Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing Blog

      

Internet marketing or online marketing as it’s more famously known is really something completely different from traditional marketing. One of the biggest advantages of internet marketing is that it is a form of marketing of which every step in the process can be tracked thus allowing you the ability to easily gauge if your campaign is yielding the results that you would expect.

Now that’s all well and good, I can go on rambling about all the benefits of Online marketing but I know that some of you out there are thinking,  “Hold on mate, Internet marketing did not work for my business when I tried it”. Now granted there are a quite a few snake oil salesmen out there so there is a big possibility that you might have been ripped off by one of them. In my experience internet marketing has really worked for most of our clients. There definitely is a few examples that just isn’t suited for internet marketing but we have found that it isn’t the logical ones.

Now for most companies you need a bespoke solution or strategy. It definitely isn’t a one-size fits all thing that you can just copy and repeatedly use. If your online marketing company didn’t sit down and find out what your goals are and discuss strategies to reach them then they haven’t got your best interests at heart.

So you need to plan a strategies that will suite your company and it’s goals. You also need to plan which platforms you are going to use to reach your goals as these play a vital role in planning your marketing campaigns and how you will be measuring them.

You need to plan which platforms or forms of Internet marketing you will be using. There are quite a few from PPC, SEO, Facebook, Social Media, and Email Marketing. You need to decide which platforms will suite your goals and the nature of your business the best.

Keeping track of your campaigns is vitally important to determine if your campaigns are succeeding. We have had clients who did not understand this and as a result thought that the marketing wasn’t working for them. Only after we did a analysis did we find that most of their leads (70%) was being generated from online marketing. Planning how you will be tracking your internet marketing campaign is equally as important as planning the campaign itself, if you more important.

Keeping track of your campaigns isn’t only to measure their success but also to improve them while they are active. Because of the nature of online marketing you can quite easily make changes to a campaign to improve the results. This means you can quickly change the campaign to remove factors that might be inhibiting the success thus greatly improving your results without wasting money on a full campaign only to notice the issue afterwards.

Now we know internet marketing has been over sold by businesses in the industry but we’re going to try and show you how you can have a look at what happened in your campaign and if your company wasn’t right for online or if your marketing strategy just not managed properly. We will segment these by platform to try and touch on all factors. So please check in again soon.

Have an amazing week!

Chris

      

People are now online more often than they where a few years ago. This can probably be attributed to the fact that they can now do so much more then a few years back. People online can now socially share everything from videos to photos and even look at where their friends are right now. This means they have more reason to be online which in turn also makes them savvier Internet users.

People don’t only go online for social reasons though but a lot of time online is also spend either doing research on their next holiday or the next camera they want to purchase. This trend will only increase as users end up spending more and more time online as they discover what all they can do online.

This is why it is vitally important for you to have an website these days even if you are a little guest house located in the middle of nowhere. In all likelihood people still need your service there and your clients will love you if you make it easier for them to find you by having a website.

Now that I have hopefully convinced you to go get your business a website you can’t stop there. You need to make sure you create an online presence for your website. Now there are a few ways to do this, which work the best when done together, but I will only discuss SEO.

Most users make use of search engines to find what they are looking for be it by typing in what they are looking for in the address bar and their default search engine answering them or them visiting a search engine like Google and searching for it there. SEO is the process of ensuring when visitor search for something that relates to your website that they will find you as an option to fulfil their need.

Thus SEO creates a presence online by offering your company, as an option to fulfil your visitors needs. Now you can’t be everywhere at the same time in real life neither can your website thus it’s important that you ensure you create your online presence with this in mind. You need to target users that are actually looking for your services and not everything related to your company or products. For this reason it is vitally important to ensure you create the right online presence with SEO.

Now to evaluate if you have created the right online presence is not that easy it will take constant monitoring and understanding of what users are actually doing on your website.  Examples would be that if you see that you have a high bounce rate your visitors aren’t finding your content relevant to what they where searching for or your online presence is targeting the wrong users. My best advice for this would be to constantly monitor it and make deductions based on your evaluations of what is happening on your website.

I want to end by rehashing the fact that SEO only forms part of a strategy to create an online presence. You will need to make sure you cover all aspects as the way people are finding what they need is changing as the internet changes so make sure your business stays up to date.

      

I know this has probably been discussed so many times online that everyone is an expert on the topic by now. Everybody understands the strengths and weaknesses of either form of marketing by now… But then why is it still so difficult to sell it to some top management executives or directors? If everyone knows about the awesome benefits of online marketing why are so few companies really harnessing its powers?

The answer is most people don’t understand it or have bad experiences of marketing online. The key here is simple, just like with any other traditional marketing your strategy needs to be clearly defined but before we go into that lets look at the two different forms.

Traditional marketing can be defined as any form advertising that was used prior to the Internet. The lines are definitely being blurred but this is a good rule of thumb to live by. Classic forms of this are radio, TV, billboards and flyers. Anything since then that is served using an Internet connection can be classified as an online marketing.  Online marketing includes search engine marketing, banner advertising, email marketing and quite a few more.

Now where these fundamentally differ is in the goals that they achieve. Traditional marketing has most of its power vested in building and broadening reach of businesses brands. This is definitely a key factor that no company could survive without. Online marketing on the other hand is a form of direct marketing, which means that the audience has the chance to directly respond to advertising as they are exposed to it. This vastly increases ROI as users are able to respond while they experience a need compare to traditional where they need to remember it so they can respond to it later.

Another factor that sets apart the two forms of advertising is measurability. Online marketing is the clear winner when it comes to measurability as it takes place in an environment that allows us to track our customers from the adverts they click on till they perform actions that are valuable to our business. Traditional marketing has developed some forms of tracking but they have stumbling blocks, one of the biggest being that they rely on human memory. People forget the tracking telephone number you offer them or they forget to claim the discount code which kills most tools you have to track traditional adverts. This means you will only ever be able to see a sample of the users that traditional marketing generates.

The high ROI of online marketing means even SME’s can take advantage of it and yield great results from it. They can also measure exactly where their leads are originating from and optimize their campaigns accordingly. When it come to corporate companies the combination of traditional marketing and online marketing means that prospective customers manage to find you after you have stimulated a need with traditional marketing. Not only that but the branding power of your traditional marketing campaign means that your visitors from online marketing will convert into leads or sales far higher than when using only one form.

So how do you convince your boss? Well you now have some facts to use and my favorite is measurability. The fact that you can launch an online marketing campaign and track every lead or sale generate by it means that you will be able to demonstrate the benefits even when you implement a smaller test campaign.

Directors need to make a business run sustainably and this means that it comes down to numbers for them. If you can show them the return on investment that online marketing generates they would be crazy not to buy into the idea.