Pros & Cons of Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a very populat form of driving traffic to a website, especially to a brand new one.

Google Adwords is the leader of PPC engine and I guess followed by Yahoo Search and MSN. No matter which one you choose to start with the process are similar - you decide which keywords you want to target, write an ad and are charged every time someone clicks it.

Anyways, lets analyse the pros and cons of PPC as a traffic source.

Pros

• PPC traffic can be turned on and off instantaneously. Once you have done your keyword research, you can be up and running in less than 15 minutes.
• It is very targeted, since you can decide the time of day and the location from which your ads should be seen.
• Its the ideal method of testing how your website converts. You can run as many tests as you want, with the goal of improving your conversion rate. PPC can help you refine your website before using other traffic sources.
• While in banner advertising you pay by impressions (an impression is when someone sees your ad), in PPC you pay only when someone clicks. This means you are paying only for the actual traffic Google is sending you. 
• Adwords is also a good way to quickly test if there is a market for a new product not yet developed. The marketer can perhaps perform a survey on the landing page to learn if theres interest on a new item/and/or technology possibly entering the marketplace.

 Cons

•  Google Adwords is a very popular way of driving traffic. The more people use the system, the more it will cost to achieve the top position. Depending on how many advertisers are in your market, it is uncommon to go over $1 a click for the top spot.
• You can't rely solely on PPC. It is easier for a competitor with deeper pockets to outid you. 
• Since Adwords seem so easy at first, many advertisers do not invest the time necessary to track the ROI of their investment. They just turn their campaign on. Only by tracking your campaigns, you know which keywords don't convert and can exclude them from your campaign.

Brand Reputation and Search Engine – Correlated?

I was reading Advertising Age this afternoon and read an article titled "Search Shifts Means Visibility Must be Earned, Not Paid". Does this infer that brand reputation and search engine optimisation are correlated? If so, this has many ramifications.

I believe marketers should devote more attention to SEO rather than SEM, as the title in Advertising Age suggets. Consumers look to the internet for information and education to help them make a more informed decision. 

In the fase paced interconnected world that we live in today, consumers are going to talk about your company regardless if you have entered the online space. So even your offline campaigns, customer service, product quality with be talked about online. And of course these conversations can make or break your brand reputation.

As part of SEM, one of the variable of getting higher rankings, content needs to be refreshed and of course rich in information can be a very powerful variable in pushing up brand name in Search Engines.

Consumers want to know more about the company/brand and read about reviews and feedbacks from current customers. But hey isn't that a way social marketing? People are searching, people are also perhaps in engaging in long-tail searches on your company and brand. So having good or bad press on search engines may be a deal winner or breaker for you - depends on how it swings.

Somehow this is no longer PUSH marketing but PULL marketing at play. Not new I might say, in the past we have always trusted our friends more than advertisements anyway.

So concluding, I personally feel that brand reputation and search engine are correlated - be it good or bad reputation. Search marketing now is not just about generating leads, it is also a strategy in itself that goes beyong selling a product.

What are your thoughts?

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Here are just some of the Social Media Marketing Monitoring tools that I use. Some are retty good and some not but nevertheess still works. 

• Google Alerts
• TweetBeep
• Watchthatpage
• Trendrr
• Trackur.com
• Google Trends
• Blogpulse

Please feel free to add to the list for those I’ve missed out. Thanks!

Authentic Marketing in Social Media – Paying People to Seed Comments – Trust

In media such as prints, TV ads, consumers will understand and recognise that these are all paid advertisement and they are perfectly fine with that. After all, this fact is known from the outset.

However what if this is not known from the outside? A trend that I see, from conversations with friends, clients and agencies is the notion of seeding conversations in Social Media. For example, firms employ (and pay of course) individuals to post comments on blogs, forums and such as to create a favourable image for the product and hope that it will generate more traffic and of course generate leads.

Is this right? I don’t know – Well for me, I hate to read comments that are not genuine especially if I found out later that this was a paid post or comment – some one who is employed by the company in question. I would lose credibility in the site or for that matter the product – trust is built in incremental steps but once lost, it falls exponentially – isn’t trust (and candidness) the bedrock of social media? Trust is one of the antecedents (drivers) of Word of Mouth (WOM).

From a marketer’s stand point, sure WOM is something they wish to achieve i.e. a result, by seeding comments, would one lose that trust if found out?

But I can understand from the agencies’s point of view is that it generates discussion in the comments section. Afterall social media is interaction and its success stems from conversations.

What are your views, I’m keen to hear them out.

Social Media humanizes your brand?

I think so! But do you think firms are more concerned about "negative comments"?

You bet! Of course that really depends on how the interaction is conversed online. Social media gives business the opportunity never befper to access consumers honest and candid feedback

You bet! of course that depends on how you interaction and converse online. Social media gives firms the opportunity never before to access consumer’s candid feedback and of course business are given the opportunity to respond and relate back to the consumers.

The "problem" I see though is that a significant number of companies still treat social media as a channel for sales. Firms should think beyong that and use social media as a means to better interact with their customers and garner feedback.

Though I have heard is that firms seem to be only concern about one major point - what if someone gave us a really bad feedback? Can we delete bad comments?, etc, etc. Fixating on negativity.

If you think about it, businesses should really be asking how they are going to engage with their consumer? Social Media did not invent critisicm. Businesses have always dealth with complaints via phone calls, email, face to face. So how different is this? 

The Ultimate Guide for Top Internet Marketing Products Exposed

The World Wide Web is filled with a lot of things. But as an Internet Marketer, you should be more particular about your competitors. Everybody wants to have a piece of the action. Everyone wants a share of the market. Obviously if you are not competitive enough you won't be earning much.

Like everything in life in order for it to have your online business succeed you have to invest in it. The basics would be a good domain name, web hosting and a marketing strategy. If you choose well in these aspects, your business could reach great heights.

Not all Domains and Hosting Providers are the same. It is necessary that you get the most reliable web host in order to provide continuous service to your customers. When choosing a web hosting service and domain, be sure to go for a server that can handle your security and expected traffic in the long run.

A good Online Marketing Strategy, on the other hand, could take your business to the top of search engine results for optimum target visits. Being on the top position would drive unique visits to your site, which could translate into sales in the immediate future. 

Your choice of Online Advertising Strategy would put your website in key places of the internet for maximum profits. Advertising is a way to reach out to potential customers. If your ads are on the right spot, you'll get an assurance of reaching your sales quota for the day. 

There are many online marketing products and packages available today to help you in promoting your online business. The problem now is in choosing which one would work for you best. But how would you know that if everybody else says that their marketing product or strategy would work like magic on your business? There's only one sure way to go about it - by consulting authentic customer reviews. 

With a portal that can provide first-hand, accurate information about a certain marketing product that's currently circulating over the internet, you would be able to come up with the best choice for your business. This portal is powered by consumers themselves. Customers, users, or subscribers of a certain online marketing, advertising, or hosting package are then encouraged to add their reviews, recommendations, and feedback - both positive and negative - about their experiences in any of the marketing packages and strategies they have availed of. These would then serve as a guide for everyone, including professionals and novice internet marketers. If there is a new online marketing product recently released, consult customer reviews first before buying it for your own use. This way, you would know if the product could really help you or not. 

Customer value = competitive advantage?

Customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, customer value, etc. This "marketing literature" has been forward that customer loyalty and customer value is a source of competitive advantage. 

Marketers have always been insisting and promoting the notion that in order to compete in this competitive market – one must provide superior customer value relative to competition. But really what is customer value?

I found this simple formulat on Google. What are your thoughts?

Customer Value = (Quality + Emotional appeal + meet expressed needs + a hosts of other benefits) / Price.

Online Marketing Decisions for 2010/2011

I am trying to develop some online marketing strategies for this new financial year. I have listed below here some online marketing decisions that we have to make for this year. They are as follows:

• The best way to engage our customers and to be more relevant to them.
• How to maximise "behavioral targerting" in direct marketing/email marketing, search and social networking efforts.
• What is the budget or ratio budget contribution for online media such as affliate marketing programs.
• The best way to leverage social media.
• What are some of the other emerging technologies to include in our online marketing plan.
• Best methods to measure sales and movements, proving it's ROI. 
• How much of the other offline marketing budget should be shifted/moved to online marketing plan.

So do share with us your thoughts. Which of these do you think is the most important and what other online marketing decisions do you feel that we need to consider for this financial year.

A One Page Marketing Plan Anyone Can Use

Planning sucks. None of us like to do it and if you’ve had any corporate experience in the process, it’s no wonder. But planning is an absolute necessity if you want to be successful.

So how do we reconcile our need to succeed with our propensity for procrastination?

Simple: Re-frame how you look at planning.
We hate planning because we remember the endless meetings, hours of research that doesn’t seem to get you closer to an answer and documents the size of War and Peace. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Developing a Marketing Plan is nothing more than setting goals and making a to-do list that will get you there. It’s really not much different than planning a party. You’re basically creating a plan for inviting more people you love to give you money and then tell other people why they should give you their money too. Sounds like a party to me.

I found a few really simple, one-page templates that can be used to develop marketing plans. I’d like to share two different ones with you. They’re designed to get you thinking and planning and making money, not writing lengthy documents.

(1) One-page marketing plan # 1 – The first marketing plan template is one that I’ve loosely adapted from learning’s from the original marketing guru, Philip Kotler. (Even he doesn’t believe in hundred-page plans). It’s a simple single sheet of paper that outlines the basic marketing components or categories like your Mission/Objectives, Target Market, Offering, Pricing, Distribution, and Communication— you know, those 4 Ps we love so much in marketing. But the good news is that that’s really all there is to it.

You can find something roughly along these lines in an old “Marketing Management” book that Kotler wrote over 20 years ago, but I think the principles are still valid.
You can use this format as a place to put your big thoughts so that you can focus on what the strategies are.

I am making the template available as a Word document — both a blank template and a mocked-up sample plan, which you can use as a guide for how to fill out the template.

Download blank template #1 (.doc format)

Download mocked-up sample plan #1 (.doc format)

(2) One-page marketing plan #2 — The second one-page plan format I use is a combination of the Kotler plan and the Guerrilla Marketing process as advocated by Michael McLaughlin. This one’s not much different from the Kotler plan, but it’s less academic and more focused on emotional triggers that will get your ideal customer to choose you.

I am also making this template available as Microsoft Word documents for you to download use to guide your marketing planning.

Download the blank template #2 (.doc format)

Download a mocked-up sample plan #2 (.doc format)

So, there you have the plans I’ve been using — and my hat tip goes to both of the masters for giving me a starting point to create these one-page marketing plan templates.

Now, I’d love to hear from you. What do you think of these one-page marketing plans? What do you use as a marketing plan, and why? In what ways would you change or improve the templates I’ve offered? Come on, share your ideas.

Is Email Marketing Dead?

Email marketing has been around since the early days of the Internet. Internet marketers use email marketing campaigns to promote their own and/or affiliated products to prospects.

Internet marketers build up mailing lists through various methods, including ‘borrowing’ mailing lists – either the spam-free opt-in lists or the spam-invested non-opt-in ones – from email marketing companies.

I have been told many times that the power of email marketing is in the size of the mailing lists. The more mailing lists members, generally means the more sales the Internet marketers make. 

Is this true?

 
Those that have been actually using email marketing responsibly (like I have been) have grown to understand that the size of the list has nothing to do with results. In fact, having a big list just to have a big list can hurt you more than help you because of the number of bounces, etc. Having a smaller, but high quality list can be cheaper to manage and can give you better results. By sending targeted messages and not “spraying and praying,” marketers do see repeat sales, because they are using email marketing to retain customers – not acquire them. It’s about knowing your audience – not volume. 

Responsible marketers are using advanced tools to segment their audience so that, ideally, the reader is only getting information relevant to their interests.

But then, with the larger number of email spams out there and the more wise and tech-savvy email users today, email marketing is heading into extinction. Or is it?

Email marketing campaign vs. email spams
People love to email spam for one obvious reason – hopefully, their spam emails are getting the attention of the email recipients, and get them converted into ‘buying’ what the spammers offer – most of the cases, ‘products’ that main purposes are for identity theft and digital robbery.
With the countless email spams out there, the legitimate and real emails from Internet marketers are often accidentally regarded as spams.

This in itself loses thousands, if not millions of dollars of the Internet marketers’ money.

Email marketing campaign vs. tech-savvy email users
Tech-savvy email users regard email marketing campaign as a mixed-blessing – in one hand, the products Internet marketers offer can be very useful for them, while in other hand, they simply just want to get the free offers that often offered by Internet marketers to build up the mailing lists.

Free offers?

Yes – it is common that Internet marketers offer something free to get prospects to sign up to claim the freebies. Free offers come in the form of free services, free products, or free reports.

What tech-savvy users do is this: they set up a free email account from Yahoo!, Gmail or others for the purpose of getting the free offers. This means, they won’t read any incoming emails from the Internet marketers, which also means zero conversion – very smart, eh? :)

Despite all that – is email marketing dead?
In my opinion, not quite.

Like I mentioned above, there are prospects who opt-in to receive offers through their email accounts.

The prospects can be product and/or service users, or Internet marketers themselves that hope to make money online through affiliation. They want to receive offer, thus increasing conversion.
One problem, though – opt-in email lists are hard to built, simply due to the nature of the lists – members are voluntarily choose to include themselves into the list.

One of the solution to overcome the problem is through partnering with an email marketing company that offer you opt-in mailing lists.

The problem with renting an email marketing list is that you’ll never know where your email blast will end up eventually. Some do register just for the sake of the ability to send their emails to the list – they register with free email address created especially for this purpose – so yes, they won’t read yours, in this case.

Remember, the keyword here is ‘opt-in’ – there are literally thousands email marketing companies that spam their mailing lists. You should stay away from them, as using their service will damage your products or services reputation.

EMail marketing works for me. For one thing the response rate is much better. If you get a 4% response rate in print it is considered a success. I notice between 25 and 30% open rate with html eMail.

As long as Internet marketers can offer quality products and/or services, the email marketing is pretty much far from being extinct.