Newsletter - September 2008

5 Golden Rules for PPC Campaigns

Low Cost Marketing in a Recession

Achieving SEO Success – Keywords

Marketing with White Papers

Growing Profits with Automated Emails

5 Golden Rules for PPC Campaigns

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is great for free traffic, but sometimes it can take time to rank well for the keywords that are most relevant to your business. Even if you are ranked on the first page of the results for your keywords, a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad can reinforce your branding and drive even more traffic to your site.

Here are 5 golden rules for PPC campaigns, to make sure that you are getting the best return for your money.

1. Research the Most Lucrative Keywords
Targeting the correct keywords is vital to running a successful PPC advertising campaign. The ‘best’ keywords can be defined as the ones that have the most people searching for them with the lowest competition.

To find out which keywords have a high search volume and low competition, you can use keyword research tools. Your keywords can then be organised into logical groups so that you can find and compare them easily, allowing you to tweak your results.

2. Track Your Results
Some keywords may not have a huge search volume but offer a high return on investment. These are generally keywords that attract customers who are farther along in the buying process, and are looking to make an immediate purchase.

In order to see how well your ads are performing, don't just track how many clicks you receive; also track through to the conversion phase to see how much money those keywords generate.

3. Test Your Ads
Even a minor change in the wording of a PPC advertisement can have a major impact on your results. To get the highest return on your PPC campaign, always run two different ads simultaneously. After a few weeks, update the one that performed less well by trying new copy to see if that improves your return on investment.

4. Send Searchers to the Right Landing Page
A common mistake in PPC ads is to send traffic to the company home page, whether or not it is relevant to the keywords that potential customers typed into the search engine. This is a bad idea for two reasons:

• It's More Expensive. Landing pages that are not immediately relevant to the search terms do poorly in the quality rating that Google uses to determine prices.
• It Drives Searchers Away. If searchers don't immediately see the relevance of a landing page to their search, they will think they are in the wrong place and close your site.

In order to maximise your PPC profits, make sure that you send searchers only to highly relevant pages, even if it means you have to create a separate landing page for each group of keywords.

5. Optimise Your Landing Page
Search engines such as Google offer lower prices per click to landing pages that perform better. A slower landing page could drive up the price of your ads. Make sure that your PPC ads direct traffic to landing pages that are quick to load.

By following these five tips, you can run PPC campaigns that drive large volumes of highly-targeted traffic to your website, for the lowest possible price. Need help with getting PPC campaigns working for you? Call 01242 570330.

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Low Cost Marketing in a Recession

As fears of a recession set in, consumers start to spend less money. In return, businesses see less profit, and tighten their belts. Whether you're marketing to consumers or to businesses, selling is getting harder. So wouldn't it be great if you could find ways of reaching customers, ways that are not only low cost, but also more effective than traditional ads?

Here are five ways to market your business, designed to help your company continue to turn a profit, even in a recession.

• Give Away Something for Free
  In today's economic climate, people are eager to find offers and freebies that make them feel like they are getting a good deal. By giving away something for free, you are appealing to this frugal urge, while also spreading the word about your company.
  
  But doesn't giving something away cost money? Not necessarily. Think of free handouts, white papers, teleconferences, and other useful (and cheap!) tips that your customers will love. Make sure your business name, telephone number, and email address are readily apparent and people will respond.
   
• Encourage Current Customers to Buy Again
  Attracting new customers is expensive, but you have a bunch of current customers that already have a relationship with your company. Focus on strengthening this relationship to drive low-cost sales. Send out a newsletter with some useful tips and encourage your customers to come back and make another purchase, or offer exclusive deals just for returning buyers.
   
• Encourage Satisfied Customers to Tell Their Friends
  While you're at it, those current customers can be a fantastic source of new business, as well. Encourage your customers to tell their friends about your business. Your message will reach valuable new ears, since referrals from colleagues and friends have one of the highest conversion rates of all marketing tactics.
   
• Network with Others
    Networking is a powerful way to reach out to potential customers, and it costs you nothing but your time. Popular networking methods that work for companies include:
  • Giving a free speech about your business's core competency at a local community college, business organisation, or wherever your potential customers can be found.
  • Attending conferences and events related to your business.
  • Using social networking websites to make contact with people interested in your business.
  • Starting a business blog.
  • Reaching out to complementary companies to exchange links and content.


• Focus on SEO
  Search Engine Optimisation is one of the top ways to drive traffic for your business, without paying anything at all. Create robust and interesting content for your website that matches your users' interests, and you could see a huge spike in free traffic.

Navigating your business through a recession can be challenging, but these five free ways to market your company can help you continue to make profits, while reducing your marketing budget. Call 01242 570330 if you need any help in implementing any of the above ideas.

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Achieving SEO Success – Keywords

If your business is to take advantage of the free and highly targeted traffic that you can receive from search engines, then it's critical to use keywords in your content. Keywords are a very important aspect in implementing any search-engine optimisation strategy, so how do you make your online content more attractive to search engines and your site visitors?

The answer: Find out what keywords are, and how to use them properly in your website's copy.

What Are Keywords?
Keywords are the words that searchers type into internet search engines when seeking products and services. For example, "holiday rentals in Devon" might be a keyword term used by people looking to holiday in Devon. "Colour laser jet printers" might be a keyword used by a business looking for a new printer.

Why Are Keywords Important?
After a searcher enters a keyword, search engines try to match those words with websites that feature them. By using keywords in your website copy, you increase the likelihood that your business's web pages will show up among the top results for those searches, thereby driving significant traffic to your company.

How Not to Use Keywords
So search engines look for web pages with a high number of keywords matching a search. That means that the more often you use the keywords, the better, right?

Wrong. That kind of thinking leads to clunky-looking websites that read something like, "Holiday rentals in Devon – find the top Holiday rentals in Devon. If you're looking for Holiday rentals in Devon, then you've come to the right place. Our Holiday rentals in Devon are..." Yuck. Who wants to read that kind of nonsense?

Search engines analyse the keyword density- the number of times the keyword appears in comparison to the amount of text on the page – and dismiss web pages with an abnormally high density as spam. So going overboard with keywords can backfire on you.

More importantly, even if you did drive traffic to a page like the one above, your potential customers would probably leave in an instant. That copy is anything but persuasive, and won't result in more sales.

How to Use Keywords Naturally
A much better idea is to use keywords naturally throughout your text. Here are some tips for using keywords naturally:

• Select keywords that are highly relevant to your content.
• Break up your keywords. It's okay to add a short word in the middle, or separate it into two sentences.
• Read the copy out loud. If you're stumbling over the keywords, you're using them too heavily.
• Sub-headings are great for web writing – and are also a fantastic place to use keywords.
• Always write for the reader first. After all, search engines aren't the ones who are going to be buying your products.

By following these tips, you can use keywords to draw more traffic to your website, without sacrificing readability or the interest of your potential customers. Need help with this? Please call 01242 570330.

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Marketing with White Papers

White papers offer a win-win situation. They help educate your potential customers, and they are a free and powerful marketing tool for collecting leads for your company.

First, however, you must learn what white papers are, and how you can use them to promote your business.

What is a White Paper?
A white paper is a report or guide for solving a specific problem that your customers face. They are not marketing brochures, but rather how-to papers filled with useful and actionable information for your site visitors. Examples of white papers topics include: "Cutting Travel Expenses: How to Run a Virtual Meeting" or "Securing Critical Data with Off-Site Backups."

What Makes a White Paper a Powerful Marketing Tool?
Most of the time, businesses are clamouring for the attention of potential customers. White papers, on the other hand, bring customers to you, because you provide them with real solutions to their problems.

People are willing to share some contact information in order to get access to a useful white paper. This is a great source of highly qualified leads. People who like your white papers share them with family and friends, or pass them around at the office, which makes them a powerful viral marketing tool.

And finally, solving your potential customers' problems establishes your business as an authority on the topic, and builds valuable trust.

How to Choose a Topic for Your White Paper
The ideal topic for your white paper will:

• Be relevant to your business.
• Address a specific problem that people have.

For example, if your business sells high-end printers, you might offer a white paper about the top five printers for creating professional-looking reports. You can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each model and, at the end, include a link to the product section of your website.

The people who read your white paper will gain a useful document that helps them make a decision about their purchase. Your company, in turn, gains the advantage that the leads your white paper generates will be highly targeted, constituted mostly of people who are in the process of buying a printer for their office.

How to Offer a Successful White Paper

• Ask for Contact Information
  Have the reader give at least their name and email address as a condition of downloading the white paper. Make it clear how that information will be used.
• Make Your White Paper Easy to Print and Share
  Offer the paper in PDF format, which can be read on any computer system, and which makes the option to print it easy.
• Don't Go for the "Hard Sell"
  Don't promote your own products too heavily, or your paper will sound spammy.
• Display Your Company Contact Information Prominently
  However, by including your business name, website, email address, and telephone number prominently, you can let your readers know how to get in touch with you. Even if a reader gets the white paper second-hand, he will be able to reach you for more information.
• Don't Be Too Broad
  Answer one specific question or need completely, rather than trying to promote your entire product line. Offer additional white papers to highlight different segments of your business.

White papers are an easy way to establish your credibility and encourage people to spread the word about your business. Best of all, they are very easy to create and give away. If you would like to discuss implementing a white paper lead-capture strategy for your website, please call 01242 570330.

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Growing Profits with Automated Emails

One of the fantastic things about your website is that much of the work that goes into customer retention and loyalty building can be automated. With automatic emails, you can offer a degree of personalisation that would otherwise require many hours to fulfill.

Here are some tips on how to successfully use automatic emails to grow your business.

3 Steps to Success with Automated Emails
Building a successful automatic-email strategy doesn’t have to be difficult. By following these steps, you can have measurable success and make logical and effective improvements to your mailings.

• Set Your Goals
  Before you send your first email, define measurable goals that you want to achieve with it. Do you want to drive a certain number of people to your website? Generate a specific number of leads? Boost sales of one of your products by a certain percentage?
• Define Your Email Rules
  Next, define when you will send your automated emails. Some follow-up possibilities include: after a customer makes a purchase, when a customer has a birthday or anniversary, at seasonal events, and/or after you haven't heard from the customer for a certain period of time.
• Track Your Success
  Carefully track the performance of your automatic emails by measuring their effects versus the goals you set in the first step. This will allow you to tweak your emails to find the most effective ways of reaching your customers.

Common Mistakes with Automatic Emails
Automatic mailings should personalise your business and so build loyalty. If you're not careful, however, they can have the opposite effect, alienating your customers. Be sure to avoid these common automated-email mistakes.

• Send Too Many Mails
  Nothing will drive someone from your mailing list faster than deluging them with email. Show restraint with the frequency of your emailings and your customers will respond much more favorably.
• Waste Your Readers' Time
  No one wants to receive emails that don't have a clear purpose. Give your customers clear and obvious benefits every time you send an email.
• Send Generic Mails
  Personalised emails that address your customer by name and address their specific needs will resonate with them and make them more likely to return to your site.
• Make Opting Out Hard
  No matter how beneficial your mailing list is, you should never try to send emails to people who don't want to receive them. Let your customers opt out of emails quickly and easily, or risk building a negative reputation.

Automated emails can inspire your customers to come back to your site over and over again, without a high investment of your time or money. These tips will help you use those emails well to increase your business's profits. Need help with improving your automated emails? Call 01242 570330.