Tag: Google Adwords
Online promotion is a key marketing method for small businesses. If you’re promoting a new offer, product or service, how can you market it online? One of the key benefits of the Internet is that it creates an even platform – allowing smaller businesses to promote themselves at a relatively low cost. But you still need to understand what is available, and how to best promote yourself using these online tools.
So imagine you have a new offer – promoting 50% of a particular product – what can you do to push this promotion online?
- Create special offer page
- Explain what the offer is
- What are the benefits?
- What are exactly are you offering – what can your customers expect to receive?
- What is the cost? (free, percentage off, pounds off etc)
- How to order?
- Include form on the page to register
Then promote this page using various online platforms:
- If you are using Google AdWords or any other form of pay per click advertising, create a special campaign with dedicated adverts pointing to your promotion web page.
- Create a press release about your offer
- Upload it to online newswires
- Might be worth paying £45 or so to put it on a paid newswire
- Email it to industry journalists and publications (both online and physical)
- Promote on all social media sites
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Create a blog post about it
- Link to the main landing page
- Create an article about it
- The benefits of your offer and how it can help your customers
- Create an email about it and blast it out to your email marketing list
- For previous prospects that maybe didn’t convert in the past, try writing a personalised sales letter to the contact and posting it (old school, but still a good-un!). Explain what the offer is and include a link to the page for people to register for it, and a paper form which they can fax/scan/email back.
- Add it to your email signature
- Maybe consider buying some banner ads on relevant event marketing websites
- When you sell one, try and get a customer testimonial which you can add to the promotional page (and other marketing materials)
- See if you can get existing customers to spread the word to their customers/partners etc
So you see, that with a bit of time and effort there really are very effective methods you can use to promote your latest offer.
If you need any help with any of these areas (creating landing pages, Google AdWords, press releases, blogging or article writing), get in touch with us today. We’re passionate about creating optimised content and have helped many of our customers get fantastic results using such methods.
Call 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com
June 24, 2010
We’ve established in the last post (Do You Have Dedicated Landing Pages for Your PPC?) that landing pages are vital if you want to get the most from your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns such as Google AdWords. They are the key to converting visitors onsite – getting visitors to complete the actions you want them to.
If created well, landing pages can be used to make a ‘hard sell’. Not in a hammy, used car salesman way, but in the sense that you have visitors where you want them. Show them what they need to see, present the information with a focused message and hit them with some strong call to actions – remember we talked about your goals in the previous post? Landing pages allow you to create a pre-planned funnel/path, pushing visitors to complete those goals.
How do you create good call to actions, and how do you get people to do what you want? Well there’s no secret recipe I’m afraid. It’s a case of trial and error – test your landing pages and constantly tweak and amend them based on the results you get.
Here are the main things you need to be aware of when creating landing pages:
- Colourful, big and bold buttons: Hit them with a call to action in a visually appealling way with good quality buttons that tell them to ‘Buy Now’, ‘Sign up for our newsletter’, ‘Take a Free Trial Today’, ‘Download Now’ etc.. Make these buttons stand out from your page through the use of colour and good quality design
- Limit the use of links and menu options on the landing page: The more links on your landing page, the more likely people will click off elsewhere, get distracted and never complete the action you want them to
- Clever content layout: People scan webpages, they don’t read them (this goes back to the ‘lazy, demanding and impatient’ bit I mentioned in the previous post!). So make it easy for them to get the key information – use bullet points, short paragraphs, bold text and colour
- Make it easy for visitors to complete the goal: If your goal is to have them contact you, make the contact form small and simple. Do you really need their full address, date of birth and favourite colour? Think about the minimum amount of information you need in order to follow up that lead and only request that. If you’re trying to get them to make a purchase, don’t make them go through hoops. Display your delivery details and return policy clearly to instill a feeling of trust, and make sure you let them know that your online payment process is secure. Don’t give them any reason to start clicking about off the path you’re directing them down
- Make sure the key information is above the fold: This goes back to newspapers – when they’re delivered or displayed in newsagents, you can see the top half of the front page – this is where they put all their major stories and headlines. The same goes for landing pages – make sure your most important information is towards the top of your landing page – above the fold. Anything people have to scroll down to view is below the fold. Remember that people have different monitor sizes too, so what may be above the fold for you, may not be above the fold for all your visitors. Why is this important? Again, people are lazy, demanding and impatient and can’t be bothered to scroll down the page to find the information they want! If they view the content above the fold and it looks relevant to their query, then they may make the effort to scroll. But if not… bang goes the back button!
- Remember that not everyone will convert: Not all visitors will be in the position to buy the item they’re searching for (or contact you for the service your offer). They could just be in the research stage of the purchase process. Do you have anything you can give them? If you can’t fulfil your primary goal of a sale, what secondary goals do you have. Can you get that visitor to sign up to your newsletter, or can they download a guide with advice on the purchasing process (possibly via a form to capture their details)? It’s important to try and make the most of each click, and understanding that not everyone will convert is important. Give people more than one option – so create more than one call to action on your landing page.
If you have any other landing page tips, leave them in the comments below. Have you tried something that had amazing results? Share it with us.
March 8, 2010
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is now one of the fastest growing forms of advertising. Most of you will be familar with Google AdWords – you bid on particular keywords, create adverts relating to those keywords, set a maximum amount you want to pay for each click on that ad for that keyword – and bingo! Lots of high quality traffic heading your way (as long as you’re bidding on the right terms and have a budget that allows for more than one click a day!).
PPC advertising, especially Google AdWords are a fantastic way of increasing the volume of traffic to your site. Many types of websites and businesses will benefit from PPC:
- If you have a new site which is not yet ranking well in the search engines
- If you’re in a very competitive market and don’t really stand a chance for ranking on your key terms
- If you haven’t got any optimisation on your site, so probably won’t rank for your desired terms
PPC is a great way of getting traffic to your site, but that’s only half the battle. Once someone clicks on your advert and lands on your website, what happens then? You need to carefully think about what your goal is for that visitor:
- Signing up for your newsletter
- Making a purchase
- Registering for an event
- Making contact via your ‘Contact Us’ form
Once you know what your goal is, you then have to think about how you’ll achieve that goal. This is where landing pages come in. A landing page, simply put, is the page that visitors ‘land’ on when they first enter your site. With PPC you have control over this (whereas in natural search it’s most likely to be your homepage, however other pages will rank also, but unless you’ve optimised a particular page for a specific phrase, it’s unlikely you’ll have much control over this).
Anyway, back to PPC where you can specify the landing page you want your visitors to land on. So what is the best page on your site to direct them to? You may think that your homepage is the best page – let the visitor click about and go to the content they want to see. But that’s where you’re wrong. The Internet has made us all lazy, demanding and impatient! We don’t want to have to search your site for the information we’re looking for – we want it presented to us straight away!
For example, if you’re selling bikes and have an advert running for the keyphrase ‘Ladies red bike’, when a searcher enters that term into the search box, they’ll get a list of natural and paid results. If they click on your advert…
Ladies Red Bike
Wide Range Of Bikes For
Ladies Who Like To Ride
www.yoursite.com
…where will they land? Do they land on your page featuring all your ladies red bikes, or do they land on your homepage? What makes more sense to you? If they can’t see immediately what they’re looking for, they’ll hit that dreaded ‘back’ button and click on another advert, and you’ve just been charged for a click with no result.
So it’s important that you direct people to landing pages that are relative to their search query.
Come back on Monday to find out what our top tips are for creating landing pages with conversions in mind; getting people to take the action you want. The more conversions you get, the better return on investment you’ll get from your PPC campaign.
In the meantime, if you’ve had any success using landing pages in your PPC campaign, leave a note in the comments telling us abou it! And remember, SMEketing are dab hands at creating high quality landing pages. If you’d like us to overhaul your PPC campaign and help you get more conversions, get in touch with us on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com.
March 4, 2010
I was driving back to Southampton on the M3 the other day when I heard an interesting fact on the radio; did you know that 80% of research before purchase is done online. 88.14% of those searches are done using Google.
So if you’re running a small business, your website must be found on Google to have a chance of connecting these targeted, high quality visitors to your website.
There are two ways to get visitors from Google.
These two methods come under the term “Search Engine Marketing” or “Search Marketing.” Google Adwords is a way of sending high quality visitors to your website immediately, by paying for it. SEO will provide a stream of free, high quality visitors to your website but can take up to a while for the best results to come through.
Both types of search marketing can be used to ensure your website reaches the visitors that you want to connect with.
What is Google Adwords? Google Adwords allows you to place small text based advertisements of your website on Google. Here’s how it works: You create text ads and choose keywords you think your customers would use to find you. Those text ads are displayed when someone types in one of your keywords. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad’s link and visits your website.
What is SEO? SEO is a way of ensuring your website is accessible to Google and has the best chance to rank higher than other websites that offer similar products/services. The theory behind SEO is simple: Ensure your website follows the Google webmaster guidelines to make it accessible. Create a website that is the more relevant to what you are offering then your competitors. Think about the keywords your customers would use to find you and use those words in relevant places throughout your website. Make it a high quality website so that other websites will link to you. I recommend that if you have invested in SEO (and I always advise that you do) you should also run a Google Adwords campaign until your SEO results appear.
Ensuring that your website ranks high in the Google results is vital to receiving high quality and quantity leads. You need to make sure your small business website is working as hard for you, as you are for your small business.
Managing a SEO and PPC campaign takes time, patience and a thorough understanding of the process. If you want to take advantage of the benefits of these solutions, but just don’t have the time or skills, contact us at SMEketing. We have experience in running campaigns for a variety of organisation, all who are now reaping the rewards!
April 3, 2009
