Top 10 Steps To 10x Your Online Marketing Effectiveness
With so many options, reasons and possible outcomes available to you when trying to market your business online, real marketing effectiveness sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. Here is a quick guide on how to keep your head on straight ad avoid pitfalls and distractions. In times like these, avoiding even one pitfall can be the difference between profit and loss.
First off, what is marketing effectiveness?
I define it as the ability for your marketing to consistently, scalably and cost effectively drive your organizational success. Given the 3 major business models online, E Commerce, Lead Generation and Custom Publishing, and to keep things simple, we will just refer to more, better, cost effective Leads, Sales and Subscribers.
That’s more volume, better quality and cost effective meaning you are making more in net profit than you are spending to generate the business.
Essentially, once you know who your market is and what value your product or service has to them as well as your current and planned position in the market, there are only 3 things that matter to successful online marketing:
- How well does your site turn a visitor into a sale, lead or subscriber.
- How likely is your advertising to bring you visitors who are likely to become a lead, customer or subscriber.
- Once an effective channel / landing page combination have been proven cost effective, how quickly can you max out that campaign and scale operations to meet the new demand.
If you are able to triple your effectiveness on any one of those areas you will have effectively tripled your total marketing effectiveness. If you can triple 2 of those areas, you have almost 10xed your results. If you can pull off significant improvements on all 3, you could start to see close to a 3000% increase in your marketing effectiveness. That is to say, It may be possible to increase your online leads / subscribers / sales by 30 times!
Keep your blinders on to these things and don’t let anyone or anything distract you.
PS. Everyone knows that SEO is the bees knees because the traffic is targeted and free, but its not reliable. You can’t actually spend a given amount of money and see a specific, scalable and consistent result. For the purposes of this article, assume that you should be doing all of the SEO best practices at each step. In some cases I will specify what some of them are. If you do everything right, you will be effectively managing campaigns that directly and cost effectively support your business and the SEO will just be gravy because you did everything else so intelligently.
#1. Start with your Site
Your site is the absolute most critical element to all of your online marketing. The ability of your site to connect the needs of your users to your value is paramount. 80% of this is going to come down to your entry point pages, headlines and calls to action. Depending on where the user is coming from, your site must do 3 things within the first 10 seconds or the user will find someone else to fulfill their need.
- Show them that they came to the right place and that you have a solution for their need
- Tell them what they need to do next to begin the process of getting it and make it super easy and super clear
- Explain why you are the one to do this for them, why they can trust you and why they should take action now.
Be sure to keyword optimize each page, and have a very crawlable site. Try to limit your targeting to 3 phrases per page and never use the same term on more than 1 page. If you want to target more keywords, create more useful content.
TIP: Good SEO landing pages and good PPC landing pages tend to be one in the same when done well. The trick is to build your whole site so that your sub level and tertiary pages satisfy both needs. Geo targeting and vertical specificity is a good thing.
#2. Set Up Site Analytics
Everything that users do on your website can be completely transparent with the appropriate application of a good web analytics package. Once their actions are visible you can experiment with them. Once you can experiment, you can alter your site and targeting in order to change your results! Once you can alter your results, you can take over the world.
Ok, you may not be able to take offer the world but you will be on your way to increased marketing effectiveness.
Be sure to set up goal tracking on every site event that supports your sales cycle so you can track all the ways in which your site is supporting your organization. Google Analytics is an incredible tool that is 90% accurate on volume, 100% accurate on trends and 100% FREE. It’s a great option so long as you are ok with Big Brother getting all up in your stuff. For most of what we are talking about, trend improvement is all we need. GA doesn’t have to track the numbers we care about most for the organization, cost and revenue.
#3. Launch a PPC Account
If you ran a shoe store and sold golf shoes, and someone walked into your store with a sign around their neck reading “Mens Nike Golf Shoes”, would you have any trouble closing that deal? Now what if you could spend money and reliably, scalably and consistently only target people with similarly specific signs around their necks? Would that be pretty awesome? Yea, I think so too.
That’s what PPC can do for you. While its not free, once your site can convert, all of a sudden the cost per click is less important than the cost per sale or cost per lead. If you can turn that golf shoes visitor into a sale 1/5 times by sending them to the Men’s Nike Golf Shoes section of your site, the click costs you $6, and you make $60 profit on each sale, you just spent $30 to make $60. Now let’s assume there are 200 people a week searching for similar terms and you can bring them all into your site as the same cost and with the same result.
Would you do anything else until you had done what you needed to to insure you captured every single one of them? You bet your ass you wouldn’t. That’s what its all about.
#5. Build Out Landing Pages
If you can make that one set of keywords convert on a single destination and tweak the experience into a profit building one quickly and efficiently, why would you do anything else?
Next step build out more landing pages to more specifically target your varied keyword targets. The keyword tells you something about the intent of the user, the page should turn that intent into an action that supports your organization. If the keyword doesn’t specifically speak to the need you fulfill, tweak your ad copy to better qualify the traffic you might get from that keyword.
Ideally, these landing pages will be relevant and useful to your regular site visitors too, if you can build them out in a way that actually makes your site a better overall resource and help further your cause, these pages will make for great SEO.
IE. An IT company may offer special pricing, packages and software to Lawyers or Doctors. Pages on your site that talk about your specialized services to those verticals are good for PPC, SEO and users!
Eventually, the # of people you can target on this kind of campaign is limited. As some point you will run out of people who are actively looking for your products and you will either need to grow your product line or expand your efforts into other channels.
#4. Grow Your Budget And Start AB Testing Headlines And Calls To Action
Landing page optimization from a conversion perspective is mainly won or lost with your headlines and calls to action.
I mentioned it before but it’s important so here it is again.
This is the job of every page on your site:
- Show them that they came to the right place and that you have a solution for their need
- Tell them what they need to do next to begin the process of getting it and make it super easy and super clear
- Explain why you are the one to do this for them, why they can trust you and why they should take action now.
IMPORTANT: This is not just the job of your homepage.
Good SEO and good PPC treat any page as a possible landing page. Traffic can come from anywhere and go anywhere on your site. You must make sure that ever page of your site does those 3 things quickly and efficiently. #1 and #2 are basically handled by the imagery you use, the headline and the call to action of the page. Everything else on your site is part of #3.
Tip: Putting your phone number and a good call to action at the top of the sidebar on every page of your site is a great start.
It’s important to try different things until you find what works. Change a headline for a couple of weeks, alter the color of your phone number, move things around, be creative. Every improvement you make to your conversion rate for a set of keywords or marketing channel is likely going to stick but if you hurt your conversion rate, you can always revert to the last version you had before.
Keep doing what works, and spend more money on it until you can’t, then stop doing what fails. It realy is that simple.
#6. Re-assess Your Site And Re-architect / Redesign If Necessary
Once you know what works and what doesn’t and have identified what I call pockets of success, it’s time to take a step back and absorb what we’ve learned. It is very likely that the site you started with seems somehow segmented, inadequate and less focused than you now realize it should be. Listen to that voice in your head.
If in addition to all of the on line stuff, you have also been paying attention to the total value of each lead, client subscriber and have been tracking them by source, you now have the information you need to identify in general, who your best customers are.
Think about total client value:
Who tends to buy the most stuff or make for long term partners?
What campaigns tend to generate sales of products or services with the lowest margins or require the least amount of support?
What campaigns bring in the largest dollar amounts?
Once you know who your best customers are, where you found them, how you converted them and what they bought, you have everything you need to revisit your core value, take a new look at your web presence and refocus your site to better reflect this new approach. You also know what your best campaigns are and can hyper focus on making those pages that best convert your top clients more prominent in your site and more targeted for your SEO efforts.
#7. Start Online PR / Link Building
Now that you have a much better idea of who you are, who your target is, what they most want in the world, that you help them get it faster and more reliably than your competitors, you are ready to step outside the Pull. (Pull marketing is finding people who already want what you have and bringing them in rather than convincing people who dont know you that they need you. That’s Push)
I don’t mean stop doing the other stuff, keep doing it, keep refining it and keep refocusing it. I just mean that now, you have created an environment that better take advantage of all of your targeted traffic no matter where it comes from (including organic search traffic).
The first place I like to start is with PR. Online PR and offline PR when done well aren’t all that different. You have people interested in an industry, a problem or a passion and your goal is to be relevant and useful enough to get them to want to tell other people about you or allow you to become part of the conversation. This is as true as a guest spot on the nightly news as it is for a guest post on a top industry Blog.
Without getting into too much detail, you need to find the places where people are talking about what you care about, listen, engage and become an active member of the community in a way that brings value to all who are involved. This includes but is not limited to, social media, social networking, blogging, forum participation, traditional pr, event sponsorship, trade organization sponsorship, etc.
You may get to the point where it makes sense to actually create a destination who’s job it is to create such a community. Be sure not to make it about you. It needs to be about them.
Regardless, you need to be sure that you are writing about the topics users care about and linking back to your site where applicaple in a way that brings value. IE. You comment on a blog and link back to an article you wrote months earlier that furthers the conversation in a useful way.
Do not just find a blog and comment, “We do that! Click here!”. You can, but that’s not nearly as useful and might get you flamed or worse, completely ignored.
Tip: Don’t buy links or pay blog networks to write for you. For the same money you can hire a part time writer to write and distribute articles for you that are much more on message and useful to you and your audience.
#8. Start Online Banner Campaigns
Once you know the space, who the players are, who their audience are, why they care about you and how traffic from that site converts, consider banner advertising on some of those sites.
Its a great branding mechanism and if you target well and your banner creative is well informed, they can be quite an effective channel.
This is also a good time to consider affiliate marketing and channel marketing for products.
#9. Keep It Accountable
TRACK EVERYTHING! Know what is happening on your site for every dollar you spend.
I mentioned this before but it’s important so I will say it again.
Keep doing what works, and spend more money on it until you can’t, then stop doing what fails. It realy is that simple.
#10. Keep Finding New Areas Of Opportunity While Maximizing What’s Already Working
Basically, any time you aren’t sure what to do next, refer to #1 and start all over again.
Eventually you will get good enough to know which area required the majority of your time until it doesn’t anymore.
In Closing
I hope this helps you keep your head on straight when trying to navigate the world of online marketing and I will leave you with 3 final nuggets.
- With everything you do, ask how that thing can be leveraged to gain additional benefit beyond its ability to generate a successful site action. (IE. Keyword rich links from a Press Release)
- If you aren’t sure its direct value to helping the site generate a specific site action, don’t do it. (SEO benifit alone does not count)
- If you have gone through this list and still aren’t sure what to do or want to find the path to success and 10x your business sooner than later, call me: Adam Schultz, 919 451 8983 .
Tags: online marketing, online pr, ppc advertising, sem, seo, Social Media, usability, user experience
This article gave nice ideas for online marketing effectiveness.
Thanks Martin!
Do you have anything to add? I’d love to hear your thoughts.