Posts from "May, 2015"

How Do You Get the Maximum Return on Your Advertising Budget

Every business needs to allocate a budget for advertising, no matter how small its operations. If people don’t know about it, how will it ever be successful?

However throwing all of your budget at the first form of advertising that comes along is a quick way to waste money. A successful advertising campaign is one that is able to make a measurable return on the investment. In other words the amount you spend on the campaign is made back through the sales it generates.

Getting the maximum return on your advertising budget is not a perfected science, but there are a number of ways to ensure you’re on the right track.

Gather Data

If you’re going to measure and analyse your return you have to have some data to work with. For example if you took out a traditional print ad in a newspaper or magazine you should be made aware of the publication’s circulation (amount of readers). If you include a unique coupon or some other offer with your ad, you will be able to directly measure the number of responses and therefore track the revenue generated.

Megaphones

This process is much easier with online advertising because you can track the referrer of every visit to your site, whether that be from Google search, a link from another site, or an online advertisement.

Target Your Audience

An advertising budget is wasted if you aren’t targeting the people that will most likely want your product or use your service. Before the internet this was often a difficult task. The closest option to true targeting was to take out ads in a trade journal or cross promote with a related business. Sometimes it was just luck, target locally and hope somebody takes an interest.

With platforms like Google AdWords targeting your audience couldn’t be easier. Your ad is shown alongside Google search results only when somebody searches for the keywords you designate. This means if you’re selling Custom T-Shirts you can make sure that only people searching for “Buy Custom T-Shirts” see your ad. This makes it more likely that they’ll click through and you’ll make a sale, and your budget is not wasted.

Test and Refine

If you’ve targeted your audience and gathered the data, it’s now time to analyze the results and see where you can improve. Using AdWords as an example, testing several different keywords and keeping the ones that convert the best is a great way to get the maximum return on your budget. To do this efficiently you’ll also need to track conversions, which means monitoring whether a user sent via an ad actually makes a purchase.

Variety

Using one source of advertising even if it works will only take you so far. It’s important to use a combination of offline and online methods, that latter which might include Search Engine Optimization, social media, as well as advertising platforms like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads.

Hire a Professional

Using some of your advertising budget to hire a professional internet marketing company to handle your online advertising will ensure that your campaigns run smoothly and all of the technical details are taken care of. You will know your general target audience, what you want to promote, and some keyword ideas, but they’ll have the experience to put it all in to action and refine your campaigns for continual success.

Doing Social Media Marketing the Right Way

At this stage every business knows that they need to have a social media presence, but simply opening up accounts on all the major platforms is not going to result in instant success. In order to reap the benefits of social media for marketing it has to done the right way.

Here are 5 things all business owners should know in order to use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to market their brand effectively:

Regular Activity

You can’t just open a few accounts and expect the traffic to your website to skyrocket. Social media success is all about actively engaging your current and future customers. While there’s no hard rule about how often you should make new social media posts, you should never leave your followers wondering where you are. If you’re not active on social media they’ll either think your business is also no longer active, or that you don’t care about them. Posting regularly lets your followers know you mean business and will directly increase your chances of making a sale. Activity is also the way to build more followers. Everybody starts at zero and if you barely post it’s going to stay at zero.

Social Media Marketing

Maintain Brand Identity

One of the key elements of building a successful brand is consistency. You don’t see Coca Cola use one logo for Twitter, another Facebook, and then another on their product labels. Everything about them is instantly recognizable. No matter how small your business you need to follow a similar approach. Your profile pictures and avatars, and you overall message should be consistent across all of your social media accounts.

Always Engage with Users

If you don’t interact with your fans/followers you’re not doing social media marketing the right way. One of the core reasons to use such platforms is to build a relationship and start a dialogue. That means promptly answering their questions and being friendly when they respond to posts. The fact that they want to interact shows that they’re interested in your business, so shutting the door in their face by not responding is the worst thing you can do. This is especially important when it comes to customer service questions, and could mean the difference between making a sale and losing a customer to the competition.

Not all Social Media is the Same

A common mistake made by those new to social media is to copy the exact same post across every single different platform. While this may work in some instances, each service has their own way of doing things. For example Instagram is all about images, the captions are secondary. Whereas Twitter is more about what you write. You may write the same things on Twitter and Facebook, but sometimes hash tags just don’t suit a Facebook status update and can even turn users off who can see that you’re using a tool. Learn the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and use them to your advantage.

Act Like a Real Human

Some of the most successful business driven social media accounts are the ones that replace the corporate spiel with friendly human dialogue. In 2015 consumers are tired of suits and ties, jargon, and company’s trying to hard sell. Sure let them know about new offers, your latest products, and other business information, but in-between you also need to by witty, entertaining, and up to speed with popular culture. There’s no reason why you can’t chime in on a popular sports game or the latest celebrity controversy. If you can wrap your business information in to something entertaining then you can’t fail.

Facts about Brands that’ll Make Your Hair Stand on End

It’s all good having a killer product or awesome service, but without a brand to back it up you can only go so far. But what is a brand?

A brand is the unique name and image that you cultivate around your business. You’re not a store that sells shoes, you’re “Skyrocket Shoes” providing “the best priced shoes in the whole universe.”

Ok, maybe your brand won’t be so cheesy but it’s important to differentiate yourself from other similar businesses, even if the only real difference is your brand name, logo and tagline. Over the years customers will grow to trust your brand and if you’ve marketed it successfully, the brand should become instantly recognizable. There are hundreds of cola drinks, but everybody knows Coca Cola right? Part of that is its taste, but a huge factor is their success in branding.

In 2015 one of the most important factors in building your brand is the internet. If you don’t Brandshave a professional and easy to use website, a strong and active social media presence, and aren’t making use of targeted online advertising, your brand awareness will be much less than the competition.

An experienced internet marketing company can handle your online brand for you so you can focus on other areas of your business. They will optimize your site for search engines so your brand is more prominent in the search results, engage existing and potential customers on social media to build awareness and loyalty for your brand, and manage advertising campaigns like Google AdWords to bring you direct traffic and sales.

If you want to achieve your business goals, here are some facts about brands that speak for themselves:

Without a Brand Customers Won’t Return

No matter what type of business you run, without consistent branding you are not going to be memorable to customers. This ranges from literally sticking your brand logo on your products, to engaging customers online. Without a brand they’ll forget who you are and won’t return, and they certainly won’t be telling their friends about you.

Social Media Works

According to the Altimer Group the average large brand has 178 social media accounts! This might not be feasible for you, but as long as you have a presence on platforms like Facebook and Twitter you’re on the right track. Social media allows you to interact and build a relationship with customers. Over time this could grow in to a thriving community. Not everything you post should be about your products or services, but everything you post will help improve your brand image and awareness.

Brands are Built by Happy Customers

A positive brand image is created by customers after they’ve had a positive experience. This means your customer service and products has to be top notch. According to a 2011 Customer Experience Improvement study, 89% of Consumers go to a competitor after a poor customer experience. So treat them right, engage their queries on social media, and they will promote your business for you (Don’t forget to use their testimonials on your site).

Call in the Experts

The majority of business and website owners that attempt to build their brand online and do their own internet marketing will never put 100% effort it. This is why it’s important to hire an internet marketing company who have the expertise and cutting edge tools to do it for you. This is their job, and they can put 100% in while your effort is focused on the other core aspects of your business.

Why You Need more than Good Content for Internet Marketing

The core of any website and online business is good content. You have to have pages that people genuinely want to view and that search engines see as high quality. There are no tricks, you can’t fool people in to thinking you have good content. If they don’t like it they won’t come. If you fall at this first hurdle you are not going to get any hits or sales.

What constitutes good content will vary from site to site, but it needs to be informative, truthful, engaging, and detailed enough for its purpose. If you were selling shoes for example nobody is going to get any value from a generic article about shoes, or a blank sales page. But if you had a detailed analysis of what makes a good running shoe, examining the different brands and features, why some are better than others, and you backed up your claims with citations – real people and Google are going to be glad they found the page.

However in today’s online world, simply having good content is not going to make your website a success. You need to know how to optimize the content and market it effectively. This is where a professional internet marketing company can help.

They will have all of the technical knowledge required to get your content visible to search Internet Marketing Specialistengines, to effectively market it to your audience via social media, and to manage ad campaigns so that your budget is never wasted.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You may have the single greatest article on the internet but unless Google is aware, it’s not going to matter. An expert will know how to fine tune your content for targetable keywords, how to code the page with technical elements like headings and image tags, and various other methods so it has the best possible chance at ranking high in Google search and bringing you more traffic.

Social Media Marketing

Likewise you may have a great product or page that’s worth promoting, but simply pasting a link on social media is not going to entice people to click it. There are certain methods and techniques to make content stand out. You also need to engage with followers and build trust, instead of going directly for the hard sell. This takes time and skill regardless of how good the content is.

PPC Campaigns

Online ad campaigns can be very effective (like AdWords), especially when you have good quality content on the landing page. But you need to understand the technical side of these platforms, which are often overwhelming for beginners. You need to know how to target users, how to build a good Quality Score, and how to interpret the data and alter the campaigns accordingly every day. This can only be achieved through experience.

Conclusion

High quality unique content is fundamental in building your brand and achieving your goals. However hiring a professional internet marketing company ensures that you’re making the most out of that content, by utilizing their years of technical online experience.