marketing

Marketing on the web, in some ways, is still like the Wild West. It has frontiers and exciting opportunities for profit, labor saving tools, and reliable experts. We also see well-intended but inept operators and a growing number of scammers and business perils. There are enough moving parts to overwhelm anyone who is not actively involved in web marketing -- even seasoned traditional marketers. From our perspective, we have two initial points of advice:

As we wrote in our May 2008 blog post, there are some very good reasons and best practices for having your company name as keywords to trigger search engine PPC ads. However, there are also some potential “gotchas” that online advertisers and buyer of leads should be aware of. Essentially, you want to make sure your company is making the most of these tactics, but not unknowingly paying for search traffic on your company name, especially at a premium price or mixed in with new customer acquisition reports.

Internet Search Engines - Used Like Telephone White Pages

Have you recently calculated the marketing or advertising cost of generating an incoming telephone lead or purchase? If so, were you surprised? This post explains tracking phone numbers and recording of incoming calls. The three main benefits of call tracking are: 1-to determine the source of business, 2- to monitor lead quality, and 3- to gauge your team’s effectiveness of handling the call. We find these tools particular useful for two categories of businesses: a- appointment based businesses; and b- businesses that have phone representatives answering incoming calls.

In our experience with search engine advertising, one of its unique aspects is that, in addition to directly generating online sales or leads, its robust settings provide an excellent tool for business research and planning. In the creation and management of search engine ads, the campaigns, ad groups, and more granular settings gather a great deal of useful data. This is particularly true for Google AdWords. When specifically set up for testing, the potential is a marketer’s dream. For example, we control the following primary variables:

It takes more than an attractive website with a good content to be efficient at converting web visitors to customers. Lately we are seeing clients put more focus into conversions from their website.

Before going further, we should describe what we mean by local businesses. Some have asked us, “isn’t every business local to some place?” The answer is yes, however, for this discussion, a local business sells products or services to customers or clients in their local geographic area. In contrast, an e-commerce site that sells products to customers statewide or nationwide does not fit the definition of a local business.

I first got into search engine marketing and advertising as an employee for a corporate team building consulting company. There, we observed a predictable pattern on which teams were more successful in team building scenarios and back at their jobs.

Teams that take time to make a plan before taking action consistently perform better than those who do not.