marketing

Using Online Data to improve Offline Business

January 31, 2012 By Guest Leave a Comment

Are you potentially missing out by not using knowledge of your online/website visitors to improve your offline marketing success? (Offline could mean printed media, trade fairs, radio, in-store etc.)

Most businesses these days accept that having a website which reflects the business brand and which performs all the functions that a customer expects is an absolute requirement. The website (with access to even basic analytics) also offers business owners insights into customer behaviours and preferences. Compared to the information that can be gathered about online customers, the information gathered for offline customers often seems incomplete and subjective.

However, there are some fairly simple techniques that can help. By incorporating online response mechanisms into your offline marketing activity the potential to use data to improve your offline marketing is increased.

How to improve the tracking of Offline Marketing Campaigns

There are ways to measure the success of offline marketing campaigns using website analytics! For example, create a landing page with a memorable URL, like yoursite.com/specialoffer or yoursite.com/radio, and direct campaign ads there. Tracking visitors and their “journey” from the landing page through your site will help quantify the success of your campaign. (Often the most effective way to achieve this is simply to create a new page within your site in an appropriate place, allowing you to tailor the content and ensure the appropriate “calls to action” are there along with explanatory text etc.)

A new landing page for each type of offline activity will also help you to track numbers and conversion rates for visitors attracted via each type of advertisement or offline activity. The difference between your website’s regular conversion rate and the conversion rate of your various landing pages will reveal the relative effectiveness of your marketing activies.

Using online analytics to influence offline marketing

Have you ever considered using all that information you can access about your online customers to help shape up your offline marketing efforts?

Take a simple example of a Cycle Store….Customers love the how-to section of websites. By tracking the most popular topics and articles in your how-to section, you can find potential new topics for in-store events. For example, a bicycle store owner may find one of his most popular articles involves basic maintenance tasks, like changing a tire or lubricating the chain. In this case, a basic bike maintenance clinic might help draw website customers into the store.

Most analytics track where people come from and where they go when they leave your online store. Again, this information could uncover a need your store can fill. In the bicycle store example above, you may find people are leaving to visit bicycle trail maps – perhaps organizing a group ride would help draw people to your store and help them find the best local cycling routes.

Segmentation of your customer base

Internet data (on your website or social sites) can give reasonable indications as to demographics and geography etc. How can this sort of information be used offline? Could it for example inform decisions on placing your commercials during radio programs or perhaps trying a new mix of magazines to advertise in? Website and social site analytics can give some insight into “who” is shopping, not “who you expect” to be shopping.

Using website analytics to help your offline business takes a little imagination, but it can have a big pay off. By looking past the numbers at the customers beyond them, you can find solutions to drive traffic to your physical store, as well as track how your advertising and marketing campaigns are going. Whether you’re paying for your analytics or using one of many free services available, using your website analytics to help direct your offline spend could pay dividends.

Filed Under: marketing

Your Customers Know You, but Do They Trust You?

October 13, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.”

So said the great 19th century Scottish poet George MacDonald, and one imagines he’d be pleased to know that in the 21st century, those are still words to live by.

Like any healthy relationship, consumers aren’t going to stick around for the long haul with a company unless trust is established and maintained. Let’s examine a few methods for keeping the bond between you and your customers as strong as possible.

TRANSPARENCY
“Transparency” is the concept du jour of the marketing world, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it’s simply a passing a trend. The truth is, transparent practices are a necessity for any online marketing campaign to thrive. In essence, transparency is based on a few simple, practical principles. For starters, you should be able to meet the consumer’s expectations by delivering exactly what you promise. If you make a mistake, do what your mother told you to do: say you’re sorry. Encourage feedback from consumers, and if you receive some salient negative input, share it publicly to keep the dialogue open.

BUILDING RAPPORT
How can you trust what you don’t know? Many consumers regard companies as faceless entities who prefer to talk “at” them, as opposed to engaging in a genuine human relationship. Social networks are a perfect venue to get friendly with your target audience and give them insight into the “personality” of your brand. American Express does a good job of connecting with their customers via their Facebook page, engaging them in down-to-earth conversations as simple as “It’s hot out here! How are you & your Amex Card staying cool this weekend?” Those two sentences alone managed to generate over 600 “likes” and 430 comments.

GO THE EXTRA MILE
Remember the time you had a really bad cold and your best friend dropped by out of the blue with chicken soup and your favorite movie? Thoughtful, unexpected gestures are never forgotten, and consumers love a company that treats their relationship with the respect and care it deserves. Find small ways to let customers know how lucky you are to have them in your corner, and make sure you take the time to reward your most loyal supporters.

FINAL THOUGHTS
You won’t find it on any stat sheet, and its qualities have always been frustratingly difficult to describe, yet trust remains the fundamental quality necessary to maintain a healthy, long-term relationship with your customers. By adopting policies built on transparency, direct connection and thoughtfulness, you can be confident that you’re creating a foundation for lasting trust.

Filed Under: marketing

How to Make Money from your Website

August 8, 2011 By Brian Kane Leave a Comment

One of the questions that I get asked just about every day is ‘How do I make money from my website?‘ and it’s the sort of question I could spend about a week trying to answer. Just like some of my other favorites like ’how do I get to the top of Google?’ or ‘how do I use social media to market my business’. So sticking with ‘the make money from website’ question for now, this post attempts to explore this subject in some detail.

Obviously the route for commercialization of a site depends on a hundred different things from what you are actually doing online, the market you’re in, what you are selling (if anything), who your customer or audience is and so on. However brushing over all that trivial stuff for now this post sets out to generally explore some of the ways you can make money from your content online. Please note this is not about straight ecommerce (plenty of that elsewhere on this site) but instead an exploration of how you can make money online without directly selling anything (or website monetization as it’s often called).

So by online content I could be referring to blogs to forums, information websites, video sites and so on but for the purposes of this post I will simply refer to it as a ‘website’. The information below should hopefully be relevant if you are trying to assess the value in your website or help you determine the best way to generate income if you are planning on developing an informational site, blog or forum.

Let’s discuss the principles of what gives any web property commercial value

1) Your Market – Subject Matter, Audience Demographic & motivation of your visitors
Some markets are more valuable than others & some audiences are more valuable than others. Consider the motivation of your online visitors. If someone is browsing the web looking for celebrity gossip and you have a celebrity news blog then chances are this visitor is not particularly valuable as they are just passing time, surfing the web, looking for gossip etc. However if someone is looking for answers to problem like ‘how to lose weight quickly’ or ‘ how to use Google Adwords’ then this visitor is far more commercial and answering their questions with your content also gives you an opportunity to place a relevant advert, an affiliate product sale and so on. These commercial placements are far more likely to convert to a click-through or sale because they are relevant to your content and relevant to the motivation of the visitor. There is a reason why health & beauty are such competitive spaces on the internet. Solving people’s problems can have real commercial value even if you are not directly selling any products.

2) Size & site Authority
The tactic of building focused mini sites (or micro sites) was popular a few years ago when search engines often favored these targeted focused little sites. This is no longer the case with Google now absolutely favoring large sites with lots of quality content, regular updates, lots of user interaction etc. These sites will have better search engine rankings, more traffic and in addition these authority sites have an incredible ability to rank very quickly for any new content that is published on them. A breaking story on CNN will rank on Google within the space of minutes because that site carries such authority with Google that it is constantly trawling the site and re-indexing content.

So commercially speaking more traffic means more commercial value but more targeted traffic means more value still. Greater user engagement also contributes to site value as this suggests visitors are there for a reason and not just finding the site by mistake (advertisers pay more to get their message in front of engaged visitors because it proves they are genuinely interested in a specific subject/market). The ability for new content to rank quickly on search engines is also very commercially valuable (consider being able to rank for the next Apple product on Google on its launch day), this type of power can be used for many commercial benefits.

One of the keys to becoming an authority site is to deliver great quality content that is engaging, presented in the right way, has the ability to generate interest and discussion and provides a vehicle to capture this (e.g blog comments, Facebook integration, forums etc.)

3) Relationships, list & interactions
Site visitors are one thing but the ability to strike up a relationship and communication channel with your site visitors can give you long term commercial value (relationship return on Investment). Building an email list of subscribers for example is a great way to continue to deliver more targeted content to a number of people. Continuing to find out more about your subscribers via surveys and list segmentation etc. will allow you to target segments of your mailing list with tailored content and incorporate some very relevant commercial ads, links etc. within your communications which should convert well if you get this right.

Social media has introduced the opportunity to take this communication and interaction a stage further with Twitter and Facebook creating more dynamic and interactive ways to deliver your content, and actually begin to interact with your subscribers/followers/fans etc.

How to Build Commercial value Online
So if these all things make a site commercial then to increase the commercial value of your site you should be thinking about identifying who your target audience is and making sure you reach this target audience through the web. This comes back to creating the right sort of quality content on your site, providing expert commentary on other things going in your subject area, employing good SEO tactics to give your content the best chance of ranking on Google (for what you know your audience is searching for) and starting to engage in off-site discussions in your subject area. In other words become an authority on your subject by taking about it a lot on your own site and on other relevant sites, forums, blogs and so on (and always linking back to your site from these places).

Continuing to build and grow your site & encouraging user interaction (e.g. blog comments) and interaction with your social media presences (Facebook, Twitter etc.) can all contribute to your online growth & commercial value of your site.

How to find and access your market – content, keywords, seo, linking building referrals
See our video guide section on Digital Marketing Strategy Development to find out more about how to research your market online & target this market through best practice seo etc.

I get all this so What Next?
So assuming you have a site, a strategy and are working on all of the elements above. How do you actually plug in in the stuff that makes the money? What are the options for website monetization?

Some different ways to monetize your website

Sell Ad space on your site
You can look for companies who are willing to spend money to advertise on your site through banner ads, video ads etc. This approach can often get you better rates than the more automated routes of onsite advertising (discussed below) however it takes time, effort, management and a bit of a sales pitch.

To sell ad space you need to find advertisers who may be interested in the sort of traffic/audience your site is attracting. A few tips you can use to find these potential advertisers are as follows

Use Google: Simply search Google for some of the words, & phrases associated with your website content/ subject area and start to look at the Google ads (ads on right hand side of the Google search results). These companies are already paying Google for adverts on a pay per click basis so they recognize the value of online advertising. These companies may be worth targeting with a sales call or email offering them an opportunity to advertise through your website.

Another method is to use sites such as www.semrush.com and run a report on your site. It will give you back all sorts of information including a list of advertisers relevant to your site who may be prepared to buy advertising from you. www. alexa.com also has a mechanism to check for sites related to yours that you could target with your sales pitch.

You will want to create a compelling overview of the key metrics of your site in order to give potential advertisers more information on which to base a decision on. This is typically known as a rate card and it would include information such as monthly site visitors, unique site visitors, monthly page impressions and demographic information about your site visitors (you can use sites such as www.quantcast.com to get some of this data)

Monetize your site with Ad Networks
This is a massive topic I am not going to cover in any detail here. There are different tiers of ad networks but getting accepted to the more exclusive, higher paying networks requires your site to be of a certain size and authority. For this reason it’s often easier to start with some of the larger ad networks like Adbrite or Adsense.

One of the most popular ad networks is the Google ad network – Google Adsense. You can sign up as a publisher through https://www.google.com/adsense and effectively set up ad blocks within your website. By simply embedding these ad blocks within your site you can let Google do the hard work for you. Its algorithm establishes an understanding of your content and it dynamically populates these ad blocks with relevant ads from its advertisers (companies advertising through Google Adwords content network). Every time someone clicks through on these ads, Google earns revenue and shares this revenue with you.

Monetize your site with Affiliate marketing
What is Affiliate marketing? It’s basically a mechanism that allows web publishers to place links to merchants’ websites/products and get rewarded when their visitors click through these links and buy a product on the merchant’s site. Many merchants run their own affiliate program, possibly the best example of this being the massively flexible and sophisticated Amazon Affiliate Program . However the easiest way to find and manage affiliate marketing is typically to go through an Affiliate Network which is acts like a “middle man” making the links between publishers and merchants and providing a management system which handles, reporting, tracking, payments etc.

There are lots of Affiliate Networks but two of the most popular networks are
www.cj.com
www.clickbank.com

There are also new smart tools/Networks which can be used for website Monetization through Affiliate Marketing. The www.skimlinks.com network has the capability to trawl the content of your site and automatically convert relevant links to affiliate links with merchants it is associated with (and there are thousands). This can be a very smart route to quickly commercialize your content without having to find individual affiliate offers, joining different networks, placing links and so on.

CPA Networks
CPA stand for Cost Per Action. So while an action in theory could be the sale of a product (just like affiliate marketing) CPA offers are usually about lead generation. So the ‘action’ would be something like signing up for a free trial or entering a competition. I have heard it referred to as ‘Affiliate marketing on steroids’ which isn’t a bad description. CPA offers change regularly as merchants promote new offers & deals so if you are a web publisher wishing to market CPA programmes you typically need lots of traffic, huge mailing lists or be exceptionally good at buying targeted traffic and converting the traffic to offer sign ups. It’s not for the faint hearted and very much a specialized form of online monetization.

There are lots of CPA networks around. The easiest way to get an overview of all the top networks and find CPA networks & offers relevant to your subject matter is to use the site http://www.offervault.com which allows you to search for CPA offers across multiple networks then apply directly to specific programmes.

Filed Under: adsense, Advertising, Google, marketing

KNOW YOUR STATS: Find out what data is important and know how to read it

July 25, 2011 By Angela Wilkinson 1 Comment

Guest Post by Daniel Elroy

No two stats are created equal.

Alas, it is a cruel truth that certain statisticians are just going to have to accept. These days, online marketers are able to collect an overwhelming amount of data from consumers. While it’s easy to get excited by the sheer volume of information available (“Wow, our product is extremely popular with divorced men who chew spearmint gum and are over six feet tall!”), the key is to zero in on the data that’s most relevant to you and optimize your campaign based on that analysis.

KNOW YOUR GOALS

We’ve all heard the overused maxim “Know thyself,” but there’s a valid reason it’s managed to survive all these centuries: it’s good advice. If your goal is brand awareness, then an email marketing campaign might be deemed successful based on open and click-through rates. On the other hand, if you’re striving for consumers to spend a fairly substantial amount of time on your website, then an enormous visitor rate simply isn’t going to cut it. An online marketing campaign can set itself up for great results by establishing from the outset certain criteria for which success will be judged, thereby allowing the analysis of future data collection to be as useful and streamlined as possible.

BE FLEXIBLE

So you’ve established your goals, and everything seems to be going swimmingly . . . except for the fact that you’ve totally misjudged the type of consumer you thought you’d attract. You thought your campaign was going to appeal to pimply male teenagers who wear braces, but it turns out that debonair older women who wear braces are the ones turning up in droves. Well, is this a bad thing? You can use the data you’re collecting to help nurture your newfound demographic and perhaps completely reassess your target audience, or you can stay the course and use the stats to determine why young men aren’t buying what you’re selling. A good way to collect useful data is the time-honored questionnaire, which you can use to pinpoint your audience’s precise likes and dislikes. Tactics & Techniques Video walkthrough demonstrating some tools & tactics which can be used to research your market online

(video courtesy of Web Analytics World)

KEEP YOUR HEAD

It’s easy to overdose on the abundance of information coming in during the course of a campaign. When a particularly striking anomaly occurs, it’s prudent to keep a level-headed approach to the data. While a sharp spike or drop can’t help but get your attention, it’s necessary to consider the root causes. Any number of things can cause this sort of “rogue data.” For example, a controversial comment on your website posted by a consumer or even a certain holiday approaching can cause certain consumers to seemingly disappear (or reappear) overnight.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The ability to collect data for the purposes of internet marketing will surely only increase in the coming years. By establishing goals, embracing flexibility, and maintaining composure, companies with successful campaigns can avoid getting drowned in the tidal wave of available information, and instead use the stats they’ve gleaned to reach their full potential.

Filed Under: marketing, reporting, Web Analytics

In These Economic Times, Small Business Can Mean Big Business

May 14, 2009 By Mary Peng Leave a Comment

Due to the difficult economic times, marketers everywhere are getting their budgets slashed. A lot of businesses think that they will make it through these hard economic times by not advertising.

Something to think about, however, is the new trend in consumer spending. Consumers are looking for ways to save money, while maintaining the same level of product quality. Therefore, brand loyalty is not important anymore. What’s most important is finding a brand that caters to consumer wants, while satisfying needs.

If anything, marketing is more important now than it ever was. People are willing to try different products. If they are satisfied with these new products, there won’t be a reason to switch back once the economy gets better. Aggressive advertising and marketing will put your products in front of the consumer when they are looking to find that great new product.

How can you find these consumers? Get them online! With every dollar being more important than before, consumers are researching almost every purchase they make. Serious thought is put into everything from what toilet paper brand to buy to what car make to drive.

Online advertising can be done most economically through search engine optimization. It does not involve a lot of money toward advertising, and the people it drives to your website are better qualified leads if keyword research is done properly. There are great tools, such as SEOBook.com, that provide free tutorials on the basics of Search Engine Optimization. This way, you can work on SEO on your own and monitor your own progress. If you don’t have time to learn, or you want help from experts, another great way to start an SEO campaign is to work with a marketing firm, like Accession Media, to help implement and handle your SEO for you. Good internet marketing firms will get to know your company and products, and work with you to determine the best strategy to implement and monitor your SEO campaign. Taking this route will free your time up to work on other things, and you’ll get regular reports and advice on the progress and direction of your site.

Filed Under: internet marketing, marketing, Search Marketing In House, SEM Management

Data Quality and Predictive Analysis

January 29, 2009 By SH Leave a Comment

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Predictive analysis can be an extremely useful tool for many different types of businesses. In fact, where there is any type of data warehousing there should be implementation of a business intelligence program that includes predictive analysis. However, in order to learn how your business can profit from this facet of business intelligence, you are going to have to understand exactly how and why predictive analysis works.

The main idea of predictive analysis is to use current and past data to predict future events. The goal of the statistical techniques used in predictive analysis is to determine market patterns, identify risks, and predict potential opportunities for growth. In addition, data relationships can be reordered to determine the most plausible outcome of possible solutions and patterns can be recognized that might have the power to alter the outcome of a probable event.

One of the most important aspects to reliable predictive analysis is data quality. The information provided by predictive analysis can only be as effective as the abundance and accuracy of data available. Data quality is absolutely necessary to the process of predictive analysis. In order to attain accurate business intelligence, companies must maintain quality data. Predictive analysis requires both past and current data about many different things including customers, businesses, products, and the economy. All of this information is used to draw relationships and patterns between sets of data. If the data is accurate and well maintained, then the business intelligence produced will be high quality as well.

In the past, predictive analysis was mainly used for newly emerging technologies. However, in recent years these practices have quickly started to become common for mainstream businesses. There are a few differences between the ways that these techniques are currently used and how they were used in the past. One of the main reasons for these differences is why companies use predictive analysis. In the past, these techniques were used for long-term analysis of market and consumer trends. However, in recent years, the mainstream implementation of predictive analysis techniques has tended to focus more on immediate, tactical uses. Because of the “real-time” nature of this business intelligence, more and more companies are using predictive analysis as standard in making predictions about particular industry markets and consumer trends.

Some of the industries that have started utilizing these business intelligence techniques include telecom, insurance, pharmaceutical, and financial industries. All of the companies in these different business sectors have been able to use predictive analysis to make the right decisions to move their businesses in a positive direction. These processes can help with economic predictions as well as predicting the behavior of businesses and consumers. This type of information, made available in an efficient manner by business intelligence, is understandably invaluable. It can turn a simple prediction into intelligence that is more precise than even the most educated guesses. Predictive analysis with appropriate attention paid to data quality has made it easier than ever for businesses to make accurate market and consumer predictions and thus smarter decisions for the growth of their company.

Filed Under: business intelligence, Data Sources, marketing

Business Intelligence Software: CRM

January 26, 2009 By SH 1 Comment

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For many companies a good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) program is a holy grail of sorts. Ideally, a company could implement their business intelligence software to streamline customer interactions allowing for employees to focus their time spend on other business activities , all the while gathering information to use in other business intelligence reports to predict the next big thing. The problem with looking for business intelligence software from that perspective is twofold. First, the company will never find what it’s looking for and secondly, it forgets that a business is its customers. Wise business intelligence professionals have pointed out that the most successful business intelligence programs are ones where realistic expectations have been set internally. Below are a few things to remember when shopping for CRM business intelligence software so that you don’t end up disappointed:

Your Customer
Your customers are going to have as much or more face time with the system you choose than your employees in some cases. Make sure that you pick a software program that is going to appeal to them. Choices are great, but if your customers can’t navigate the system, they’ll probably hang up or log off before you learn what they needed or wanted. Go for customer satisfaction and you’ll never go wrong.

Your Business Intelligence Software Company
The company you pick is going to make a big difference in how easy it is to manage your CRM software. Find a company that can help guide you through the process and is willing to work with you to find the best program for your customers and not just up-sell you on extra bells and whistles. A company that you can work with is going to make it much simpler for you to work with your customers using their software system.

Your People
By choosing a business intelligence software system that is easy to use internally, you can help your employees help your customers more quickly and efficiently. At the end of the day, to provide truly excellent customer service, you need not just a great CRM system, but a great team of customer service representatives who can step in and help the customer if necessary. Your people can get information from your customers that no software system can, but a good CRM system can help you make that information actionable and handle issues or requests that are simple to address. You can learn things from your customers that can help make your CRM better and a good business intelligence software company will help you address those needs as they arise.

Knowing what to expect from your CRM system can help you pick the best one for your company. Just remember your customer, a good business intelligence software provider, and solid support for your system are all very important to your business intelligence initiative and you’ll be on your way to successful CRM that will benefit your company.

Filed Under: business intelligence software, CRM, marketing