’t forget to keep a close eye on your paid search program.  Don’t just set it and forget it.

The great thing is… if your initial keyword selection isn’t giving you the results you thought it would, then you can always adjust your program immediately based on what your response data is telling you.

http://www.dmnews.com/Set-your-search-budget-to-be-based-on-its-profitability/article/139312/

The Importance of Developing Handraisers for your Business

So few companies fully understand and leverage the power of developing “handraisers”.  In our world, this is someone who is interested in your company’s product, but not ready to purchase your products or services at this time.  It applies to just about every business segment and industry.

I am sure you can relate this to your every day shopping experiences.  You are shopping at a store or online for something you are looking for.   Through your shopping experience you are exposed to the product or service, but you are just not ready to pull the trigger at this time.  Possibly you want to shop around a bit, or receive additional details on the items you are looking at.  While we tend to think retail, it could be any thing from a new car, to a charitable cause, to a service you need for your business. 

If you haven’t developed a Handraiser channel for your business, you really need to make it a priority.  It is typically not expensive, and it will provide you access to a very productive prospect segment.  We typically see a handraiser Channel converting to customers a 5 to 15 times the best targeted competitive prospects.  Often, they will even outperform your current customers when soliciting new business.

Where do you get started?  Typically business owners will provide an opportunity within their website or retail location for prospects/shoppers to receive more information or to stay in touch with the company.  This can be as simple as a sign up for a newsletter or an opportunity to receive “special value offers” from the company. 

To fully maximize the potential of the Handraiser channel, every prospect / shopper touchpoint should provide an invitation to easily engage in this communication.   Examples of these might include:

• A link on your website that offers prospects an avenue to stay in touch
• Point of Sale within your storefront that invites shoppers to sign up for special offers
• Reference in your marketing efforts (newletter, mass media, targeted media) to go to a landing page to sign up for ongoing special values

The Email channel is an excellent avenue to communicate with this audience … taking advantage of the low cost and delivery speed of the medium.  

Have you developed a Handraiser channel for your Business?  While many businesses have integrated these systems as a part of the Lead Management process, still the majority of businesses have not.  If you are one of these organizations, you are missing out on a powerful and inexpensive way to develop new customers.

Offline and Online integration — Little things make a big difference!

This week, I came across an article from JupiterResearch talking about online and offline integration efforts that I thought was pretty strong.  We have been talking about marketing integration for nearly two decades … but now we have more channels to integrate than ever before.

Possibly you have heard the statistic:  “An iProspect’s 2007 study ‘Offline influence on Online Search Behavior Study’ found that 67% of online users were driven to perform a search as a result of an offline marketing message … And 39% of those offline-influenced searchers ultimately made a purchase.

These statistics make a lot of sense to me, but the sad point of the article was that nearly half (45%) of search engine marketers still do not integrate their online and offline efforts. All kinds of reasons came up as to why.  The top reasons were:

• They don’t advertise in offline channels
• Lack the budget
• Lack the resources
• Don’t know better
• Have separate people managing offline efforts … and they are not synchronized with online
• Just don’t see the benefit of integration

In my opinion, a big part of the issue is that while online marketers understand their medium, they really don’t understand the overall disciplines that drive marketing and consumer behavior.   With the online mediums growing so quickly, many have jumped in without fully understanding how to optimize the overall marketing dollars spent.

It not necessarily big things that involve huge investments.  Look at some of these stats:

• 76% of offline offers could not be acted upon online
• 74% of offline keywords were not used online
• 66% did not use the same images and videos offline as online
• 60% did not include their company slogan / tagline  or even their product or service name prominently online

I am sure the economic challenges of 2009 will force some reevaluation in this area.   From my perspective, this is some pretty basic “marketing blocking and tackling”.  While I am happy that we are addressing these key issues with our clients, more education and awareness is needed to connect the best practice results and disciplines with the average company’s marketing efforts.

Questions to Get Your Paid Search Campaign Started Right

I’ve run into a number of clients who really don’t understand where to start when it comes to generating targeted leads through paid search.   The more I thought about it, I decided it would be helpful to provide some guidelines for clients to gain a basic understanding of things you need to think about to run a successful online lead generation campaign. 

I asked Joe Ford, our strategic partner from NetVantage Marketing, to pull together a few of the basic things you need to think about.  He actually came up with several items for you to evaluate.  Here are Joe’s thoughts:

Like any marketing initiative, it is always important that your online marketing campaign get off to a good start. The pre-launch work that goes into a campaign can pay large dividends, and it can also save a lot money and headaches in the long run.

The following is a set of questions that can serve as a checklist when you’re looking to get a paid search campaign off the ground.  These are broad questions, in many cases you will want to dig deeper to properly investigate the value points of each area depending on the campaign objectives. You should be getting asked similar questions by your online marketing firm, or asking yourself these questions if managing your campaigns in-house.

1. What is the overall background and mission of the company?

2. What are the goals of your online campaign in relation to:

a. Brand positioning

b. Building awareness

c. Increasing leads

d. Increasing revenue via direct sales/ecommerce

e. Are there any offline/traditional campaign efforts that should be coordinated with the paid search campaign?

3. Has there been past work done in the online marketing arena?  If so, what were the metrics for success, and is there data that we can use to investigate?

4. Has there been web analytics in place to detail the performance of the current website?

5. How long has the website been in its current state? If there has been current changes, was the results tracked through web analytics?

6. Is there a greater emphasis on certain products or services than  others? Should we be marketing and driving traffic to certain products and services that are better sellers or represent higher margin?

7. What is the target audience profile, and what are the different personas throughout the buying cycle (this can have a profound effect on keyword selection)?  Are there any new audiences that we are trying to target with this campaign?

8. Either from current web traffic reports, or from a qualitative business standpoint, what are the keywords that your target audiences are utilizing to find your site?

9. What are the initial keywords that you feel you want to be ranked highly on for your business?

10. Are there any online channels that you deem necessary to be placed on?

11. What is the testing strategy?  What variables will be evaluated, and what is the cause/effect frequency that you or your firm has in place.  (This will be especially important early on in your campaign)

These examples represent a basic foundation of questions to gain the right information to form a strong campaign that hits target audiences and meets your online marketing goals. As you can see, there is a combination of qualitative and quantitative information that needs to be gathered. Keep in mind that these initiatives should be treated with the same processes and standards as any marketing campaign you conduct.

As you can imagine, starting a pay per click campaign without answering these above questions can lead to major trouble and a lot of reactive work post campaign launch.  It is important that this foundation is created as comprehensively as possible.  This will allow your testing platform and refinement strategy to have the best chance for success!

Where do you go to find information on a business?

We have had some discussion around the office recently on where people go today when they want to find a particular business or business product?  It use to be that our only option was to pull out the “Yellow Pages”.  Obviously today, the Internet has changed our world in this area … but, how many people are really using the Internet instead of the Yellow Pages?

Well, my informal poll is really inconclusive.  Some still use Yellow Pages, some exclusively use the Internet and some use a mix of both depending on what their need is.   I searched the Internet for some more statistical backing in this area.  The reports I found were a little dated and one can only believe that today’s stats would point to an even greater share of consumers using the Internet:

•  –In June 2007, comScore Networks reported that 60% of local consumers now go online to search for local businesses, as opposed to 33% that go first to the printed Yellow Pages.
• –Almost 40% of local shoppers say that a presence on the Internet – or lack of presence – will affect their decision about who they do business with. [Source: Web.com, 2007]
• Nearly 137 billion searches were conducted at the five U.S. core search engines in 2008, representing an increase of
  21 % versus the previous year.  [Source: comScore Networks,  2009]
• Search query growth was driven largely by an increase in searches per searcher, which rose 16% from the previous year, while number of unique searchers grew 6% .   [Source: comScore Networks,  2009]
• Google Sites, which generated nearly 85 billion searches in 2008, accounted for nearly 90 percent of the total growth in
  search query volume during the year.  [Source: comScore Networks,  2009]

Clearly, every business needs to think through how they establish their electronic presence … as it is an increasing part of every company’s marketing efforts.

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