If you are a small business and not thinking about marketing online, you should be. Australians are spending ever increasing time on the web and traditional media is less and less effective with each passing year. If you aren't doing some marketing online, you are probably missing out on leads.
How to Get Started
There are a number of options for online marketing. The best for most small businesses is an add in Yellow Pages Online and Google Adwords. In this article I will be focusing on Google Adwords. There are three basic approaches to Google Adwords, which approach suits best will depend a lot on how much time you have, how much control you want and your budget.
- Sign up for Google Adwords and setup a campaign in-house
Setting up a campaign in-house is the least expensive. All you need is a Google Adwords account and away you go. If you want to optimise and measure your campaign (a good idea unless you are happy to simply put up an add and see what eventuates) you will require help from a web developer unless you are technically minded.
- Join an 'integrator'. This is a web service company (for example salesforce.com) which enable you to setup Adword campaigns within their products
An integrator will help you setup a campaign that can be properly measured and analysed at a reasonable cost but there will still be a learning curve on the tools. The other problem with the integrator approach is they rarely charge for just the Adwords campaigns alone so be sure to look at the total package and how it applies to your business.
- Sign up with a marketing company that specialises in Google Adwords
The third approach is the easiest but the more expensive. With this option its most important to find a parter company that matches your philosophy and budget. It will pay to shop around, ask lots of questions and compare packages closely. Be warned - Online marketing is full of Technospeak, so keep this in mind when looking around.
DIY Campaigns
So you have decided not only to dip your toe in the water and get into online marketing you want to do it yourself. There are a few things that can save a lot of time (and money) in getting up and running.
1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is a key buzzword amongst online marketing firms (and often hosting companies). Ask about it and you are likely to get an answer that probably sounds like digital voodoo.
In simple terms SEO is a way of moving your site to the top of the list of results in google or yahoo searches. There are two key ways to do this:
- Optimised Content
Lets say you make ice cream and have an online catalogue with all your flavours. Your site is up and you do a search for Chocolate Icecream. Ick, there are 10,000 hits and your site is nowhere in site. Time for some optimisation. A quick look at the product range shows up something a bit more unique. Our example company makes a 99% fat free Chocolate Icecream that has a number of health benefits. This is something to work with, in this case creating a couple of articles on the low fat icecream with links to other sites that have good supporting medical information. Now our example company is moving up the list in "Low Fat Chocolate Icecream" search.
Optimising the content of your site means having some idea of the sort of searches people use to find your products and providing pages that will have lots of good keywords that will support those searches. Preferably these pages will also have links to other sites that also have similar keywords to the search. A little time with different google searches can be very revealing.
- Links back to your site
Quality links back to your site help push your ranking up. What is a quality link? One that is relevant to the search. Going back to the icecream example. Good links for our "Low Fat Chocolate Icecream" search, would be links to the site by nutritionists, naturopaths, newspapers or other health industry websites. Low quality links would be confectionary resellers (unless they specialise in healthy confectionary) and so on.
SEO can be very time consuming because the rankings of pages can change on a daily basis so its a constant battle. Thats where Google Adwords comes in, a well placed campaign will see your link on the front page of search results without having to constantly tune your site. None the less spending some quality time optimising your site is very important in getting the most out of your online presence. Also the more you know about your site and Google, the more effective you will be in targeting your campaign.
2. Break the Google Code
How do you know what people are searching for? How do you know which searches lead to people clicking on a link to your site? There are a number of paid services which can provide this information but google actually provide a free tool called Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools provide useful information on site optimisation and the kinds of searches people are doing. Better still results are broken down by country, so you can look in your local market or overseas. To use the Webmaster Tools you need a google account and to add some code to your homepage to verify you are a legitimate owner of the site.
3. Experimentation is Vital
It's important to know which searches are going to lead to people actually buying your products, which at the outset will likely involve a bit of guesswork. In the early days, setting up a number of campaigns to run in parallel and comparing results would be a good idea. As an example lets say our ice cream company sets up three separate ads attached to three different searches.
- Chocolate Icecream
- Low Fat Chocolate Icecream
- 99% Fat Free Chocolate Icecream
Three weeks into the campaign it turns out that "Low Fat Chocolate Icecream" search is more than twice as effective as the other two in driving people to the site.
4. Direct customers to the right place
Don't just direct customers back to your home page unless it has the information relevant to your Adword Promotion. If the person clicking on the Adword link has to locate the information on your site, you have lost them and an otherwise very effective campaign could be binned unnecessarily. If there is an order/enquiry form, take them straight to it. If its a product that can be bought, take them to the page where they can buy it.
5. Measure, Measure, Measure
This is where the help of a website developer will be very handy. The key to measuring is to trap information about referrals in a database that can be easily used and extracted. Trap information on which ads people click on to get to your site, what they do when they get there and what they end up buying. In our Ice cream example this involved setting up the adds to pass information to the site and store it in a database along with information on site movement and purchases. A little analysis of the data showed that 20% of people that clicked on the ad bought the chocolate ice cream and of those 30% purchased at least one other flavour. Good information to know for sales and marketing planning for the future.
Useful sites for DIY Google Adwords
So you want to get to work? There are a number of tools and resources that will provide useful information and advice.
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