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Making the Most of Your Click-Through Rates

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Click through rate continues to be a key metric for Internet marketers. However, the question “What’s a good click-through rate?” is a little bit like asking “What’s your favorite movie?” Truthfully, it really comes down to personal preference. Just as some people might lean toward an adventure film as their favorite movie, others might prefer something from another genre.

The same is true for click-through rates on your Sponsored Search ads: The highest possible click-through rate may work for some—but it doesn’t work for all. That’s why the honest answer to the question is, “It depends.”

Click-through rates are naturally going to vary from campaign to campaign, and even from keyword to keyword. Everything involved in the way your ad is displayed plays a part, from your ad copy to the ad’s ranking on the results page.

This being the case, your click-through rate should really be viewed as only one indicator of your ad’s performance. It’s best to try and balance your evaluation of those rates with a just-as-critical look at your conversion rates (number of clicks converting into sales or other actions you want people to take). While it might be easy to generate a bump in your clicks, you also want those extra clicks convert into sales.

An ideal click-through rate provides the best possible return on investment, and to achieve that, it’s important to consider these factors:

1. Competition

Are your keywords fighting for clicks? Generic keywords, such as “dvd,” tend to have a lot of competition, which lessens the chance of getting clicks. More specific keywords, such as “transformers dvd,” generally have less competition and a greater chance for clicks.

2. Position

An ad with a high ranking may generate more traffic to your web site. To help attain a good position in search results, keep your bids competitive and your ad quality high.

3. Ad Quality

Are your ads relevant? Do they contain the related keywords? Do they reflect the offering of your site in a way that will appeal to users? And do they include any competitive advantages you offer that might set you apart from your competitors?

4. Ad Testing

Create multiple versions of your ads and use ad testing to determine which ad works best. Vary your ad offerings, as well as your display URLs, to see what gets the best results.

5. Identifying Low-Performing Keywords

Compare the click-through rate of similar keywords, to see if any are significantly under performing in relation to the others. If so, consider moving those low-performing keywords to a different ad group and creating new, highly relevant ads for those keywords.

There really is no hard and fast rule as to how high a click-through rate should be. But if your ads are compelling and your click-through and conversion rates are well balanced, you’re off to a great start.

Post provided by Noah Belson

Source: Michael Fleischner – Marketing Expert

Local Search: What You Need to Know

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

For small businesses and retail establishments, local search can have a favorable impact. Marketing to customers in your neighborhood used to be as easy as putting up a sign or advertising in the local newspaper. But today’s web-savvy consumers shop for products and services locally on the Internet using local search.

Using a local search engine, marketers can target customers in a specific area while maximizing their marketing investment. They can use specific targeting, using the right keywords and search phrases to pull customers to their site and front door.

Local search offers low cost, relevant advertising dynamics, an audit trail to measure results and opportunities to increase revenues and profit. The key is partnering with a local search company that provides relevant search results, so your customers can find you easily. They should provide high-quality location data, geo-targeted advertising and efficient search algorithms.

Here are five reasons you should use local search:

It is on the rise The local search marketplace is expanding. Local search is estimated to grow to a $6.2 billion market opportunity by 2010. (Kelsey Group). According to ComScore, 47% of local searchers contacted or visited a local merchant as a result of their online search.

There’s money to be made It’s been proven that “local” searchers convert into buyers.

According to industry analysts, approximately 80% of an individual’s income is spent within about 50 miles of their home. With 95% of the potential local search advertising market today remaining untouched, this is a huge opportunity for businesses.

Online advertising just makes (dollars and) sense

In today’s economy, more local companies are turning to online advertising as a new way to capture greater local customer revenue. At the same time, many Internet players are refocusing on local search as a method of increasing revenue and profit. (Mike Dobson, president of TeleMapics).

Local search costs less and delivers more

One of the reasons that local search attracts new advertising customers is that it offers relatively precise targeting capabilities, at one of the lowest costs per lead offered by any advertising medium (29 cents,according to Piper Jaffray & Co.). It also offers an audit trail.

Your customers can find you faster

Traffic has declined for traditional print publishers, as it is easier and quicker to research a buying opportunity online than to search print media. In the Yellow Pages arena, the market has fragmented because of increased competition between publishers, diluting the effectiveness of Yellow Pages advertising that many small businesses once relied upon.

If you haven’t considered local search as an important part of your marketing program, now is the time to do so. You’d be surprised at what an impact you can make!

Jennifer Black is VP of marketing for Local.com.

Source: Michael Fleischner – Marketing Expert

Stretch That Budget

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

With marketing budgets under scrutiny, doing more with less is essential for creating a positive return on your investment. The fact is that marketing budgets are shrinking in today’s difficult economic climate. This is the precise opposite of what should actually happen. When times are tough, its time to start marketing.

Do more with your shrinking marketing budget. This is easily done when you consider the power of viral marketing. The purpose of viral marketing is to leverage others – customers, prospects, friends, and connections to help you sell your products and services. Here are a few other ideas you can use to jump start your marketing.

Leverage all you do. Whenever you make a contact with browsers, prospects, customers, or friends, consider how you can communicate information about your products and services. Is there a way to use each interaction as a stepping stone to assess needs, offer solutions, and move individuals through the purchase decision process?

Make a conscious effort to ask for referrals. In many industries, referrals are the lifeblood of the business. Starting a referral campaign is easy and can be done simply by asking. You may also consider offering an incentive to individuals who pass along your name or encourage others to transact with your company.

Focus on creating a dialogue. If you are interacting via multiple media such as fliers, letters, emails, etc, make sure that you include valuable information and promotional offers. This can keep your business moving forward and is easy to implement. Think about adding a promotional postcard to your next package with an offer your customers can’t refuse.

Keep testing new things. Especially in tough times, it is very important to dedicate a portion of your budget toward trying new marketing methods or ideas. Even if it is just ten percent of your budget, all it takes is one success idea to have a significant impact on your lead flow or revenue.

Improving marketing results does not have to cost you money. In fact, some of the best, most successful marketing ideas were started with little or no money. Think viral. How can you leverage the assets you already have? By taking what you have and making it better or expanding it, your results will often scale. To many people stop short of fully riding out their marketing campaigns and enjoying the results they can achieve if only they persist.

Offer a free download on your website. What can you do to attract more visitors and have them give you valuable information about themselves? The information you provide could be a free informational packet, checklist, or video. If people want free, you can give it to them but remember to ask them for something first. Be the master of get/give and you can build your list quickly.

Source: Michael Fleischner – Marketing Expert

The Most Important Aspect of Marketing…Testing

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

One of my colleagues recently asked me, out of all the aspects of marketing including online marketing, marketing strategy, Web 2.0, market research, etc., what was the most important? Without hesitation I replied, “Testing”.

Many of my marketing friends might argue and profess that if you don’t have the right message, reach the right audience, the right timing, or the right offer, you won’t succeed. And to that I say ABSOLUTELY! In fact, those are the very elements of a successful campaign that can be identified through proper testing. So how do you know that your messaging is optimized or that you’re reaching your target audience in the most effective way possible? Only proper testing can give you that information.

When someone on my team says that a particular campaign was a success I ask, “how do you know?” The answer often has something to do with metrics around campaign performance. But this information is merely releative. If your click through rate was 20% and your conversion rate was 0.35% for an online campaign, it may have generated a positive return, but is 0.35% the best we could have done? Did we test the campaign to set expectations before full launch?

By testing multiple landing pages, post cards, direct mail packages, keyword campaigns, and other marketing campaigns, you can find what resonates best with your audience and set proper expectations for performance. Once you’ve established a baseline, continue to test and experiment with different messaging, timing, and offers and compare your results against your baseline. Then, when someone asks you how well your campaign performed, you can say good, bad, or indifferent based on real data.

A great example of this was a recent email marketing campaign completed by my team. They tested 3 subject lines – everything else remainded the same (the list, the email creative, the price, the timing, etc.). During our test, one subject line outperformed the others 3 to 1. Wow! What a difference this made in our overall campaign performance when we sent the email to tens of thousands of potential customers.

Ongoing measurement and testing is essential for marketing success. If you’re not testing your marketing campaigns on a continuous basis, you’re missing out. Of course, once you establish a solid control (baseline), you’ll have a hard time out performing it. In general, you’ll only improve your success rate about 10% of the time. But continue to test, test, and test some more and you’ll see your knowledge and results increase.

Source: Michael Fleischner – Marketing Expert

Ask Who, Then What

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

If you’re running a small or medium sized business, or perhaps a marketing department, it’s difficult to stay on top of all the marketing changes over the last couple of years. Social media, networking, new technologies… who can keep up with it all?

One way to stay on top of your marketing game it so be actively engaged. Set up Google alerts, RSS feeds, and become an avid reader of industry magazines. Even with all of this information, we, as marketers, rarely have the time to stay on top of every bit of marketing news. So how can you manage it all? Ask who, then what.

Marketing technologies, strategies, and tactics will continually evolve and change. Therefore, you need the right people on your team who can keep up with different aspects of marketing – regardless of what changes come about.

Think about your team members and what they’re most interested in. Is it marketing on Facebook, Twitter, or some other social networking site? How about mobile marketing or changes in the online advertising space. Find someone who is genuinely interested in an emerging aspect of marketing and have them update you on a regular basis. This is how the best marketers stay on top of just about everything.

Of course you could always work with an agency (if you budget allows), but an agency is doing the same thing you can do on your own. This is especially true if you have a team of people. Schedule monthly “update” meetings and ask everyone to report. You can then take this information to determine whether or not you have an opportunity to succeed with a new type of media or marketing tactic.

Keeping informed is much easier with the right people. First ask who, then what!

Source: Michael Fleischner – Marketing Expert

Is Your Marketing SPAM?

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

The truth is, there is a fine line between advertising and spam and unfortunately many business owners do not understand the difference between the two. This is important because while a creative, well developed Internet marketing campaign can help to attract new customers and keep existing customers loyal, spam of all kinds is likely to alienate both new customers and existing customers. This can be extremely damaging to your business.

There are a few basic Internet marketing strategies we can focus on to illustrate the multiple types of spam that may be hurting your business and the success of your marketing campaigns such as banner ads, email campaigns and message board posts.

Banner ads are one of the most popular strategies which accompany an Internet marketing plan. These ads are usually ads which appear at the top of websites and span the width of the website. It is from this appearance that they earned the name banner ads but actually banner ads can refer to ads of a variety of different sizes and shapes which appear in an array of different locations on a website.

In many cases the business owner purchases advertising space on these websites but the banner ad may also be placed as part of an exchange or an affiliate marketing campaign. Banner ad exchanges are situations in which one business owner posts a banner ad on his website in exchange for another business owner posting his banner ad on the other website. These agreements may be made individually between business owners with complementary businesses or as part of exchanges facilitated by a third party.

In the case of affiliate marketing, an affiliate posts and advertisement for your business in exchange for compensation when the banner ad produces a desired effect such as generating website traffic or generating a sale. The terms of these agreements are determined beforehand and are generally based on a scale of pay per impression, pay per click or pay per sale or lead. Now that you understand what banner ads are, it is also important to understand how they can be overused and appear to be spam.

Placing your banner ad on a few websites which are likely to attract an audience similar to your target audience is smart marketing, placing your banner ad on any website which will display the ad regardless of the target audience can be construed as spam. Internet users who feel as though your banner ads are everywhere they turn will not likely take your business seriously and are not likely to purchase products or services from you as a result of your banner ads.

Email campaigns can also be very useful tools in the industry of Internet marketing. These campaigns may involve sending periodic e-newsletters filled with information as well as advertisements, short, informative email courses or emails offering discounts on products and services.

Loyal customers who opt into your email list will likely not view these emails as spam and may purchase additional products and services from your business as a result of this marketing strategy. Additionally, potential customers who have specifically requested additional information on your products and services will also find this type of marketing to be useful.

Email recipients who did not request information are likely to view your emails as spam. Harvesting email addresses in a deceptive manner and using these addresses to send out mass emails will likely always be considered to be spam. Only send the specific information requested to those who requested it!

Finally, message boards provide an excellent opportunity for business owners to obtain some free advertising where it will be noticed by members of the target audience. If the products and services you offer appeal to a specific niche, it is worthwhile to join message boards and online forums related to your industry of choice. Here you will find a large population of Internet users who may have an interest in your products.

You might consider including a link to your business in your signature or posting the link when it is applicable to the conversation. However, care should be taken to carefully review the message board guidelines to ensure you are not doing anything inappropriate. Conversely, replying to every message with a link to your website when it is not relevant to the conversation is likely to be construed as spam by other members. This can devalue your posts and discredit your company or website.

Think through all of your existing marketing tactics and ask yourself, “Is this borderline spam?” If the answer is yes, think about changing your tactics or clarifying your communications. Your prospects and your business will be glad you did.

For more email related information visit http://www.marketingbyemail.info

Source: Michael Fleischner – Marketing Expert

Marketing Through Admission

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Use the proven power of ‘the damaging admission’ while promoting and selling your products and services to gain the trust of your prospects.

In the mid eighties, researchers at Cleveland State University made an astonishing discovery. The researchers created two fictitious job candidates, Dave and John. For each of them they created identical resumes and two almost identical letters of reference. The ONLY difference was that John’s letter included this sentence: ‘Sometimes, John can be a little difficult to get along with.’ The researchers showed the resumes to personnel directors.

Guess which applicant the directors most wanted to interview? Believe it or not, the answer is John. The researchers concluded that the criticism of John made the rest of the reference far more believable.

Many savvy marketers have long understood the power of the ‘damaging admission’. The damaging admission is where the seller points out the flaws of what they are offering. Few products, services or offers are perfect and most prospects can’t help but wonder, ‘What’s the hidden catch?’

So if you take it upon yourself to let your prospects know up front what the weaknesses or limitations of what you are offering, you accomplish several things. First, by announcing upfront the limitations of your product service or idea, it stops your prospect from attempting to uncover those limitations for himself. Secondly, it lends credibility to everything else you have to say about your product or service. After all, if you’re honest enough to admit the weaknesses and flaws of what you’re offering, it stands to reason that all the positive things you have to say are true too. Finally, it can actually draw your prospects attention.

Who can resist paying attention to the sentence that starts, ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, but..’? Cosmetics company Lush have long understood the power of the ‘damaging admission’. Next to their product descriptions they include positive and negative comments from customers. Hence a shampoo that features rave reviews from some customers, may also be accompanied by comments from others such as ‘smells like coal tar’. Kind of refutes the idea that the positive testimonials are manufactured doesn’t it?

Here’s another example of a damaging admission, taken from one of my own products: ‘If you’re determined to find a catch, there is one major flaw that you should know about. This programm won’t pick up the phone and make the calls for you! You’ll still have to pick up the phone and dial!’

What stops most people from making the ‘damaging admission’ is that they’re afraid that by showing a weakness they’ll lose the sale. In actual fact, the reverse is true. You’re far more likely to win your customers’ trust and respect if you admit the flaws of what you are offering.

Post by Bernadette Doyle who publishes her free, weekly Client Magnets newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them then sign up for the Client Magnets newsletter at http://www.ClientMagnets.com today!

Source: Michael Fleischner – Marketing Expert

Reputation Management Made Easy: 7 Effective Ways For Managing Your Reputation Online

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Have you Googled your name recently? Today, more than ever, individuals are turning to the web to learn more about people they meet, interview, and simply want to know more about. With information being so pervasive, managing your reputation is more important than ever.

How to Manage Your Reputation Online

Fortunately, managing your reputation online isn’t all that difficult, but it does take work. Here are 7 basic steps you can take to ensure that your reputation doesn’t become negatively impacted by what’s being said about you online.

1. See where you stand. Start your reputation management initiative by Googling your name. Try it with quotes and with out (first and last name together). Look through each of your results on page one and page two of Google. Are there any there are are negative or you wish to remove?

2. Set up a Google alert. Visit Google and set up an alert for your name. After setting up the alert Google will send you and email to confirm that you wish to receive the updates. Accept the alert and each time your name is published to the Web, you’ll know about it.

3. Contact website owners for name removal. If there are sites that include your name and commentary that is less than desireable, contact the appropriate websites requesting that the information be removed. More often than not, website owners will agree to remove your name and/or inappropriate information.

4. Purchase a domain with your name. Add sites and webpages associated with your name and watch negative search results get pushed lower on Google rankings. Visit GoDaddy or another provider of website URLs and hosting, and purchase a domain that contains your name. Even if your name is rather common, experiment with variations until your name can be established in the form of a dot com. Once you own a domain, publish a webpage with your personal profile.

5. Start a blog under your name. Blogger is a great tool for setting up your own blog which can be used to publish information about yourself. Popular blog sites are often picked up by Google and you can control the content. Be sure to sign up for Technorati after your blog has been published. Submit your blog for review and its popularity will increase, improving search rankings and continuing to push down negative search results.

6. Free press release. Use free-press-release.com or a similar free press release site to publish favorable information about your and your reputation. This form of reputation management is easy and costs nothing. Be sure to use your name throughout the release and in the release title.

7. Author articles in your field. Publish article relative to a particular topic or area in which you’ve done some work or have experience. Use article distribution serivces to build online references to your content. Make sure your articles contain an about the author section that links back to your main website.

There are a variety of strategies you can use to manage online references about you, your family, or others that need to manage their reputation online. Other online sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, and Squidoo, offer ample opportunity to deliver favorable search results that can push unfavorable results down in search engine rankings. The key is to start today – proactively manage your reputation and put yourself in a favorable light.

Post by Michael Fleischner, Internet marketing and Online Reputation Management Expert who has been helping individuals improve their reputations online for more than four years. To learn how Michael can help you improve your reputation – contact him at support@marketingscoop.com or simply Google “Michael Fleischner” to learn more.

Source: Michael Fleischner – Marketing Expert

Selling in a Soft Economy

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Establishing maximum value for your price is never easy. In today’s volatile economy, it’s even more of a challenge. For most companies, costs are increasing, yet the ability to pass them along to the customer is fraught with numerous roadblocks.

The customer’s response to a price increase is rarely positive, with the usual line of objections that go along with it. In addition, there are the concerns that a competitor’s price may undercut yours or that the customer may choose to go down a different path instead of buying from you at all.

As big as these issues are, they pale in comparison to the number one roadblock to maximizing your price point: the confidence of the salesperson. The main reason why companies do not capitalize on their potential revenue is because their salespeople do not have the confidence to ask for and receive the highest price point.

If a salesperson is secure in what they are selling and in knowing how the customer will benefit from their products/services, then they will be confident in asking for and getting the desired price point. The problem is that many times the salesperson lacks confidence in at least one of these areas, resulting in their inability to make their sales quota.

To rectify this problem, it’s important to examine how the salesperson first developed a lack of confidence in their ability to maximize their price points. Generally, it stems from a sale they perceived to be lost because their price had been too high. On the surface, their assumption probably appeared to be correct. However, in reality, it just seemed that way because the right price-value relationship had not been established. If the salesperson had executed a proper sales strategy that allowed both himself and the customer to see the product’s/service’s true value, this could have been avoided.

It needs to be communicated that in a B to B environment, the benefits are to both the buyer and the business they’re buying it for. In a B to C environment, the benefits are to both the buyer and to the person who will actually use the product or service. When the salesperson and the customer understand this, it can help erase the uncertainty that the price may pose. In general, new salespeople often lose the sale shortly after they’ve stated their price. Thus, it’s only natural for them to believe that the price was the determining factor. However, when digging below the surface, the price was not what prevented them from closing the deal. Rather, they lost the sale because they didn’t ask enough questions to fully establish the needs of the customer.

Top-performing salespeople ask questions that allow the customer to elaborate on their needs and then demonstrate their listening skills by asking appropriate open questions and probing deeper with great follow-up questions. They use the information that they learn to better explain how their product or service can be beneficial to the customer.

In my 25 plus years of selling, I’ve learned that the customer’s real needs, hurts, and wants don’t often surface until you’re demonstrated genuine interest in what their thoughts and goals are. Ironically, this means that you can throw out their initial comments, as it is rarely the need they are looking to fill.

In summary, today’s economy is full of opportunities for top performing salespeople to ask really good questions that get customers talking. This allows both the customer and the salesperson to see, feel, and understand what their true needs are. When the salesperson can experience this across multiple customers, they will begin to develop the assurance they need to be able to confidently convey the maximum price point their company expects them to receive.

Mark Hunter, “The Sales Hunter”, is a sales expert who speaks to thousands each year on how to increase their sales profitability. For more information, to receive a free weekly email sales tip or to read his Sales Motivation Blog, visit http://www.TheSalesHunter.com

Source: Michael Fleischner – Marketing Expert

Make Your Search Campaign Successful

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Search marketing is a great way to generate revenue and grow your business. However, many marketers fail at search and don’t know it. The basic performance reports available from providers like Google can lead an advertiser to believe that his or her campaign is generating plenty of qualified interest, when the truth might be precisely the opposite.

Clicks, click-through rate and cost-per-click are the measuring sticks of most search campaigns, because they’re the statistics most easily gleaned from online reports. Judging a campaign’s performance by these standards is not only misleading, it can cause an advertiser to waste significant investment.

Why? Because a click is only one action — it doesn’t measure what that prospect did when he or she clicked on your ad (that is, did he or she become a lead or buy your product) or even how qualified he or she is. Our experience tells us there are many advertisers who are content to generate thousands of clicks at considerable cost, but discover on further analysis that the vast majority of those clicks are completely worthless.

The perfect search campaign is one that:

■ generates a cost per acquisition (CPA) — whether your acquisition is a lead, download, registration or sale — competitive with other advertising vehicles

■ generates predictable CPA results at projected spend levels

■ is sufficiently expansive to cover every keyword or phase, and every variation that a qualified prospect could search on

■ delivers relevant ad copy for every keyword (to drive clicks) and maps to relevant landing pages (to drive conversions)

■ is designed in such a way that specific terms, groups of terms and campaigns are all optimized separately, with separate budgets, ad copy, geo-targeting and day-parting

■ is tracked through use of a back-end database or CRM system that measures ROI on a keyword-by-keyword basis.

Don’t have all these metrics in place? No one does. The scenario above is the ideal program, and a hypothetical ideal at that. But you should use these standards as goals and benchmarks.

Know what you want to achieve. Are you trying to generate downloads, registrations, page views, sales leads, qualified leads or sales? How are you defining that goal — is someone filling out a registration form, hitting a particular page or meeting certain qualification criteria?

Your search campaign should measure how many of those desired actions are taking place; how much each desired action is costing in the aggregate; and, which keywords generate those actions at the lowest cost.

Howard Sewell is president of Connect Direct.

Source: Michael Fleischner – Marketing Expert