“I know that only 50% of all advertising works.  I wish I knew which 50%” – David Ogilvy

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…

Today we are in our comfort zone and we don’t want to try something new. As soon as we see something is working then we keep to it. It is almost like going to a new restaurant. I think most of you will agree with me that it is very annoying going to a new restaurant and you don’t know the menu or the food! But just think of it this way, why not go to new restaurants, try out their food and then you have a variety of restaurants to choose from when you have a special occasion instead of just the one or two restaurants. This is the same with marketing. People are scared to make use of new marketing tools, they still carry on with the old marketing tools because they are afraid to get out of their comfort zone and try something new.

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.

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

Today it is extremely important to have an online presence and without any marketing, your website would not get the right traffic for the products or services you provide. A lot of small companies start by doing some type of internet marketing themselves to drive traffic to their websites in the form of PPC, some SEO or via social media. Soon they will find out that this is a full time job and to do it properly they will need professional help.

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 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.