Online Advertising and Marketing
Your website is up, and you have promoted it on everything from business cards to T-shirts. Your check-out program is primed for action. And you’re ready to deliver on every order. There’s only one problem—nobody shows up.
The internet is littered with tens of thousands of dead sites, abandoned because no one visited. You can always tell a dead site—it was last updated on its launch date or shortly thereafter. So, how can you make yours successful?
Throw some money at it—judiciously. “It’s a good idea to stick with low-cost, grass-roots techniques,” says Jim Daniels, president of JDD Publishing in Smithfield, Rhode Island. Daniels has written several books about internet marketing and is the founder of bizweb2000.com, a mega site of emarketing content geared to entrepreneurs.
Also, if you can afford one, hire a PR firm. In general, raising your firm’s visibility through media exposure lets you talk about your website to a broad range of potential customers. Ultimately, your website is your primary calling card.
A Marketing Tool
Think of your website as a marketing tool like the others you use to promote your business. Because its return is hard to gauge, your job is to learn how to get the most from the web. “Why would someone want to visit my site?” That’s your key question. If your site talks only about your company and how great you are, chances are, no one will come back. Attracting visitors requires magnets: things that excite people and make them return for more.
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Before you publicize your site, make sure you have an opt-in box on the homepage and throughout your site by using email capture software, also called an autoresponder system. This is a great way to develop customers and build your email list so you can send them valuable offers, tips, and resources. For more details on setting up email captures, visit AWeber at www.aweber.com and check out the opt-in tutorial. Click on the “Menu,” then on “How-to Videos” under the “Support” category.
Savvy marketers master permission marketing, which provides incentives for customers to learn more about your product or service. Let’s say you run the Clicks and Bricks Bed and Breakfast in Vermont. Spring and fall are your off seasons. You’d like to reach out to former visitors and those who have sent emails inquiring about the Clicks and Bricks B&B.
Using the principles of permission marketing, you can:
Use your database of customer and prospect emails to build an audience for a promotional campaign.
Recognize that those consumers have indicated a willingness to talk to you. So, find something to say to them. You could offer them a “three nights for the price of two” promotion or run a contest for a free two-night midweek stay. It’s offers like these that keep customers and prospects engaged.
Encourage a learning relationship with your customers. Send emails or print brochures about upcoming local events such as the annual Fall Leaf-Peeping Festival, or offer two-for-one coupons for an upcoming art show. Remind them of Vermont’s allure in the spring and fall.
Deepen your communication as site visitors become customers and first-timers become return visitors. Send birthday or anniversary cards. Reward them with a glossy national B&B directory. Show them that you value their patronage.
Now, think about how you might be able to apply these examples to your own business. How can you think creatively to boost your permission marketing outreach efforts?
Attracting Visitors to Your Site
The number of websites is well over the million mark with the potential of crossing into the billions. According to the “2017 Domain Name Industry Brief,” published by Verisign, the internet boasted more than 332.4 million domain names by the end of 2017. With millions of websites out there, attracting visitors to your individual site is often the biggest challenge. Your strategies for doing so may include search engines, paid search services, and affiliates. Let’s consider them one at a time.
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Using search engines is a matter of personal preference, but the vast majority of US internet browsers use Google. While you should try some other engines listed in this chapter to discover which return the most “hits,” or matches, with your keywords, the more matches in Google and the more likely you are to be found.
Search Engines
Search engines have become a ubiquitous part of American culture. Every day millions of Americans go online to search the internet or “Google” something or someone. According to a 2016 report from the Pew Internet and American Life project—which produces reports that explore the impact of the internet—79 percent of Americans say they make purchases online, and 82 percent say they at least sometimes read online customer ratings or reviews before purchasing items for the first time. And according to BrightLocal, a search marketing firm that focuses on local markets, 97 percent of consumers looked online for local businesses in 2017—and 85 percent of those say they trust an online review as much as a personal review. Web searching is the primary point of discovery for most of us, especially when we are seeking new products or services. So, how do you get noticed?
Perhaps the most important—and inexpensive—strategy for getting people to your website is to rank high for your preferred keywords on the main search engines in “organic” or “natural” searches (as opposed to paid ads, also known as “sponsored links,” which are often found on the right side of search pages or clearly marked as a “sponsored link”). In general, achieving a high rank is based on three criteria: competition, relevancy, and content.
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Adding widgets to your website and staying active on social sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, helps increase organic SEO rankings. What’s a widget? It’s a live stream of updates from your social sites that feed directly into your website. For more information on embedding widgets, type in “widgets” in the search box on each social site.
Think of “competition” like popularity. The more popular (talked about, linked to, and clicked on) your offer or website is, the more competitive you are. “Relevancy” is based on how well your offer or site matches the keywords. Your site should include the keyword, or be as close as possible to the keyword that’s being searched. Finally, your “content” should address the question being asked. Your goal is to answer the query as directly as possible. You want the end user to say “Yes, this is the answer I’m looking for.” The sooner you master these three criteria, the higher rank you’ll be able to achieve in search results. Mastering the art of search is not impossible; it just takes practice, time, and consistency. Take the time to think about what your potential customers are really asking and how your offer or website answers their questions. Be persistent and consistent, work through the learning curve, and you’ll find yourself with a high rank in the search engines.
Search engine marketing (SEM) has grown significantly in the last decade and is a profitable segment of the internet. “With nearly half of every dollar spent on digital advertising going toward search, it remains the most crucial channel for marketers to get right,” according to Forrester Research’s 2018 report on SEM.
Increasingly, ad budgets are being shifted away from offline marketing, such as print, direct mail, and TV advertising, and directed toward online marketing. In 2017, digital ad spending was $209 billion worldwide, the first time it eclipsed television ad spending (which reached $178 billion in 2017), according to Magna, the research unit of IPG Mediabrands.
There are many search engines out there, and they all differ in structure, search strategy, and efficiency. But according to a January 2018 report by NetMarketShare, 74.5 percent of searches were powered by Google and another 8 percent by Bing.
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Think of all the keywords and phrases for your product or service, and put them in your URL. For example, try discountchairstore, discount-sofas-and-chairs, or buydiscountfurniture. The search engines are likely to pick up multiple keywords, thereby boosting your rankings.
For the best exposure, be sure your website is listed on both these sites as well as other players like Ask, Yahoo, and AOL (yes, it’s still around), which command a small amount of search traffic and can be useful if your business provides a service of some kind that people are likely to search for. To use search engines effectively to draw visitors to your site, the keywords you choose in your domain name, title tag, and the text of your main page can spell the difference in your search engine rankings. Keyword-rich domain names, title tags, and main pages boost traffic. And when using keywords, remember it’s important to have them appear naturally. You can check Google AdWords and Google Insights to get a good idea of what sort of words and phrases people search for in your category. Look at Twitter’s trending topics for the prior few months for hints as to what people are talking about around the products or services you offer. You can narrow the trending topics menu to regional or even more granular results.
The easiest way to get ranked on search engines is to submit your domain name to various search engines. Maximizing the number of times your URL comes up in a search result is an ongoing process. It takes patience to monitor the search engines by visiting them frequently and studying your log files to see which search engines send you the most traffic. If you need to make changes in your website, particularly your opening page, to move up in the search engine rankings, do so. Spend your time submitting to the most-popular and frequented search engines.
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Google has improved the kind of insight it offers websites, adding Google Search Console to its analytics suite. It helps determine not just how visitors reach your site but what happens once they get there. You can use the results from Console to help you hone your search words and amplify your paid search efforts by using paid campaigns to push the pieces of your site visitors are most likely to go to.
Once listed, you can use free online tools, including:
SiteReportCard.com: compares your site with your competition in SEO-friendliness
LinkPopularity.com: lists all sites that have linked back to your domain name in a very basic format
iSpionage.com: shows you how your compare to your competitors in terms of search traffic
Keep in mind that Google’s share of search is so significant that it’s important to spend the most time refining your keywords for Google success.
Also keep in mind that the narrower the category, the better your chance of scoring unique visitors; for example, “percussion instruments” and “ice skating dresses” are more specific than “drums” and “sports attire” and have a better chance of scoring clicks. Think about how specific you might get when searching for an item and apply it to your business.
“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
—MARK TWAIN
Paid Search Services
Many companies also use paid search services as a supplement to SEM. These services basically allow you to pay to have your website be part of the results of a user’s query on a search engine site. There are three types of paid search services: paid submission, pay-for-inclusion, and pay-for-placement.
In paid submission, you can submit your website for review by a search service for a preset fee with the expectation that the site will be accepted and included in that company’s search engine—provided it meets the stated guidelines for submission. While paid submissions guarantee a timely review of the submitted site and notice of acceptance or rejection, you’re not guaranteed inclusion or a particular placement order in the listings.
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For more information on how to use Google AdWords, pick up Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, Fifth Edition (Entrepreneur Press, 2017) by Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes, and Bryan Todd.
Paid inclusion programs allow you to submit your website for guaranteed inclusion in a search engine’s database of listings for a set period. While paid inclusion guarantees indexing of submitted pages or sites in a search database, you’re not guaranteed that the pages will rank well for particular queries.
In pay-for-placement, you can guarantee a ranking in a search listing for the terms of your choice. Also known as paid placement, paid listings, or sponsored listings, this program guarantees placement in search results.
Google and Bing also offer pay-per-click search advertisements. These ads represent one-third of Google’s ad revenue, so experts say they pay a great deal attention to their success.
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What’s the best day to send email marketing messages? According to a 2013 Experian email benchmarking study, emails sent on Mondays had the highest ROI, but emails sent on Friday had a higher clickthrough rate. The study found that recipients are quite active late at night, with unique open rates averaging 21.7 percent from 8 P.M. to 11:59 P.M. and 17.6 percent from 12 A.M. to 4 A.M. In addition, this late-night group was more likely to click through, with open rates of 4.2 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively. So, experiment with days and times and see what works for you.
These programs allow you to bid on the terms you wish to appear for; you then agree to pay a certain amount each time someone clicks on your listing. Costs for pay-for-placement start at around a nickel a click and go up considerably based on how high you want your site to appear—and competition for keywords has the biggest bearing on that. For example, a bid on “web hosting” will result in payment of a few bucks a click if you want to get on the first page of results. But if you’re promoting, say, lighthouse tours, you may be able to get on top paying a dime a click.
In the Google AdWords program, Google sells paid listings that appear above and to the side of its regular results, and on its partner sites as well. Since it may take time for a new site to appear within Google, these advertising opportunities offer a fast way to get listed with the service.
The cost of your Google AdWords campaign depends on how much you’re willing to pay and how well you know your audience. It all boils down to knowing your goals and letting Google know what they are. Google will grant the highest position to the advertiser with the highest keywords bid and the highest clickthrough rate. Minimum costs per click start at a penny.
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More than 40 percent of consumers search for products and services on their mobile devices, according to a 2017 study by Deloitte. It’s important to experiment with—and perhaps put more of your dollars toward—mobile advertising. You can use either paid search engines or display mobile advertising companies, such as AdMob (now owned by Google, (www.google.com/admob/), Smaato (www.smaato.com/), InMobi (www.inmobi.com/), or Mojiva (www.mobyaffiliates.com/mobile-advertising-networks/mojiva/). Image and text requirements for mobile ads through these companies, as well as through Google AdWords, differ from desktop ads, so be sure to understand the difference to make sure you maximize your reach.
According to Google, your ad’s position on the page is determined by your Ad Rank. You can find more insight and tips for boosting your ad’s position at https://support.google.com/adwords/.
In the Bing Ads program, you aren’t charged to create an account; you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. The highest position is given to the advertiser with the highest keywords bid and the highest clickthrough rate. You can budget by the day or by the overall campaign goal, and the automated metrics will help manage your result. You will gainfurther insight into who turns into a customer once they click. Bing can reach some audiences Google doesn’t and claims that 27 percent of its clicks come from searches exclusive to Bing. So, take your time experimenting with both search engines.
Local Search
Want local customers to find you? Then try local search engine advertising, which lets you target ads to a specific state, city, or even neighborhood. A growing number of small businesses are using local search. In 2017, Forrester Research found that 71 percent of consumers start their search for a purchase using a search engine and 74 percent said they use a search engine for “consideration and purchasing” decisions. And, according to a 2018 online reviews survey by Review Trackers, 63.6 percent of consumers check reviews on Google before visiting a business—more than any other review site. About 35 percent of business, product, and service searches are local, according to another study by the group, with 53 percent of searchers typically visiting or contacting a local business they’ve found within 48 hours.
Like other search engine advertising, the local variety lets you track your account closely to find out which keywords are most successful at drawing customers and how much you’re spending each day.
Calling All Followers
When it comes to marketing anything on social media, without a large following, you won’t get very far. Getting there can be hard, but R.L. Adams, an entrepreneur and software engineer, offers these three tips for making the journey to a larger footprint.
1. Define your niche audience. Who are you targeting? Get specific? This is important because you’ll be curating your content toward that intended audience. Everything you do or say should be geared toward this audience. In marketing speak, they call this your demographic. The more you can define your demographic, the higher your chances for success.
2. Add massive value. You can’t succeed on social media without adding massive amounts of value. There’s fierce competition in the marketplace, and the stakes are high. Find ways you can share your expertise with others, as well as help the people that follow you in some way. The more you focus on this mentality, the more likely you’ll be to succeed in the long run.
3. Collaborate. Find like-minded entrepreneurs on social media who you can collaborate with. Reach out to them. Build a group or find another way that you can team up with others who might be in a similar situation as yourself or with a similar number of followers. There is power in numbers. You can’t expect to do this yourself or go it alone. Give accolades and praise to others and form joint ventures with other people if you want to see sustained growth in followers and fans over time.
As you can imagine, the major search engine companies offer local search options, too. You’ll find them offered on the main search marketing pages for each site.
Affiliates
Firms that sell products and services on their websites for commissions offer another way to draw site visitors. The web is democratic—a SOHO (small office home office) can be an affiliate of a Fortune 500 firm, as can other corporate giants, midsize businesses, and even charities.
Affiliates place merchant promotions on their websites to sell goods or services. They control the type of promotion, location on the site, and the length of time it runs. In return, the affiliate earns commission on clickthroughs, leads, or purchases made through the site. For example, your town’s Big Bank is the affiliate looking for local merchants to advertise on its site. It has a restaurant, an office supply store, a realtor, a law firm, and an accounting firm with ads or promotions on its site. Depending on what they negotiated with Big Bank, they’ll receive commissions on sales that initiated from their website. For every clickthrough that results in a sale, you’ll earn a commission anywhere from 1 to 10 percent for multichannel retailers or 30 to 50 percent in the software sector.
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Want to know more about search engines? Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com) can answer your questions. It compares the major search engines and tells you how to get listed. It also provides tips for searchers so you can learn to think like your customers and make it easier for them to find you. Plus, you can sign up for a free newsletter.
A survey commissioned by Rakuten Affiliate Network showed that affiliate marketing should reach $6.8 billion by 2020. What’s more, 90 percent of advertisers that answered the survey said that affiliate programs were important or very important to their overall marketing strategy.
You may want to consider joining an affiliate program network, which provides all the tools and services affiliates and merchants need to create, manage, and optimize successful affiliate marketing programs. Sites that offer quality programs include Rakuten Affiliate Network (www.rakuten.com)—which offers deals with Best Buy, Lego, and Foot Locker, among others—and CJ Affiliate by Conversant (www.cj.com). Another route is using your favorite search engines to find companies that have potential as affiliates. For example, if you own a gym and sell workout products, you might want to affiliate partner with nutritionists, personal trainers, sports drinks, and vitamin and health-food partners. If you decide to run your own affiliate programs, Infusionsoft (infusionsoft.com) offers a complete email marketing system and everything you’ll need to run a successful affiliate program.
Keeping Visitors at Your Site
A good website design and strategy for attracting visitors takes you three-quarters of the way to success. The final step is getting people to try your offerings and come back for more. The best way to do that is to treat each customer as unique. Fortunately, the web lends itself to the kind of personalization that’s relatively easy and inexpensive for even the smallest business.
With a little effort, you can address each site visitor’s needs effectively. Combined with offline strategic work—such as hitting customers every other week with a free newsletter or offering them a two-for-one special if they haven’t visited your site in two months—readily available ecommerce tools enable you to personalize as nothing else can.
The basis for customization is the cookie—a morsel of information that lets sites know where customers go. A cookie is a piece of data that’s sent to the browser along with an HTML page when someone visits a site. The browser saves the cookie to the visitor’s hard drive. When that customer revisits the site, the cookie goes back to the web server along with the customer’s new request, enabling your site to recognize the return visitor.
Here are some ideas for marketing programs you can create from an analysis of stored cookies and email:
Send a postcard to customers who haven’t bought anything online in three months, offering a $10 or $20 reward for shopping online.
Send an email with a new promotion a few weeks or months after a customer makes a purchase.
Offer a chance to win something and make it easy for visitors who drop in at least once a week to enter the contest.
If personalization seems too complicated, you can still design your website to speak to different groups of people. Let’s say you’re a realtor wanting your site to meet several needs. Create a screen with button bars like these:
If you’re a buyer, click here.
If you’re thinking of listing your house for sale, click here.
If you’re a Realtor from outside the area, click here.
If you want to join our team, click here.
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Jim Daniels, founder of online income site bizweb2000.com, advises teaming up with other sites in your niche by forming joint ventures. Search for sites that serve a similar customer base, and get their mailing addresses. Then mail them a letter offering to send them your best product or service at no charge so they can try it out. If they like it, you’ll pay them a commission if they’ll recommend it to their site visitors and newsletter subscribers. If you found them easily on the web, chances are they have lots of website traffic.
This form of customization addresses the needs of different groups. You have made an effort to provide information tailored to each market segment. It doesn’t cost a million dollars, yet increases your credibility and efficiency.
Getting visitors to stick around long enough to explore your site is just as important as tempting them to visit in the first place. Here are some tips on capturing your visitors’ attention:
Make connections. Hyperlink your email address; this means most visitors can simply click to open a blank message and send you a note.
Have fun. People who surf the internet are looking for fun, entertainment, or distraction from their day-to-day routines. You don’t have to be wild and wacky (unless you want to). Just make sure you offer original content presented in an entertaining way.
Add value. Offering something useful that customers can do adds tremendous value to your site. For example, customers can track their own packages at the FedEx or UPS site or concoct a recipe for a new drink at the Tito’s vodka site. While it doesn’t have to be quite so elaborate, offering users the ability to download forms, play games, or create something useful or fun will keep them coming back.
Keep it simple. Don’t build a site that’s more than three or four levels deep. Internet users love to surf, but they get bored when they have to sift through loads of information to find what they’re looking for.
Provide a map. Use icons and button bars to create clear navigational paths. A well-designed site should have a button at the bottom of each subpage that transports the visitor back to the site’s homepage.
Stage a contest. Nothing is more compelling than giving something away. Have the contestants fill out a registration form so you can find out who’s coming to your site.
Make payment a snap. If you’re setting up an online storefront, give customers an easy way to pay you. Consider including an online order form, toll-free order number, or fax line.
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If you want to get noticed online, offer to provide content to others. Enewsletters and magazines always need new information. One of the best ways to create an online presence is to email sites and volunteer content on a regular basis.
Use these tips to get started on the road to offering an engaging, welcoming site that will keep your visitors coming back.
The Ad-Free Zone
When you design your website’s marketing plan, remember that the internet is a community with its own set of rules that you as an entrepreneur must understand to be successful. The primary rule is: Don’t send spam.
Reach Out and Email Someone
The Direct Marketing Association offers some practical advice on how to be more successful at reaching current and potential customers through email:
Encourage customers and prospects to add your email address to their personal “approved list/address book.” Being an “approved” sender yields higher response rates and generates fewer complaints and blocking issues.
Carefully consider the content and presentation of your marketing messages because recipients are increasingly labeling any email communication that’s not relevant or looks suspicious as spam.
Click the “spam check” button in your email program to see if your email is at risk for being marked as spam. A growing number of ISPs use spam-filtering software. This technology uses algorithms to determine whether incoming messages qualify as junk email and filters them out before they get to a client’s inbox. In addition, you should register for all mailbox provider feedback loops. In general, aim to keep complaint rates (total complaints divided by total delivered email) below 0.1 percent to avoid temporary or long-term blocks.
Adopt good list-hygiene and list-monitoring practices that help facilitate message delivery. Monitoring campaign delivery and open and clickthrough rates is essential because low open rates or high bounce-back rates may indicate a delivery problem.
Not only is it annoying to recipients, but it is also illegal. In 2004, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (or CAN-SPAM Act of 2003) was signed into law. It set forth the first national standards for governing commercial email. The law requires commercial email messages to be labeled and to include opt-out instructions as well as the sender’s physical address. It also prohibits the use of deceptive subject lines and false headers. A good way to get folks to opt in to your email list—which of course they’ll have the option of opting out of—is to offer a free monthly email newsletter.
Content is wide open, but effective newsletters usually mix news about trends in your field with tips and updates on sales or special pricing. Whatever you do, keep it short. Six hundred words is probably the maximum length. Another key: Include hyperlinks so interested readers can, with a single mouse click, go directly to your site and find out more about a topic of interest.
Another tip to keep in mind: Don’t post commercial messages to newsgroups that have rules against these types of messages. For example, on the social networking site LinkedIn, don’t post massive messages that sound like sales pitches to any of the groups. However, if you’re offering valuable content and resources or if you’re looking to start a discussion on a topic, then by all means post away.
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You can get more detailed info about the CAN-SPAM Act and how it might affect your business by visiting the Federal Trade Commission’s info site for the law at www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business.