IMHO one of the more exciting areas of Internet marketing is an area that is often neglected and rarely talked about within most small to medium sized companies. Much emphasis and water cooler talk in Internet marketing is often focussed on Search, Social Media and how to involve Facebook into the marketing strategy. All are good and great channels and mediums for the lead generation, acquisition, branding, market intelligence and immediate distribution of marketing messaging. So while these are all great for investing marketing budgets, why is it the 80/20 rule (80% of your business/revenue comes from 20% of customers) so often overlooked and neglected? For marketers its not as sexy as the latter as their campaign strategies are focussed primarily on acquisition marketing channels for new customers, and lack of accountability for showing revenue, profits, and sustainability from existing customers.

So how does this relate to online marketing? Whether 80/20 rule strategies are sought to increase revenue from the 20% of customers through up-sell, cross-sell or direct sell tactics, the 80/20 rule impacts all web marketing channels – including Search, and especially Email. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month we started down the path of “landing page strategy testing – is it worth it?“. Landing pages can be an extremely useful tactic to increase conversions in a campaign. Employing landing pages is typically utilized in paid search campaigns, internal conversion pages and more recently, email marketing campaigns.

This week I’ll continue the subject on landing page strategy and jump into the second step; Test Strategy – determining pages worth testing. Determine your target page for testing by working down the list in order of importance and priority of your defined goals.

Start with visitors who are already leads. These individuals are those who are in the “action-mode” and ready to convert (purchase/opt-in/download, etc). They have already begun the journey down your conversion path. Utilize your analytics (ex. Google analytics), ‘Goals’ (if set up) and the conversion funnels. The conversion funnel overview will provide insight into page attrition of the leads who area already in the conversion mood. By establishing KPI’s in the conversion path such as page attrition, will allow you to easily gauge any positive or negative impacts of visitors in the conversion path. This itself will speak volumes of where to begin testing and optimization.

Again, this may cover the conversion paths of your eStore checkout, or your opt-in page, or a paid search campaign. Whatever area you identify is most critical to the success of your goals, is the ideal place to start. Read the rest of this entry »

Enhancing a campaigns performance in the Search channels such as a paid search campaign, or even in an email program, if done properly can reap those conversion rewards, or whatever your defined KPI’s (key performance indicators) may be. Though when traveling down this path of designing, building and executing landing pages, the necessity to test is critical. Just as with a paid search campaign, email promotional or lifecycle campaigns, eStore check out sales funnel and your run of the mill homepage, the need to test to optimize is integral to maximize your online the outcome you’re seeking…whether it be increased signs ups, conversions, sales, opt-ins, opens, click thru’s etc.

Understanding what’s worth testing is that “ah-ha” many marketers face and tend to pull random ideas out of the hat. The issue I’ve found with marketers is not necessarily deciding if they should test…but rather understanding what variables they should test. While almost any variable on the landing page could be tested – raised CTA (call to action), key messaging above the fold, dynamic keyword population, localization to the visitors geographic city or region, larger images/buttons/text, content layout stemming from heat map reports, etc., the list can go on and on.

So what is worth testing? Here are my guidelines on what’s worth testing. Read the rest of this entry »

Blogs, Twitter, Facebook it’s all the hype with today’s marketers and leaking into the fabrics with business owners and entrepreneurs jumping on the latest buzz words and making a best attempt on understand what all of this Social Media means, and how it can work for their business.

Reminds me of the dot com era when businesses jumped on the cart to put a website online, but not truly understanding how it will work for their marketing and business and provide value, other than doing it because everyone is, and of course bragging rights.
I receive at least 3 of these questions a week, and many more of prospects calling in asking for these services, but not understanding what they are, how they work, or most importantly, what value and ROI will they receive out of it. And this is where we begin…needs, objectives, metrics and ROI. Though while every self-proclaimed “Social Media Expert” may have the answers that sound good to the prospective client, the proper answer simply is understanding what Social Media components will work best for the prospects/clients business, and presenting those key performance indicators to benchmark those components, and the resulting ROI. Too many web marketing companies and publishers will have different ways and means to measure a Social Media campaign success, and while many may be correct, the rapid growth of Social Media space has resulted in to many complimentary metrics to gauge campaign performance and effectiveness. So a good starting point is to first understand some standard definitions for Social Media metrics to give a foundation of how to measure Social Media campaign success, and from this, tailor the metrics to the clients objective(s).

IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) released in early 2009 a proposed standardization of these Social Media metrics to lay the foundation for publishers and online marketing experts to get everyone on the same page. Similar to early days of the web and analyzing website performance by the various metrics available at that time – hits, page views, visitors, etc.

The Social Media Metrics standardization expands on the fundamental metrics in an effort to make campaign reporting for agencies and advertisers more consistent and less wild-wild-west. You can download the Social Media Metrics document here. It also offers some segregation between 3 distinct channels of social media; and supplementary metrics for each channel; Social Media sites (ex. Facebook), blogs / blogosphere, and widgets and applications. Read the rest of this entry »

I must admit I was one of those people who at first didn’t care less about the social media tool of Twitter and felt it was just one of many social media tools that will come and go. I was wrong. Twitter does have a purpose that supplies the demand from thee mass public, and can be complimentary fit in the overall online strategy to distribute content, and built external organic links.

Twitter is a social media tool to communicate and stay connected to the masses through short, brief updates that answer the question “what are you doing now?”? I like to think of it as an exploitation of Facebooks status feature, that taps into the psyche of human natures thirst for gossip. As a means to quickly stay up-to-date on what people are doing, its a brilliant tool to feed this thirst.

Alternatively – just watch this video on “twitter in plain english”

However, in this post I won’t go into details on how Twitter can be leveraged strategically for the overal mix of your strategy, but simply to give a high level understand how Twitter can support an organic search strategy to spread content and build those oh-so sought after external one-way organic links. Keep in mind, Twitter is not a link building tool, though externally it can be utilized indirectly as link bait. Read the rest of this entry »