The festive period means shops are selling Christmas trees, stockings, advent calendars and singing Christmas collectibles; all of which signals that the countdown to Christmas has begun.

So what should you be doing now in preparation for a lucrative Christmas?

Here are a few things you can do during this festive season:

The first step is to look at your account’s history:

Analyse your accounts past metrics such as cost per click, impressions and conversion rate in order to plan your strategy effectively. One metric that is pretty useful is the average position of the text ads and the related performance, so you will know more or less how to position your “special ads” to achieve the best results.

Choose relevant keywords and match types:

Ensure that you add festive keywords to your keyword list such as “Christmas gifts, Christmas hampers, Wine for Christmas” etc. Be sure to also include variations and misspellings as well, in this case it would be prudent to include search terms such as “Xmas gifts, Holiday activities, Xmas table decor” etc. You could even further improve relevancy, if for example you sold Christmas trees online, you could include keywords that include a clear call to action, such as “Buy Christmas Trees”. This type of keyword is great for your ROI. Another key point is to be aware of match types, if you are operating on a large advertising spend, a campaign incorporating all match types would be feasible, however if you have a smaller budget, you can try limiting the campaigns to exact and phrase match keywords.

Inject some glitter to your ad text:

This is the time of year where the competition is quite stiff, so in order to grab the user’s attention, you need to have ad text that really jumps off the page. Include call to actions, free offers and special discount prices in the ad text and more importantly include the “Christmas” terms as well.

Landing pages and website:

It’s important to keep the Christmas feel and theme on your landing pages and website, Christmas is a significant time for many people and these little touches can make a big difference in persuading users who have clicked through to convert by making a purchase.

Happy Marketing This Christmas Season!

With Search engine optimisation (SEO) you not only build brand awareness, but more importantly, you gain trust within your industry. The higher the ranking of your site in the search results, and the more frequently your page appears on the results pages, the more visitors and sales you’ll have, because you are targeting people who are looking for your product. Being listed on top of search engine results also almost automatically cements your company as a market leader.

Trust + brand awareness + more visitors = more sales.

So what is SEO? SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of structuring a web page so that it is found, read, and indexed by search engines as effectively as possible. It improves the visibility of your website in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

These search engines use crawlers to follow links from one page to another and retrieve the contents. This is indexed and added to their databases. Search engines’ web crawlers rank sites according to their relevance to search terms, which is calculated using criteria such as the extent of keyword matches and the number of sites linked to a website. Done properly, SEO ensures that, when users search for terms relevant to your business, they will find your website every time.

Unique content counts. Having professionally written, relevant copy on your site (different from the content on other sites in wording, structure and topics) can provide a big boost for your site’s rankings. Frequency of content change is also a must – not small changes to existing content, but new content which shows that your website is active and dynamic.

Gone are the days of telesales agents calling you at every conceivable hour of the day to sell you that Cellphone contract that you do not want or need. Also, you have the right to demand being removed from mailing lists if you receive spam text SMS’s that do not give you the option to opt out. This also pertains to all other forms of spam emails and other correspondence. This is certainly great news for the consumers, but how does this affect the marketers of all these goods and services? Well now there are fewer avenues to reach potential customers, but there is one avenue that many marketers are starting to rely on to reach an ever-growing online market.

The online population has exploded in the last ten years, with companies like Facebook having more users than all but 3 countries’ populations on earth and marketing budgets all over the world are moving over from the old traditional forms to the new age of marketing, online marketing. The biggest player on the online information/ search engine market is undoubtedly Google. Whenever there is something you want to know, buy or sell, Google can provide you a portal to literally Billions of websites, information and potential customers.

So what does this have to do with the CPA, well it comes down to two words: Permission Marketing. Permission marketing, the opposite is called interruption marketing, is when consumers give you “permission” to advertise and sell to them by clicking on adverts and websites and by searching for information or products. Thus they are coming to you for this info and thus the CPA places no restrictions on this form of marketing. Many large companies are relying heavily on their websites to sell their products and services and some companies do not even have physical offices anymore.

To conclude, the CPA has contributed heavily to the changing face of marketing in South Africa and marketers everywhere have had to adapt their strategies to accommodate this. Companies are spending millions each month advertising using Google and Facebook ads as well as optimizing their websites to rank high on search engines (SEO). The only question that remains is “Can you afford not to adapt your marketing strategy as well”?

Gone are the days of waiting patiently for a letter in the post, of standing in line to see if you got some form of communication from a far away friend or relative, and then cherishing every second and every word the letter contained.  In fact, gone are the days of even reading every word in every letter.

What does this mean to us corporates wanting to impart valuable educational information to our clients?  How does this affect our marketing strategies and capture the attention of our potential clients?

We need to innovatively adapt. We need to look at avenues where customers choose to interact with us, rather than the other way round.  We need to impart product knowledge, educate and sell, rather, to the customer while they are either in need of it, or actively looking at acquiring it – where they are most amenable to receiving the information and acting on it.

Where is this, you ask?

The internet.
It has become the single, biggest source of information, education and product listings and guidelines – not only for this next emerging generation, but for everyone.  Lugging the Britannica encyclopedia series or sets of catalogues of all your favourite (and new) products along with you, now means carrying a laptop with 3G access, and most probably utilizing search engines.  In fact, with the emerging market of smartphones, accessing the internet has become even less than all of that already.
Looking at this trend, it would be of utmost importance then, to ensure that you have a website – and more importantly, to have it visible.

While everyone is uncluttering and wading through oceans of information, take the lead by streamlining and honing in your advertising and marketing.  It will probably be the best time spent on business strategy ever!

Isn’t that a scary thought?

Today, statistics show that only 20% of marketing and advertising still works in its traditional format.
The market is becoming saturated with similar products, services and solutions.  Our challenge today is no longer just being the most innovative producer, but the most innovative marketer in getting our products to the fingertips of the consumer seeking it, and almost more so, making the person who is yet unaware of it, feel that they need it.  You have to be able to get into your customers’ heads before you can get into their pockets.

How, you ask?
Well, the first few things to be cognizant of, is that people are drowning in the sheer volume of messaging out there, as well as the amount of media formats and choices of media formats in which they receive the messaging. Even products previously perceived as luxuries, today, have become commodities.  Most marketing messages will not stick out above others…
So how do you establish your product as trusted and known, a brand that stands out from the rest , a brand people want to associate with?

We say “It’s simple”:  You can achieve these goals by speaking to your captive audience, in their language, and at their time…  Your message will now not only be well received, but also processed well, and you are able to create the initiation of a trusted relationship between your customer and your brand.

You say “Problem”  With all the different ways to communicate at this time, how do I do that?
We have looked at, and found, one large common denominator in when this perfect time is to interact – and that is online, and specifically while people are searching for products or services like yours.

In South Africa alone, online sales broke the R2bn mark in 2010, with a predicted increase of 40% in 2011.  And this does not include the amount of sales done physically or telephonically relating to or following an online interaction.

And what is more, is that it is all tracked and measured – from the moment someone clicks on your advert, right through to them becoming your customer.  The flexibility of online also means that you can fine-tune your campaigns real-time, ensuring optimum results.

The key, thus, is to get people to know about you before learning about your competitors, and this can be successfully obtained by changing your marketing and advertising strategy to include Online Marketing and Search Engine Marketing – and getting more traffic to and interaction on your website.

Make more than 50% of your advertising work…

As soon as you talk to a client about on line marketing the first thing they want to know is whether it will work for them and how successful will it be. Then the next question is which product will work for them. With online marketing you can see exactly from where your clients came from, you can determine the conversion rate and you can also see the amount of visits for a specific day. You can get traffic to your website from your social media pages and vice versa. If you have a contact us form on your website, you will be able to get all the information of your client, which help you with your client database and to increase your sales. And the best part is you will be visible online. If your website was normally on page 10 or 20, it will be visible as soon as a client searches for your product / service.

Below is a pie craft of how many people make use of search engines. You will notice that 70.95% make use of Google, 14% of Yahoo and 9.70% of Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search)

Search Engine Graph

More and more businesses are dedicating more of their budget to Internet marketing campaign than traditional off-line advertising because online marketing is working for them. PPC ads allow companies to pinpoint exactly who they want to advertise to and where their ad is going to appear on the results page. With a Facebook ad you have the potential to reach over 400 million active Facebook users, depending on your industry and the key phrases used. Now you can just image how many potential clients you had missed because you are not visible online.
This week we are going to discus some case studies of companies who decided to get out of their comfort zone and who are using PPC, SEO or SMM. We will see how successful they are and how they has grown from day one using online marketing.

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

This week we will have a look at why you need to get professional help for your website, from the management of the website to all types of online marketing that can be utilised. The online marketing industry is an ever changing environment and if you are running your own company and still need to keep track of all the best practices needed to stay ahead something will get left behind.

Online marketing professionals work with websites and the marketing thereof everyday and trusting a company to handle your website might be worth a lot more than just the extra money that you will spend for their services.

People that I’ve met that ran their own PPC campaigns for example, realized that it was getting too involved for them to manage it properly. After handing it over to us they could focus more on their business and performance of the PPC campaigns also improved. Trying to do SEO yourself might be a bit more tricky because SEO is a lot more technical. You need someone that understands the technical side of how websites and search engines work to do that properly. Managing your social media marketing by yourself might work for a while but you will soon realize that as it grows that it will become time consuming, and you will never get to everything that you have to and do proper management of your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Do check back here the rest of the week for more reasons why you should use an online marketing expert.

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.

That is why effective online marketing is vitally important. It is essential to have a strong online presence and not be just another needle in the proverbial haystack.

The two main ways to create an online presence is through Pay Per Click advertising and through Search Engine Optimisation. Both of these methods work very well but each one has it’s advantages and disadvantages.

SEO

SEO is where the website is optimized to perform beter for certain keywords on the Search Engine Result Pages. It involves fixing the code of the website and optimising the content for the desired keywords. With SEO your goals are more long term, as it takes time for your pages and changes to your pages to be indexed by the search engines as well as getting a good rank for your keywords.

PPC

Pay Per Click is a type of advertising that is used on websites and search engines. You set up an ad that will display when certain criteria is met and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. It works on a bidding system, you compete against other advertisers for the top spot. The placement of your ad all depends on what you are willing to spend per click as well as the relevance of your ad and content to the specific keyword you are bidding on. PPC is a lot more flexible than SEO because you can start and modify campaigns in a couple of minutes. You can see results instantly, so it is good to get a PPC campaign going while you are busy optimizing your site to perform beter organically.

The rest of the week these services will be discussed in more detail, so do come back to find out more.