For small businesses seeking to increase their reach on the Internet, here are a few tips on how to do so with minimum fuss and maximum impact.
Note that while most of the suggestions are common sense, the underlying message behind them is “Carry out your marketing only after you’ve understood your market.”
1. Landing page optimization :
You gotta do the basics else you’re sending traffic to a web property that will not allow you to get the conversions that you want. For a small business, it’s typically leads. Begin with a website usability analysis to understand how a potential lead in your space will behave on your website. Once you do that, design your lander accordingly. Without this basic analysis, you’re essentially spending money to send visitors to a website that statistically will not convert.
2. Lead capture :
Make sure you have a way to get the visitors information (legitimately). Most visitors will not make a buying decision on the first visit so try to have suitable call-to-action drivers on your website to convince the visitor to share their contact information with you. Use email as a follow up tactic to touch these folks at a later time (a week or so).
3. Keyword analysis and keyword routing :
Naturally, do your keyword analysis using wordtracker to get your top 25 keyword s that you’ll be focusing on for your campaigns. Target your keywords to specific pages and not the home page, so that the visitor finds exactly what they want the first time based on the keywords he’s typed in.
Not that I’m a major fan of PPC but SEOMoz’s study on the effectiveness of PPC campaigns vs organic search was interesting (see graph above)
. I would however take this with a pinch of salt since their test was carried out in the metal roofing industry only.
4. Use geo-targeting and time management :
Don’t have your ads run at midnight if your target demographic is not going to be looking for your products online. This goes back to doing your research to ensure that you know when your target market’s going to be searching for your products online.
Also, make sure your geo-targeting settings are correct or you could have visitors from areas you are not prepared to ship to.
5. Don’t do Content or Search partners in Google or Yahoo :
A complete waste of time. Google and Yahoo will scream from the rooftops about how their search and content network adds value to the entire PPC process. It’s mostly twaddle. From what I’ve seen the content and search networks get you very little conversion. Focus on search and take it from there.
6. Bonus tip :
If your B2B product requires a longer sales cycle, try focusing your advertising on a free report that targets your market and encourages them to visit your website and leave contact information. People love freebies and a free report that offers them some insight on something related to your products or services will be useful.
