Chapter 10
Maximizing Your Web Marketing
In This Chapter
Developing your Web identity and keeping control of it
Creating a strong hub Web site and relevant satellite sites
Making your site visible to Internet search engines
Exploring the world of online advertising — and budgeting for it appropriately
Using e-mail correctly and effectively in marketing and sales
The Internet creates a versatile medium for direct marketing that, when used correctly, can make a huge impact on your marketing. You may be surprised at all the different ways you can use the Web to market your business and product line. This chapter covers the many options the Web offers, including the following: a hub Web site and a variety of satellites on separate Web pages and social networking sites; visitor registration so you can market to people via e-mail or send them postcards and catalogs through regular mail; the opportunity to track and boost your visibility on search engines; and the ability to reach a larger audience through live Webcasts of marketing events.
Whether your marketing budget is $600 or $60,000, you can use the Web to build sales in lots of exciting ways, and this chapter shows you how. (Also check out Chapter 21 to find ten tips for boosting Web sales.)
Creating and Managing a Web Identity
Your Web identity is the sum of your appearances on your own and others’ Web sites, including search engines that may list your Web sites, any banner or other ads you may be running on the Web, and blogs and other online conversational or social appearances. Just like in good real-world brand management, you need to have a clear, consistent name and image in the virtual world of Web marketing.
The core of your Internet marketing strategy (literally!) is a good hub Web site, the main Web site for your business or product that supports a range of uses, from general customer inquiries to press visits, and that also provides access to your online store. Your hub Web site’s structure should stay relatively constant. Don’t worry about it getting old because you’ll always be updating it with new products, new press releases, and banners or boxes that highlight any special promotions you may be doing elsewhere on the Web or off of it. Around this hub and connected to it through reciprocal links, you may have a wide range of smaller and/or shorter-term Web pages for specific promotions, as well as pages you may maintain on social networking and blog sites. Your ads on high-traffic Web sites and in Web directories are additional spokes that direct traffic to your hub. (See “Developing Your Hub Web Site” later in this chapter for help with the design of your site.)
The next sections take a closer look at what you can do to set and manage your Web identity.
Standardizing your Web identity
When establishing your Web identity, make sure the message you’re sending is clear and consistent. To achieve the latter, remember that you want your brand to be recognized and reinforced everywhere people run into you, both on the Web and off. Start with your URLs — the Web addresses that identify and link people to your Web pages — as well as any corporate or personal business names you may use on blogging sites and social networking sites. These Web identities need to match and reinforce your brand identity. If you can’t create Web identities that are exactly equal to your brand name (the product or company name you wish to promote), then embed that name in a longer name so it’s still visible.
If you use a variety of names on the Web that don’t really add up to one simple, clear, single identity, then you need to pick the strongest name and migrate the others toward it. For instance, if your business is named Forest and Stream Natural Landscaping, having your main Web site address be www.forestandstream.com and your blog name be ForestandStreamGardener may make perfect sense. You can even create a MySpace identity using this same name and also load lots of photographs of your successful landscape projects on Flickr (www.flickr.com) under the same moniker. If you’re using AOL, Gmail, or another common e-mail platform, you can add e-mail capability to your hub Web site address so that anyone who sees your e-mails will see the brand name and know what your Web identity is, too.
Using the top inch to advantage
When creating your Web identity, maximize the amount of screen space your customers see. The top of your Web page is where you get to hammer home a consistent, memorable, clear brand identity on the Web. In fact, Web designers and users generally accept that the top inch or two of every Web page is branding space for whoever controls that page. You want to use that top inch or two to present your brand name plus a short tag line, logo, and special promotional links and messages. Be careful though, because this space can easily get cluttered with multiple logos, messages, and promotions.
To ensure that you’re taking full advantage of this top inch or so, select type, colors, and a visual logo that tie into your overall branding. Repeat this banner design with only minor variants whenever you control the appearance of the top of a Web page. You can do a quick audit of your Web brand identity right now by looking at the top inch of every page you control. Is it as consistent and as strong as it can be? If not, clean this area up immediately.
Registering domain names
If you don’t have the right domain names (also called Web addresses or URLs) already, you need to create one or more new ones. Select candidate names based on your off-Web brand name, which can be combined with a descriptive word or short phrase if need be to make it more unique. To test the availability of a possible domain name, go to sites such as www.register.com and enter the domain name in question to see whether it’s available.
As you search for potential domain names, keep the following criteria in mind to make sure you obtain a good one for your hub site:
A good domain name relates to your business or brand. I can register the domain name www.lookmanohands.com if someone else hasn’t already. It’s catchy. It amuses me. Should I use it for my Web site address? No. It fails my first test because it doesn’t relate to my business or brand. My corporate training business is called Trainer’s Spectrum, so I use the domain name www.tspectrum.com. It’s not clever, but it’s clearly relevant to my business.
A good domain name is memorable. Someone who wants to remember it can. Using your company or brand name makes the Web site memorable to anyone who knows the name of your business. For instance, customers can easily remember that Crayola’s Web site address is www.crayola.com. Or you can simply combine two or three easy words and make the string into a memorable URL. A firm selling UV filtering glass and Plexiglas for framing valuable art could choose a sufficiently relevant and memorable domain name like www.uvprotectionglass.com.
A good domain name is unique. If your company name is similar to others, add a unique term or word in your domain name to make it more unique. For example, Ford Insurance Agency has to avoid accidentally losing Web visitors to Ford Motor Company’s www.ford.com, so the agency uses www.fordinsurance.net. Also, make sure your domain name doesn’t violate someone’s trademark. Check Web addresses against a database of trademarks (in the United States, you can do this search for free by going to patents.uspto.gov, clicking on the Trademarks link on the left-hand side of the page, and clicking on #3 [the Search TM database link]) or ask a lawyer to do a more detailed analysis if you think you may run into an issue. The trademarked domain name you want may be available, meaning you can register it at a site like www.register.com because nobody else has yet, but if you begin using it, the owner of the trademark may sue you.
Developing Your Hub Web Site
Your hub Web site is your main site where you provide broad coverage of all-important topics (each under a separate tab). It’s also home to your e-commerce site (if you plan to sell products on the Web, that is). Your hub Web site should look and feel a lot like a traditional business Web site, because it’s the all-in-one site for customers, employees, the media, and the just plain curious. What makes it a hub is that it links all of your smaller, single-purpose sites and places, including landing pages to support Web ads, your blog, your MySpace page, your Facebook page, your Flickr albums, and your YouTube videos.
Whether you ask for professional proposals from design firms or design your own site by using templates, make sure your Web site has a custom look built around your logo. Your Web site needs to put your logo and business name or brand name out there consistently and clearly. Don’t compromise your brand identity just to accommodate a cheap template or a snazzy design concept. (See the earlier “Standardizing your Web identity” section for more on the importance of consistency in your brand’s presentation online.)
No matter whether you design your own hub Web site or have someone design one for you, you should also consider adding an online shopping cart. Many basic hosting plans include a shopping cart, so you can implement this feature fairly easily by using theirs. And note that you need to have a dedicated merchant banking account linked to the shopping cart. Talk to your banker about this. If he looks at you blankly when you ask, then you need a more modern bank — switch at once.
Designing a hub Web site on the cheap
Creating your hub Web site doesn’t have to cost you thousands of dollars. If you want to save a little money, just try creating it yourself.
To create your own hub site, start small and consider the following:
Look for providers of Web site templates and select the one that offers the features, style, and pricing you like best. Many sources are available, so examine them closely to determine which one is the best fit for you. Some options include
• Google: I like the options that Google offers, including an assortment of easy-to-use, professional-looking templates.
• Firms that register domain names, such as Register.com: These companies generally offer do-it-yourself packages.
Hire an Internet service provider (ISP). You can find an ISP to host your site quite easily. In fact, dozens of ISPs may be trying to find you to make a sale. Pick one that offers the fee structure, services, and flexibility you want — and change ISPs if that ISP winds up not satisfying you. If you’re planning to build your own site using a template, then search for an ISP (working with only one is easier, if possible) that offers a template you like. Also, if you plan to set up a store on your Web site, look for an ISP that offers a shopping cart template. Many of the basic Web site templates do not include a shopping cart, so make sure you find one with a cart you like. (A low-cost alternative is to use an eBay store for your shopping cart function and link to it from your hub site.)
Consider using your domain name and ISP to provide your own e-mail addresses, too. Having your e-mail done through your own domain looks more professional and helps you promote your brand name and Web address. For example, if you register www.excellenthairproducts.com, then you may also want to have your personal e-mail be alex@excellenthairproducts.com.
Check out the latest edition of Building a Web Site For Dummies (Wiley). In this book, David Crowder discusses everything from design and implementation to e-commerce.
Hiring a professional designer or firm
A sophisticated Web site design may be beyond the reach of a do-it-yourself marketer and the available templates. If that’s the case for you, you pretty much have two options when hiring a professional:
A young freelance designer: If you need a good custom site and can afford at least a few thousand dollars for it, look for a young freelance designer who’s about to finish college and has already designed a number of good commercial Web sites on the side. I’ve used several up-and-coming designers on Web projects and saved my clients a lot of money this way. Note: I find young freelance designers need fairly close supervision, so if you don’t have the time or patience for that, look elsewhere.
A professional design firm: If you have a relatively large business already (that is, you gross at least half a million dollars a year), then don’t mess around with amateur Web site designers just to save money. Instead, visit several dozen design firms’ Web sites and look at their sample work. Choose a handful of firms that have good examples of the kind of Web work you want. Past work is the best predictor of future work.
After you have some candidates in mind, ask these firms to provide detailed proposals based on a specific list of objectives you provide. The clearer you are about your objectives, the more focused and affordable your candidates’ proposals will be. Don’t let any firm talk you into three times as much work than you think you need. Stick to your objectives. If a firm can’t offer a proposal that addresses your needs specifically, then cross that firm off of your list. No matter how impressive its proposal, the firm’s inability to follow your instructions will only end in over-budget disaster if you go ahead and work with it.
Looking at the core elements of a good hub site
The best hub Web sites are easy to navigate and feature clean, uncluttered, appealing design, despite having a great many options embedded in them. Be sure to include the following elements in your site if you want to increase your chances for success:
Simple, clear navigation: Before you do any designing, you want to ensure that people who visit your site can find what they need. To guarantee your hub site is easy to navigate, make a list of between three and six main categories or topics around which your site will be organized. In my opinion, when a home page has too many tabs or buttons, nobody can find anything, and viewers tend to get frustrated and migrate away to some competing site that’s easier to use.
Streaming video, animation, and database management: You can use these technologies as important delivery methods, like showing a speaker in action, demonstrating a new product or providing services, and supporting the consumer online.
Photographs: If you have good photos of your product in use, candid shots of customers, or any other relevant pictures, post them to illustrate your site. Or budget another $500 to $1,000 to add stock photographs to your site. Sites with relevant images — especially of real people — are graphically more appealing and hold the visitor’s attention longer. Stock photography houses sell low-resolution images (at a lower price I might add) that are optimal for the Web and load quickly.
An About Us button or tab: This button or tab links to a simple page featuring contact information, company history, customer testimonials, media clips, and photos and bios of key personnel. Try substituting short video statements for those boring photos of key people. The video footage can live on YouTube (www.youtube.com) and be called to your hub Web site when someone wants to view it — this is a cheap and easy way to offer streaming video.
Bestsellers and special offers: This element is important if you’re selling products on your hub site. Feature bestsellers and special offers on the first page, along with links (in the form of buttons or tabs) to the handful of main product categories.
Fashioning a registration-based site
A registration-based site is one that locks visitors out of the bulk of its pages until they input their name and some identifying information, such as an e-mail address, title and business, or other useful information for your marketing activities. A registration-based site builds a list of visitors for you. You can then use this list to send marketing messages by e-mail or regular mail.
Think about what you want to do with the names before deciding what information to ask people to provide. If you may want to mail or call visitors, then collect their full addresses and phone numbers.
To do so, create a form for visitors to fill in, linked to a database that captures each field (a field is a specific bit of information, such as name, title, street address 1, street address 2, state, zip code, e-mail address, daytime phone, evening phone). HTML programmers know how to program these forms, or you can use an off-the-shelf version from an ISP.
People won’t register on your hub Web site unless you offer them something that a) reduces the perceived risk they may feel they’re running by giving up their contact information and b) seems worth the minute or two registration takes. A credible, well-designed site and a well-known brand or business name reduces the sense of risk. As for what you give them to reward them for registering, that’s up to you — apply your marketing imagination to the challenge. If you have useful information, you can allow people access to it after they register. If you normally charge a fee for some service, offer a discount for visitors who register. A frequent-customer discount is another great way to entice people to fill in your form.
Getting Your Site Noticed in Search Engines
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of making your Web site as visible as possible to Internet search engines. Various consultants specialize in SEO, and if your Web traffic is too low, you can ask several of them for proposals. However, there are things you can do first that may be sufficient for building your search engine–driven traffic. The sections that follow give you some help.
Taking advantage of header and META magic
You can make sure your Web site is easy to find by tagging it with appropriate titles and terms describing its contents for the various search engines to pick up.
The first thing you need is a header block or head — a technical section that contains descriptive information about your Web page (it isn’t considered part of the page’s viewable content). Your Web pages must have heads, and these heads must include a title element. The title should be quite specific about what content will follow and include several descriptive terms or words to help search engines match your content to relevant searches.
Each page needs a title that’s relevant to its unique content (not a duplicate of the first page’s header) and has an H1 tag around it (an identifier that tells Google and other search engines what it is). For example: <h1>Boost Web Site Traffic via Search Engine Optimization Techniques</h1>. If you’re working in a template, the coding for the H1 tag should be there already, so all you have to do is type the descriptive header in the right place. Limit your header to 66 characters because Google will cut it off if it’s longer.
Next, your Web site developer (or you, if you’re trying to do Web development on your own) needs to think about what META tags your site needs. META tags are lines of HTML code that identify properties of the document — often by using keywords that may turn up in a search. For example, the author of a how-to article on a Web site may want to include a META tag such as, META name=“Author” content=“Alex Hiam.” Some templates prompt you to type in META tags. If working with a designer, ask him to include relevant terms as META tags.
Don’t expect your META tags to guarantee that people using any of the common search engines get to see your site. Way too many sites are out there these days, and yours may be listed on the 15th page, after 140 other listings. META tags can help put you in the running, but they can’t ensure a prominent page-one placement in a search engine’s results. You have to combine them with other search engine optimization tactics.
Boosting visibility on search engines
Search engines locate (or index) billions of sites from user queries each day. Consequently, you’re a needle in an immense haystack. Here are some strategies for boosting the visibility of your Web site on search engines and to Web users in general:
Make sure you have a strong presence on the Web and then manage that presence. A strong, consistent brand, with well-selected Web addresses and other identifying names (such as usernames on MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, a blogging host of your choice, and Flickr), can help make you visible on the Web. Refer to the earlier section “Creating and Managing a Web Identity” for more.
Provide a site map. The fewer links a search engine has to navigate to find content relevant to a specific search, the higher it’ll rate your site. A well-designed site map cuts the search engine’s journey down to just two links. A large Web site needs a separate page for its site map, whereas simpler pages can place the map on a navigation bar that’s visible from every page. On your map page or navigation bar, list all pages by title or topic and provide a direct link to each one.
Communicate directly with your customers to build traffic. Search engines look at traffic when ranking pages, so anything you do through direct communication with your customers to build traffic can help. Offer free informational or entertaining content people will want to visit and download. Consider hosting a bulletin board about your industry or product. Make your Web site a resource for customers and noncustomers alike, so as to maximize the amount of interaction with visitors.
Collect, post, and update a page of links to related sites to improve your ranking. Put a tab or button on your home page that’s labeled Links, or if you want to pump up its appeal, label it The Best Links, Recommended Links, Our Pick of Links, or something like that. To find sites to link to, do your own searches and see what sites appear in the top ten listings. Then visit each of them and see whether you can find appropriate places and ways to link to them from your site (and vice versa, if possible). A company that distributes products for you or a professional association in your industry is a natural to link to your site. Build such links and the higher-ranked sites tend to draw yours up toward them. But make sure you have useful content to justify those links! Very brief reviews of the linked-to sites may increase the value of your links page and thus build usage and traffic.
Build a family of sites and social networking site pages around your hub Web site. Doing so may capture traffic out on the rim of your Web presence and direct it toward your hub. Include single-purpose, single-topic satellite pages and optimize the META tags for these pages so they rank higher than your hub site in searches specific to their topics. Check out the “Adding Satellites around Your Hub Site to Draw Visitors” section later in this chapter for more info.
Advertise to build traffic. Traffic increases rank on most search engines, so a promotion that drives traffic to your Web site gets amplified by follow-on traffic that comes from search engine visibility, which in turn creates more visibility. I cover advertising options in the later “How to Advertise on the Web” section.
Driving traffic with content
To increase the length of time users spend on your Web site, and to ensure high involvement and return visits, you need to think like a publisher, not an advertiser. For this reason, I consider strong content to be the hidden factor for increasing Web site traffic. Unless you have valuable and appealing content, you may have difficulty building up traffic on your site. If you don’t know how to write (or film) and publish great content for the Web, enlist the help of eager young writers, videographers, and others who do. However you do it, make sure you enrich your hub site (and/or satellite sites) with valuable content visitors will want.
You basically have two kinds of content you can offer on your site. I’ve coined these terms because there don’t seem to be appropriate terms in the Web lexicon. (You may need to explain these terms and the content strategies they represent if you’re working with a Web designer.) They are as follows:
Durable content: It holds its value and may be kept on your Web site in an easy-to-access archive.
Ephemeral content: It’s useful for a few days to a week but has to be replaced regularly, or else it gives your site an abandoned, neglected feel.
I suggest you try to have a mix of durable content (such as useful facts for your customers) and ephemeral content (such as commentaries on recent events). Update the durable content at least once a year and renew the ephemeral content every day or week, deleting out-of-date content as you add the new stuff. (Most Web sites have a lot of out-of-date ephemeral content on them; don’t let yours be one of them.)
If you don’t have a ton of time to keep updating ephemeral content, focus on putting durable content on your Web sites. This useful information accumulates on your sites and builds traffic more durably than ephemeral content. And unless you’re a journalist or an insomniac blogger, it’s hard to do your real work and also post fresh new content on the Web every day. Durable content works for you while you ignore it. I like that. Your durable content should include reference materials of use to your customers, such as
A glossary of technical terms
A list of readings, Web pages, and other useful references
White papers and how-to instructional pages and blogs
Instructional videos and photos (which you can post on YouTube, Google Videos, or Flickr and call up to display on your hub Web site)
Reaching your traffic tipping point
The tipping point concept applies to Web visibility. You have to do a lot of work initially to build traffic, and that hard work often seems difficult and costly. But as soon as you begin to be one of the more visible sites in your topic area, the traffic starts to sustain itself. So have faith and keep plugging away until your site’s traffic is high and you appear among the top dozen sites for key searches relating to your product or service.
What if you do everything you can to build traffic but your Web site continues to be ignored? Then you may be tempted to hire one of the many companies that offer search engine optimization (SEO) consulting services. Most of these firms (such as Wpromote, which has a service called QuickList; see www.promote.com/quicklist for details) work for a fairly reasonable fee, and there’s little harm in trying them for a month or two to see what happens.
Adding Satellites around Your Hub Site to Draw Visitors
Many opportunities are available for increasing your Web reach and presence. For starters, you can put smaller or more specialized Web sites and pages in orbit around your hub site to attract more and different types of visitors and draw them toward your hub. Interested in knowing more about how such satellite Web sites can help your main hub site? The following sections have you covered.
Using landing pages effectively
If you advertise on the Web (and I suggest you do; see the later “How to Advertise on the Web” section for tips), then you probably need one satellite Web page for each ad campaign. A campaign is a run, also referred to as a flight, of ads that deliver the same basic message or offer but may do so in different formats or styles depending on where they’re placed. Because the campaign has the same basic message or offer, all the ads can include a link to one landing page (the name for the satellite Web site that supports an ad campaign).
Two types of landing pages exist. Pick the one that supports your ad campaign best:
A transactional landing page (also called a lead capture page) finishes the job the ad started by persuading visitors to complete some kind of transaction, such as making a purchase or signing up for a membership or special offer. Special trial offers are often effective on transactional landing pages. Write a transactional landing page like you would any good ad or catalog copy (see Chapters 6 and 7), but keep the copy simple and short because people don’t like to read at length on the Web. Also keep in mind that a majority of those folks who click on the ad and arrive at your landing page will then move on without taking further action. You may want to give some of these defectors a lower-level way to engage (like offering to send them free information if they simply sign up for your database).
A reference landing page aims to fill the visitor’s informational needs by providing useful content, such as links, reviews, and professional listings. Marketers for associations and nonprofits tend to use reference landing pages more than for-profit marketers do, but this type of page can be helpful in a wide range of ad campaigns. If you build a reference landing page that has rich enough content to attract a steady flow of thousands of visitors a month, you can sell advertising on it and turn it into a revenue stream. Use Google AdSense to sell ad space on your Web site or go through broker sites such as www.direct-link-ads.com. Marketers with valuable information may be able to subsidize their own advertising by selling ads on a reference page.
Regardless of the type of landing page you employ, be sure to track visitor statistics with an eye to conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who sign up for your list, accept your special offer, or make a purchase). Ultimately, you want to optimize this ratio. Experiment with ads that attract people who’re easy to convert; also experiment with the copy, layout, and offer on your landing page. The more you experiment, the more you discover about how to convert visitors at a good rate.
Conversion rates on successful landing pages may range from 1 to 50 percent depending on the type of site, offer, and visitor, so there’s no magic number to shoot for. The best way to know you’re succeeding is to document an improvement over your own past performance.
Note that you don’t always have to create a physically separate site for your satellite. A page within your hub site that can be linked to (and that offers navigation to a registration page, your home page, and a shopping cart page) can provide an appropriate landing page. The key is to create a dedicated landing page that draws people further in by getting them to sign up or begin using something right away.
Building relationships by blogging
Many of my readers are experts in their fields with interesting viewpoints, anecdotes, and tips. In other words, they’re people who can write good columns or blogs. A blog is really just a modern-day column posted on a Web site rather than printed in a newspaper. I recommend blogs over traditional columns because they’re easier to set up and because they tend to attract more readers, thus creating new marketing relationships with prospective customers. However, note that the average blog —a personal rant that doesn’t seem very professional — isn’t what I’m talking about. Most marketers need professional blogs, which take the same form as personal blogs but with content that’s more consistent and professional (think how-to advice, tips, and interesting facts aimed at potential customers).
To help you get your own business blog started, compare blog services (such as blog.com) to find one that offers the platform you want. Many are free, but if you upgrade to fee-based blogs, you can get rid of the ads that pop up on the freebie services — and on a corporate site you may not want other companies’ ads mixing with your message. For current examples of popular executive blogs, check out Corporate Leaders Blogs (www.corporateleadersblogs.com), which posts a list of the top ten CEO blogs and offers commentary on each one. (If you follow the links to the featured blogs, you’ll see what blog hosting services they use.)
Take a look at Adobe’s blogs (blogs.adobe.com), where the software company aggregates technical and how-to blogs by many of its employees. The look is amazingly simple and clean considering this company makes software such as Illustrator and PhotoShop. (I don’t know why Adobe uses a simple text format for its blog site; perhaps the goal is to emphasize that the blog is all about serious content.) Many designers and artists visit these blogs regularly for ideas and tips, making them an important link to the customer community.
Also look at airplane maker Boeing’s blog (boeingblogs.com/randy), which is written by one of its top executives and speaks to employees as well as customers and the general public. This is a good example of brand management on a blog page. The banner features the Boeing logo on the left and a product — an airplane in flight — along with the more specific brand name for this blog: Randy’s Journal.
My favorite example of a corporate blog is the one maintained by the photography Web site Flickr (blog.flickr.net/en). It features interesting examples of photographs on Flickr, and it has a well-done subscription form on the top-left corner that you can use as a model. I recommend adding a subscription option to your blog so you can capture readers’ names for your marketing activities.
Getting active on social networking sites
If you’re targeting a young audience, a cool social networking site such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or LinkedIn can be the core of your Web marketing strategy. But even if you’re not aiming your product at twenty- or thirty-somethings, I urge you not to overlook the value of social networking sites.
To brand yourself on these sites, make honesty your number one priority. Regular users of social networking sites quickly see through fake personas and reject insincere and inappropriate friend requests. Don’t engage in astroturfing, the term for marketers who try to create fake grassroots buzz on social networking sites. Leave astroturfing to ruthless political campaign consultants whose huge budgets make up for their lack of morals. Real marketers don’t create a buzz unless genuine interest exists in them and their message.
The foundation of brand development on the various social networking sites is either to create and maintain pages in your own name or in the name of your brand. Any number of businesses, ranging from destination resorts to local hair salons, have MySpace pages where they post fun information, photos, or videos about their work and customers. (You can do the same on Facebook, but I recommend creating a personal page in your own name there and adding information about your work along with the personal information that normally makes up a Facebook page.)
If you’re already communicating with peers and friends on a social networking site, then you shouldn’t have a problem creating a brand presence there too. On the other hand, if hopping on Twitter or Facebook is totally foreign and unappealing to you, then you’re probably not going to succeed in integrating your business or brand into the site’s Web community. Instead of giving up, find someone (preferably a person under age 30) who loves these social networking sites and hire him part time to establish your brand identity for you.
After you have one or more pages set up on social networking sites, you can use them as a platform to launch a viral marketing campaign, which is simply the introduction of some piece of content that others will enjoy or find useful enough to pass along. An obvious option is a how-to video that demonstrates one or more of your products. Post it on YouTube and then link to it on your blog, Web site, and MySpace page. Tada! It’s now available for anyone on the Web. If the video has legs — appeal that makes others want it — then links to it will begin popping up on other people’s Web sites and social networking pages; in other words, the video will go viral (spread on its own). If it doesn’t, make another video with more appeal. Making something that lots of people love isn’t easy, so be persistent if you want to use this strategy to good effect.
How to Advertise on the Web
To make your hub and satellite Web sites (see the earlier sections in this chapter for the scoop on these specific sites) visible to anyone searching for them, you need to spend some advertising dollars. In fact, most marketers have to turn to Web advertising at some point. If you’re one of them, the sections that follow can set you off on the right foot.
As with all advertising, start small with your Web campaign, look for profitable returns, and only scale up when you’re fairly sure you have a winning ad that won’t lose money for you.
Starting with pay-per-click search ads
People punch in search terms millions of times a day, so a great way to attract prospective customers is to make sure your Web site pops up when they do an Internet search. Lots of search engines exist, but the largest ones are (in order) Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com. Together these four sites account for more than 99 percent of all English-language searches. To see what comes up when someone searches for a product or business like yours, make a list of the sorts of key terms a prospective customer might use and punch them into any of these search engines. You’ll get pages and pages of listings, some of them commercial in nature. The commercial listings are usually paid for on a usage basis, meaning that the marketer pays a fee each time someone clicks on his listing. Basically, you never pay for ads unless they’re used. Isn’t pay-per-click advertising a great concept?
Pay-per-click advertising (also sometimes referred to as key-term advertising) should be the foundation of your Web advertising because it reaches people when they’re actively looking for something — either information or a product or service to buy. The fact that they’re actively searching means they’re likely interested in buying, which means you can turn them into your customers relatively easily.
Here’s how pay-per-click ads generally work:
1. You write a very short (one-line only) text-based description of your product, service, or special offer.
This is the foundation of your pay-per-click ad.
2. You link your ad to key terms you think people will use in searches.
Do this by following a specific search engine’s instructions for advertisers and entering your bids for specific search terms in the relevant form.
3. You tell the Internet search engine how much you’ll pay for a click on your ad.
This is your bid. For example, I might commit to a bid of 50 cents for a click on the search term “marketing advice.” So if someone follows my link from his search to my Web site, I owe Google 50 cents. If my bid is higher than anyone else’s bid, my listing appears before any other commercial listings at the top of the searcher’s screen, which increases the probability of that person clicking on my listing.
4. You sit back and track the results.
Based on your findings, you may have to adjust the wording of your ad, the selection of key terms, and the amount you bid on them. Keep experimenting day by day until you find a formula that works for you. Then revisit your formula once a week or so to make more minor adjustments as needed.
All Internet search engines these days offer pay-per-click advertising. I suggest you start by experimenting with Google AdWords (adwords.google.com). Google has the biggest share of the search engine market, so you’ll probably reach more prospective customers through Google than any other search engine. Also, it’s easy to look at monthly and year-to-year trends in searches on Google by using Google Trends (www.google.com/trends). This site can alert you to slow periods (searches for many business-oriented terms fall off sharply in December), allowing you to time your pay-per-click advertising to peak search periods.
Adding banner ads to your repertoire
Banner ads (those brightly colored rectangles at the top of popular Web pages) are the Web’s answer to display advertising in a print medium or outdoor advertising on a billboard. They’re good for building awareness of your brand, but not much more than that.
Think of designing a banner ad the same way you would a billboard poster (see Chapter 8) — as a way to get across a very simple, clear, and engaging message. Use only a single, brief headline, perhaps supported by a logo and a couple lines of body copy. Alternately, you can use a brand name and an illustration. In either case, the ad must be simple and bold — able to attract the viewer’s attention from desired information elsewhere on the screen for long enough to make a simple point.
Whatever you do, don’t let your banner ad get too lengthy; Web viewers don’t want to read a ton of copy, and you’ll lose their interest in a flash if you use more than a handful of engaging words.
You can create your own banner ads by searching for and selecting any of the many banner ad templates that are for sale over the Web. Or you can hire a Web design firm to create a banner ad that’s designed to fit your marketing program more exactly. A good Web design firm often adds enough value because of its experience and expertise to make paying the firm’s fees worth it, so don’t be afraid to ask for proposals and consider the option of hiring a pro.
If you decide to use a banner ad for direct-action advertising, be sure to include a clear call to action in your ad. Typical Web banner ads don’t give enough information about the product to stimulate an urge for immediate action. Nor do they make taking action easy.
After you design a good banner ad, you need to give even more thought to where it sends the interested viewer. Usually a dedicated landing page is necessary (see the earlier section “Using landing pages effectively” for more on landing pages). You also need to determine the best sites on which to place your banner ad. The three criteria to keep in mind are traffic (favor sites with lots of visitors), a good fit with what you do (favor sites where your customers are likely to be), and cost (compare sites where traffic is high and the fit is good, and shop around for the best ad rates).
MySpace’s ability to deliver a specific profile makes it a good place to experiment with banner ads. Search “MyAds on MySpace” for a current entry link or try advertise.myspace.com for specific information and instructions. You can then target your MyAd toward a specific profile consisting of age, gender, location, hobbies, and other variables. For example, a dating and relationship coach can target single women in the Miami area who like outdoor recreational sports with a banner ad that says “Looking for a ‘sensitive, single man’ who’ll keep up with you on a weekend bicycle trip?” Even better, you can set a daily limit on the budget for your ad so you won’t have a nasty surprise on your credit card bill at the end of the month.
Furthering your Web campaign with creative display ads
Previously, Web ad campaigns used to be based almost entirely on banner advertising (which is a form of Web display advertising). Now the best campaigns integrate multiple forms of advertising, including
Buttons: Very small, clickable ads.
Half-banners: Half-sized banner ads that provide significant cost savings.
Square pop-up ads: These open on top of the active Web page in their own small browser windows.
Pop-under ads: These open as larger windows beneath the current Web page.
Skyscrapers: These are tall, thin ads that look like vertical banner ads.
In addition, Web ad agencies offer lots of creative new options, including interactive ads such as widgets, which are banners with an overlay of a pop-up interactive box that usually asks for an e-mail address in exchange for a chance to win some contest or prize. You can also animate a pop-up or regular display ad or include video in it. Or you can use one of the skyscraper formats to create something that looks like an old-fashioned printed coupon, with the addition of a live form for entering an e-mail address and linking to a landing page where the offer’s details are provided and the deal is sealed.
Then there’s the interactive, a Web display ad that invites the viewer to try his hand at something entertaining or useful. For example, a kitchen design company may run an interactive display ad on Web sites whose content is aimed at homeowners and remodelers. The copy might say something like “Click here to use our kitchen design software for free.” The trick with interactive Web ads is to quickly send people to a landing page where they fill in a short registration form, allowing you to capture their information before you give them access to the free tool or toy.
If your initial experiments with Web advertising (pay-per-click ads, banner ads, and other display ads) are at all encouraging, consider hiring a Web design and advertising firm to develop a more extensive program that includes a wide variety of Web display ads. Search for a firm in your area so you can sit down face to face and make sure you like and trust the personnel involved. Then set very specific objectives and budgets so the campaign doesn’t get out of control. Of course, if you really want to manage your own Web marketing campaign, you can, but it takes time and a willingness to roll up your sleeves and learn how to do it yourself. I recommend using display ad templates unless you want to spend all of your days programming in HTML rather than running your marketing campaign.
As for where to place your Web display ads, follow the same general criteria that you would for placing Web banner ads (see the preceding section): Target high-traffic sites that are a good fit with your brand and offer competitive ad prices.
Knowing How Much to Budget
When asked how much of a marketing budget should be set aside for Web marketing, I tell people to strive for between 10 and 25 percent. However, this is a very broad generalization. I’ve suggested to some clients that they spend 100 percent of their net profits on Web marketing for a year or two, in order to boost themselves up to national or international visibility. For clients whose business comes largely from word of mouth, I’ve recommended they keep their total Web spending at 1 or 2 percent of revenues.
You have to determine what percentage is right for you by trying different marketing initiatives and seeing what happens. If you’re a fairly small business right now and you run a banner ad that swamps you with great leads and orders, then maybe you should borrow money to run that banner ad all over the place and scale up your business to meet the demand it produces. If so, then you may actually decide to spend more than your last year’s revenue on this year’s Web marketing. Sounds radical, but in the right circumstances, it can be sensible. No point allowing opportunity to pass you by!
The one thing I can say with absolute certainty about ad budgets is this: Don’t send good money after bad. If you run an ad, invest in a Web site, or do any other Web marketing that loses money and doesn’t seem to boost your leads and build your brand, admit defeat and refuse to spend more on the same kinds of activities. You can and should see positive results from your Web advertising. Increase your spending in response to positive feedback from your market. If an ad doesn’t work on a small scale, it’s not going to work on a big scale. Try something else — on a small scale, of course — and keep experimenting until you find an approach that produces positive results.
Understanding E-mail Etiquette
You can create, or hire your Web site designer to create, an e-mail that looks like a well-designed Web page, with animation and clickable buttons linking to your site. Then all you have to do is blast it out to millions of e-mail addresses and surely you can make millions overnight.
Not so fast! Okay, so you have this great marketing message or sales pitch, and you want to send it to everyone in the world who has an e-mail address. You can do that, but I don’t advise it. The more specific and narrow your use of e-mail for marketing, the better. And U.S. marketers must be careful to avoid violating federal restrictions on spam (junk e-mails). I help you stay on the sunny side of these laws in the following sections.
Sending appropriate individual e-mails
The best marketing e-mail is a personal communication with a customer you know, sent individually from you with an accurate e-mail return address as well as your name, title, company name, full mailing address, and phone number. It may read as follows:
Subject: Thanks for your order!
Dear so-and-so,
I wanted to follow up after your purchase of (your product) on (date) to see how it’s working out for you and to thank you for your continuing business. If you have any concerns or questions, please let me know by return e-mail, or feel free to call my private cellphone number, (xxx) yyy-zzzz. Thanks!
Best,
Your Name
Your customer is going to receive, open, read, and appreciate an e-mail like this one. He may even respond to it, especially if he has any current concerns or questions or has another order on its way. Even if he doesn’t reply to it, however, he appreciates that e-mail. And that message doesn’t bug anyone or look like spam.
Use e-mail as much as you can for legitimate, helpful, one-on-one contact and support of customers or prospects.
Going over the guidelines for mass e-mails
Sometimes sending an e-mail to a list rather than an individual is appropriate, but please make sure you have a clear purpose that benefits everyone on the list. Also make sure your list is as focused as possible to avoid angering people. Goodwill is a valuable asset, so don’t destroy it!
The following list has some additional guidelines for good mass e-mailing that I think all marketers should follow. My inspiration for them comes from the Association for Interactive Marketing and the Direct Marketing Association, which have guidelines for the responsible use of e-mail. These guidelines for bulk e-mailing also take U.S. federal regulations into account:
Send e-mails only to the people who ask for them. Your bulk e-mails should ideally go only to those people who’ve given you permission to contact them. You get the most solid form of consent when someone asks you to include him in your mailing. You can get these requests by creating a useful e-newsletter and advertising it on the Web as a free subscription. Those people who sign up really want it, and they’re happy to see the next issue arrive.
Remove addresses from your list immediately when people ask to be removed. Why? See the earlier rule about not angering your customers and recall that in the United States, refusing to allow people to opt out is illegal. Also, people have such widespread distrust of Web marketers that you may consider writing the person a brief, individual e-mail from you (identify yourself and your title for credibility), letting him know you’ve eliminated him from the list and are sorry if you’ve inconvenienced him. Don’t say any more in the e-mail or try to make a sale — you’ll just make the person even madder. By being so responsive to his complaint, you generally leave a positive impression, so don’t be surprised if your special attention to his request leads him to initiate a sale later on.
Test purchased e-mail lists before using them. This guideline is applicable only if you absolutely insist on buying a list. If you do, try e-mailing a very simple, short, nonirritating message to the list, like an offer to send recipients a catalog or free sample, and ask for a few pieces of qualifying information in return. See what happens. Cull all the many bounce-backs and irritated people from the list. Now your list is a bit better in quality than the raw list was. Save those replies in a separate list — they’re significantly better and more qualified and deserve a more elaborate e-mail, mailing, or (if the numbers aren’t too high) a personal contact.
Respect privacy. People don’t want to feel like someone’s spying on them. After all, real people live at the end of those e-mail addresses and deserve to be treated as such! Never send to a list if you’d be embarrassed to admit where you got the names. You can develop an e-mail list in plenty of legitimate ways (from customer data, Web ads, inquiries at trade shows, return postcards included in mailings, and so on), so don’t do anything your neighbors would consider irritating or sleazy.
Send your bulk e-mails just like you send individual ones. Use a real, live, reply-able e-mail address. I hate it when I can’t reply to an e-mail — it makes me mad! And as any good marketer knows, you don’t want to make customers and prospects mad.
Include your company name and a real mailing address. If you’re in the United States, federal law now requires that you include this contact information. Also give recipients an easy way to opt out of future e-mailings — another legal requirement in the United States.
Make sure the subject line isn’t deceptive. U.S. law now requires you to make your subject line straightforward (that’s just good sense anyway). In marketing, you want to know right away if someone isn’t a good prospect instead of wasting your time or his when he has no interest in your offer.
Keep your e-mail address lists up to date. When you get a hard bounce-back (a notice that a message was undeliverable) from an address, remove it and update your e-mail list for the next mailing. A soft bounce-back is an undeliverable message resulting from some kind of temporary problem. Track it to see whether the e-mail eventually goes through. If it doesn’t, eliminate this address from your list.
People change their e-mail addresses and switch servers, so you can easily have bounce-backs on your list who may still be good customers or prospects. At least once a year, check these inactive names and try to contact them by phone or mail to update their e-mail addresses. Some of them are still interested and don’t need to be cut from your list; they just need their e-mail addresses updated.
If you’re e-mailing to an in-house list of people who’ve bought from you, gone to your seminar, or asked for information in the past, remind them of your relationship in the e-mail. They may have forgotten.