2010-09-06
The three most important elements when starting out with marketing
Once you form a foundation for your web strategy, the execution
becomes easy. The goal is to constantly
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I often hear business owners talk about wanting to increase sales and generate leads but fail to define what success look like to them. In order to define success, you must first realize your current state of business from an analytical and financial perspective. Do you have any existing data to help you take the pulse of the business? What kind of financial (Return on Investment or ROI) and non-financial (business impact) objectives and metrics are available?
Without real knowledge of your true costs, you run into a potential misconception of what your real ROI is. Understand that ROI includes not just how much you pay for web hosting or your overheads, but also other costs associated with running the entire campaign such as, cost of time working on the campaign (broken down into average hourly wages), amount of labor burden costs (cost consisting of all indirect labor costs incidental to operations), SEO costs (monthly or accordance with your budget), email marketing costs, technology infrastructure costs etc.
Understand Your Costs and Metric
Once you have a true total cost of you running the campaign, you can run those numbers against your traffic and sales conversion rates to identify your ROI. Here is an example of how you can create a simple metric chart:
Assuming I get those numbers, with a quick glance the data shows that by spending 3 times amount of money on this campaign, the result returns 8 times more sales with the cost per sale reduced by more than half. This is a high level overview to help you define your goals for each metrics. Again, watching your real cost of the campaign will bring clarity to your true profitability.
Using Google and Twitter to Identify Your Customers Online
Once you define your goals and know what success looks like, the next step is defining your customer profiles then search for them online. For starters, you should at least know the age demographic, income level or occupation. After you know who your typical customer looks like, you need to find where they are online and what they’re talking about to get a step closer to engage them.
This is where you should be looking at using some free online tools to help you gather useful data.
Let’s look at using a combination of Google and Twitter to find your customers. As an example, I’m going to assume that you own a local retail apparel store and you want to drive traffic to your store.
First you should come up with a list of keywords that people are searching on Google. The simple and fast way to do it is to use Google Keyword Tool and Google Insights for Search.
Google Keyword Tool
Google offers the keyword tool so you can search and find what popular keywords people are searching around your products or services. I’ve used the keyword “evening wear” and as you can see, it returned all relevant keywords and the volume of searches for the past 12 months. Feel free to make adjustments to show the data in different ways (I’ve sorted the list by Local search volume) and how much people are paying for those keywords.
There is no doubt that “evening wear” is the most popular keyword locally. This indicates that most people simply put in the keyword “evening wear” so if you want to target a narrower range like “evening wear tops” you will have less competition for the same keyword. Click on Add and you can create your list (will be displayed on the right) and when you’re done adding, you can export the entire list in text or excel format.
Google Insights for Search
Once you have a basic list of keywords, head over to Google Insights for Search to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.
Now you can take popular keywords you’ve found and insert them into the search term area, and you’ll find more information about your keywords. Unquestionably the keyword “dress” out paced all other keywords I’ve insert (evening wear, women’s shoes, handbags). And you’ll also find that New York is the place where people search most for dresses.
Play around with the different settings and you can also export the results in excel format.
Google Wonder Wheel
The Google Wonder Wheel was introduced to simplify and arrange search results. It’s basically a pre-defined mind mapper which helps the user get all the related search results in a wheel shaped like display.
Simply go to Google.com and input your search term, click on the “show options” link and find the “Wonder Wheel” link on the bottom left to get your search terms mind-mapped.
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