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By: Matt Dunleavy
Published by: Excedra
Categories: Marketing Solutions & Process Management
Sub-Categories » Search Marketing | PPC Management | Organic Search Optimization | Conversion Optimization | Creative

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After sitting in on a few sales consultations with new prospects I was blown away by how unaware the majority of tech-savvy executives are of crucial components that are necessary to generate traffic, and convert it into paying customers.  For the most part it seems their reservations begin right when they hear my strategies apply primarily to their web site with the most common and memorable line of them all- “Well I already have a web site that I paid a lot of money for, so I don’t think I’ll need that”. If you’re one of these people, I suggest you take a look at the web marketing topology below and its corresponding summaries before you consider moving into other marketing and advertising approaches.

Are you really doing everything you can to increase your traffic and conversion rate?

If your web presence doesn’t contain most of the components illustrated below, the answer to that is more than likely NO!

 

 

1. Product Landing Page

Landing Pages (otherwise referred to as “Landers”) are the web-based doorstep to your sales team.  Whether you’re launching a ppc marketing campaign, an organic search optimization, or a social media effort, you can see by looking at the topology above that all of the external components of your web marketing infrastructure exist for the primary purpose of driving visitors to your landing page to drive the purchase. Landing pages differ from conventionally designed web pages as the objective is to remove any and all distractions from the visitor and persuade them to either make a purchase or commit to your message by completing form fields or a web-based application on the page.

A well constructed landing page should have a clear definition of the product you’re offering, along with the product’s  key features & benefits.  Another component of a good landing page design is a well constructed product guarantee that compels the visitor’s commitment.Here’s an example of a simple landing page that does a pretty good job of covering the fundamentals.  Take notice to the streamlined approach – A headline, brief sales copy, a call-to-action message and my favorite addition to any landing page design – the arrow.

If you’re in the process of Landing Page Design, be sure to check out my article “Three Killer Conversion Enhancements For Your Landing Page Designs“.

2. Auto Responder System

Recent innovations by email marketing software providers like iContact and InfusionSoft have opened doors around the globe to small business owners that was once restricted to larger enterprises due to the costs and complexities of implementation.  Auto-responders are used pretty often as e-mail marketing tools that allow business owners to generate very personal, automated follow-up emails that can be delivered according to a schedule that’s predefined. For example, you could set your delivery schedule so your prospects(or existing customers) receive an email instantly after “opting in” to your list via your web site, one email the following day, and an email every six days thereafter.

Many people get email auto-responders confused with tools used for SPAM. This is a completely false perception of email marketing as there are a few mechanical differences between a SPAM campaign and a legitimate email marketing campaign. One of the primary differences between the two email campaign types is the receiver’s consent- the visitor of your web site or blog actually requesting (or allowing themselves) to be apart of your mailing list and auto-responder sequence via a form on your web page.

Auto-Responders play a crucial role in the development of trust between you and the prospective customer.  A web page without an auto-responder input is a page that must do a masterful job of gaining the prospective customer’s trust, in addition to persuading them to make an actual purchase or complete the page’s desired action. If you were to illustrate that in a real-life scenario, it’d be like walking up to a person you’ve never met, shaking their hand, and then immediately hitting that person with a sales pitch. There would be little to no trust in the message you convey, nor the product you’re offering them.  An auto-responder will allow you to hit your subscribers(prospects) with multiple exposures of your message, in addition to increasing your readers’ trust over the course of multiple interactions, and ultimately deepening the relationship between you and your prospects.

The end result of a well constructed e-mail campaign is usually a pretty significant increase in the volume of web traffic that converts into hot leads and paying customers. An effective, easily implementable strategy for the content of your email marketing campaigns are the repackaging your existing blog posts into multi-day “eCourses” that contain your call-to-action message.  The length of a typical eCourse is between three and seven days on average (3-7 blog posts).

 

3. Lead Capture

The lead capture, or “capture point” on your web site is a mechanism that requests information from the visitor (typically basic contact information such as their name, phone number, and e-mail) and captures it through an HTML form on your landing page design for the purpose of lead generation.  The information captured is usually then sent directly to their sales department via email or piped into their lead management application where it’s categorized, sorted, and approached by a specific salesman for that product. Every page you include a capture point on is one more shot at getting the prospective customer to compel themselves to you, so finding creative ways to implement them into mostly all of your web pages and blog posts could drastically increase the amount of leads generated. Be careful not to ask for too much information from your prospective leads as doing so could discourage them from completing the form fields. An example of a simple (but effective) lead capture, is the form on the right column of this example landing page.

4. Paid Search Placement

Paid Search Placement, otherwise referred in the tech industry to as PPC Marketing, has been given the title by most marketing professionals as the most important direct marketing innovation of this century. And it’s easy to see why: never before has it been possible to advertise to people while they’re looking for what you offer. PPC advertisements are typically displayed in the “sponsored advertisements” area at the very top above the fold, and far right column of search results for most popular search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. As paid search placement is billed on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, you are required to bid against other web sites in an auction format for your ad position.  If appropriate time and resources are invested in keyword research and well written ppc advertisements, a PPC campaign can unlock markets populated with millions of monthly searchers looking for you, resulting in an explosive opportunity to capture new qualified leads and customers that can be successful within minutes of being turned on.  I don’t know of very many advertising venues that can get the ball rolling that quick. 

The burdens of PPC Management mostly involve frequently comparing your existing highly performing ads against newly created ad concepts for the purpose of finding “the winning message” (defined as A/B testing). One of the biggest problems business owners face when launching a ppc campaign is the competitive advantages larger companies have in lucrative markets. For example, one of our clients is in the insurance industry. Entering the car insurance market via search marketing is a tough move from the very beginning, if not one of the toughest. Advertising on search engines (PPC) under keywords “car insurance quote” could cost you many thousands per day for a relatively small amount of traffic. In addition, your competition isn’t just the local car insurance salesmen; they’re the huge fortune 500 machines with deep pockets and talented personnel (sometimes). Today, most open marketing venues online like Google Adwords, and Yahoo Search Marketing are dominated by these competing companies purchasing ad space in bulk (or bidding very high on a cost-per-click basis in this case), essentially rigging the minimum costs to advertise on a good bit of generic search keywords and keyphrases.

This harsh outcome leaves the raw costs to enter most markets so high that small business owners have little or no room for error when entering the marketplace, provided they can even make it through the front door.  Solution? Learning everything you can about your target market, the costs to enter that market, and most importantly the behaviors and monetization strategies of the top competitors operating in the market as that information could be the secret to how that competitor is able to place such high bids with a return on their advertising spend.

 

5. Organic Search Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of positioning your landing pages or other web page content to appear in the natural search results for search queries containing keywords related to your product or business. This is both an incredibly difficult, and inestimably valuable skill to master. According to SEMPO, over 75% of all search traffic comes from the natural, organic results. Interestingly, over 85% of the world’s search marketing budget is spent on pay-per-click (PPC marketing). There’s a very good reason for this – SEO is much more difficult to get right than a PPC campaign.

There are two different but equally important approaches for SEO; on-page optimization, and off-page optimization.  On-page optimization techniques require you to add/modify elements of your web page’s code such as the title, meta tags, header tags, bolded keyphrases, links, and text to a format that crawlers are able to identify, ultimately improving your page rank.  Off-page optimization mostly consists of generating inbound links, or “link building”, which is essentially convincing the developers of other relevant web sites to link to your desired pages. Some black-hat optimization techniques including purchasing inbound links from content sites built for the purposes of fabricating search rankings. These types of sites are called Content Farms and could get your site banned from major search engines pretty quickly.

One thing to keep in mind when preparing to optimize a site for organic search results is that Google and other major search engines are constantly changing their algorithm and criteria for what they consider a “top ranking” web site to be.  This poses a problem for both search consultants and web developers as they’re constantly forced to learn new strategies and standards to keep favorable rankings.

 

6. Social Media Networks

With Facebook preparing for a $100 Billion Dollar IPO, it’s safe to say that social media is sticking around for awhile.  Once used primarily by teens and musicians to chat, and share media like music, news, and photographs online, social media has evolved into a networking standard for almost any age group and profession. In recent years, communities like Facebook and LinkedIn began assembling the personal data you add to your profile into databases that allow advertisers to target very specific demographics with laser precision and deliver relevant ads based on interests, preferences and choices made by the user.

Social Media Marketing can be accomplished at least two different ways, with both having their pros/cons.  The first (and traditional) way, is by purchasing ad space on the social network.  Most popular social media communities sell space on a cost-per-click (CPC) compensation structure similar to Paid Search Marketing. The second technique can increase traffic and search rankings at the same time.  This technique involves writing catchy articles that are improved with on-page optimization techniques, and distributing them on the social media networks to your desired market. Many have implemented both strategies with great success, however in my experience the frequent creation and distribution of fresh content to your audience seems to be the formula for a winning Social Media Campaign.

 

7. Re-Targeting

Re-targeting is a fairly new advancement in advertising technology that allows your banner ads to chase your prospects around the internet for repeated bites at the apple after they’ve left your web site. The process of re-targeting begins when a visitor lands on one of your pages and the re-targeting cookie is placed on their PC instantly.  When the visitor leaves your site and visits any of today’s popular web properties (ESPN, CNN, Facebook, YouTube, AOL- you name it), the page reads the re-targeting cookie on your PC and displays your ads to their visitor. This not only deepens the relationship with the visitor due to repeated exposure to your message, but usually increases conversion rates with little additional effort.  Re-targeting is pretty much universal with regard to its compatibility with other components of a web marketing system as it targets traffic that has already left your web site.

 

8. Affiliate Networks

Affiliates carry many labels- referral partners, eRetailers, authorized retailers, etc.  A long proven performance-based referral model, Affiliate Marketing allows web developers, and search marketing professionals to link to landing page design via a banner ad or link, and receive a commission for the referral.  Affiliate Networks typically work off of a Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) compensation model whereby the affiliate receives a commission only when a sale or lead(if you’re generating leads) arises as a result of the referral.

There are many affiliate networks and third-party applications, but most of your real players stick to the more popular ones such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, and PepperJam due to their cutting edge interfaces, and tracking technology. Popular affiliate networks also has a good network of affiliates to start and grow your efforts. I’ve experienced success working with affiliate programs for businesses of all sizes ranging as small as a local t-shirt designer, up to as large as a Fortune 500 insurance company.

You should only launch an affiliate program once you’ve gotten the important components of your system in place as any errors,  issues, or glitches with your web site could cause affiliates to drop participation in your program and never re-join.  One thing you have to take into serious consideration when launching an affiliate program is the overall quality of your product, including your branding, customer service, and any other aspect that could irritate or disrupt the consumer.  Most affiliates that take their work seriously will only work with popular brands, offering high payouts on quality products, so if you don’t have a good balance of both you should consider fixing that before launching a program.

9. Media Placement

Media placement or “media buying” on the web typically refers to purchasing banner advertising space in bulk from high-traffic web properties like NFL.com, YouTube, CNN, and AOL.  Media placement can also refer to other mediums such as Television & Radio commercials.  I’ve come across a lot of unsuccessful media buyers out there that thought they were smart enough to guess the winning ad for their media buys without proper A/B testing of their sales copy and ad text (which usually takes place in much earlier phases such as ppc management), and spent a fortune in the process before achieving even mild success.  When done properly, media buying could be the golden faucet that takes your traffic and revenue to new heights.

I hope some of the components mentioned in this article prove valuable in the growth of your business. I invite you to contact us with your toughest marketing challenges.  The marketing professionals at Excedra are standing by right now to help. Get a free instant marketing evaluation report for your web site now.

Visit Excedra’s Web Marketing Blog for free tips and tools you can implement now to increase your web sales and improve your overall marketing efforts.

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