Entries Tagged 'online marketing' ↓

As an internet marketer you’ve probably heard people talking about traffic and conversion rates.

So what’s your conversion like?

Do you know?

Do you even care?

Well, if you want your online marketing to be effective you need to know and care what it is. But before you charge headlong into panic because your conversion isn’t as good as your neighbour’s, you need to consider what your conversion goal is.

Your conversion goal may well be different to your neighbour’s so don’t get hung up on who’s got the biggest just yet.  First you have to work out what yours is. It could be:

• Newsletter sign-ups
• Order form completions
• Brochure downloads
• Signing up for a free trial
• Payments

Once you know what it is you’re measuring you can start to quantify the effectiveness of your website through Google Analytics.

But before you can achieve conversion you must have traffic. The information you obtain about your website through analytics will show you the number of visitors your website is receiving every day, week or month (that’s your traffic), how long they remain on your site, which keywords bring in the most traffic, which pages they visit etc.

You may think you’re doing brilliantly with your marketing because you are getting thousands of visitors to your website every month.

Great – but is that reflected in your sales or sign ups? If your traffic has suddenly jumped, has your turnover made the same leap? If not, something’s wrong because you’re not converting.

5 reasons why you’re not converting

1. Quantity not quality

You may be getting loads of visitors but if no one is buying something is seriously wrong. The first thing to check is your keywords.

Each page of your website should be targeting a different keyword. So if you are getting traffic but there are no conversions (and your bounce rate is very high), check your keywords as they may not be attracting the right readers.

2. Your promise isn’t delivering

Again this one goes back to your keywords.

In this instance you may be using a keyword that doesn’t actually reflect what’s on your webpage. Therefore visitors are arriving at your site expecting to see blue butterfly brooches but when they arrive all they find are blue brooches.

Therefore you have a mismatch between what you’re offering your visitors and the traffic your SEO efforts is targeting.

3. Now what?

One of the most common aspects of a web copy that is missed is the call to action.

If a visitor lands on your website, finds your content relevant and interesting you must make sure you tell them what to do next.

A well positioned, commanding call to action above the fold of your web page (so it’s in their eye line) will make sure your reader knows exactly what they must do next – whether it’s to buy, order, sign-up etc.

4. Boring…

If you’ve gone to the expense and trouble of developing a good SEO strategy you need a great website to wow your visitors when they find you.

If your web site is poorly structured with bad navigation, slow-loading pages and full of annoying pop-ups your visitors will flee.

This will reduce your conversion rates and boost your bounce rate – and that’s not good.

People want to see websites that are well designed, easy to navigate and a joy to use. These features will encourage them to stay and make them more likely to buy from you, sign-up to your newsletter or complete your survey.

5. What about you products?

Of course, your poor conversion rate may have nothing to do with the design of your website or the keywords you’re using. It could simply be because your products aren’t what your customers need.

You see web design and great copywriting will get you only so far – if you’ve poorly researched your market and are trying to sell something people don’t want, they won’t buy it. If you’ve checked everything else on this list and it all looks OK, maybe it’s time to consider whether your products and services satisfy the needs of your market.

As we’ve seen, your conversion rate (or lack of it) can be affected by a number of different factors. Your keywords, web copy, web design and products and services will all have their part to play. If you want targeted traffic and a great conversion rate they all have to be firing on all cylinders.

From 1st March marketing communications on websites will be covered by the ASA

The Advertising Standards Authority will soon be covering marketing communications on your company’s website and other non-paid-for space under your control. It will cover all organisations operating from  the UK.

Basically it will bring online marketing in line with the high standards that have to be adhered to in other media.

The areas it will cover are:

• Your company’s own marketing messages on its websites, regardless of sector, type of business or size of organisation
• Your company’s marketing communications in other non-paid-for space which is under your control. This includes social networking sites line Facebook and Twitter

So what does that mean?

Basically the ASA is looking to maintain and improve the standard of digital marketing communications and build consumer trust. All marketing should be legal, decent, honest and truthful.

So if your website promises a guarantee claim of delivery of goods within 2 working day, you must do that. If you offer a product at a specific price, that’s what you must charge. Similarly if you are offering a service, your claims must be genuine and truthful, we all remember the exaggerated broadband speed claims of recent months.

Probably the most difficult part of the remit to understand is that relating to social networking sites. In a nut shell, any claims published by companies on their Facebook pages or Twitter accounts must be adhered to as they will come within the realms of the ASA ruling.

Of course, one of the main aspects of social networking is encouraging user generated content – things like comments and tweets. If these are generated by the public they won’t fall within the new guidelines but if they are adopted by a company and incorporated within their own marketing campaigns, they will. For example if you use photos of customers enjoying your product, they will fall within the remit of the ASA. If you, as a company, re-tweet a comment by a follower on Twitter (e.g. regarding the availabilty of a certain item in store that day), it will fall within the ASA’a remit.

As you can see this could have far reaching consequences for many businesses so it’s well worth taking the time to visit the ASA website for more information to make sure all your marketing communications comply.

Blogging has long been known as an effective promotional tool for businesses.

Not only do they allow you to add numerous pages of great content to attract readers, they are also an excellent source of links and potential link bait.

Through your articles you can offer advice, build your repuation as an expert in your field and develop online relationships with your readers who, potentially, may become customers of the future.

On this blog I have looked at the art of blogging from many different angles including articles on:

Get Your Blogging Noticed

Can You Be a Great Blogger?

How To Become a Blogging Expert

The Holy Grail of Blogging

Better Blogging

I was interested to come across a really useful pots in socialmediaexaminer.com called 26 Ways to Enhance Your Blog Content.

The article runs through their 26 top tips related to the craft of blog writing and a number of critical factors that will help to ensure the production of high-quality posts. After all it’s only through the constant generation of interesting, well-written articles that you’ll attract a regular audience for your blog.

Grab a coffee and have a read and see how you can improve your blog content.

One of the most vital aspects for any individual or company looking to boost their profile is getting involved with social media. Since starting out as a freelance copywriter I’ve embraced social media channels to ‘get my name out there’, offer advice and drive business my way.

But if you’re a newbie, where so you start?

There is a social media language that many find impenetrable – what do you do? Should you Tweet, Facebook, go with LinkedIn? Once you have set your profiles and accounts up, what then?

Well to help you get started I found this great post on socialmediaexaminer.com on How to Create Your Personal Social Media Brand which features a video interview with Mari Smith, author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day. Mari talks how to create yourself as a brand and how to monetize your personality on social media.

By watching the video you’ll learn how to build your own brand equity with social media plus some amazing tips for both the self-employed and people who work for large companies.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• Why you need to carve out your position and brand equity
• How to start branding yourself on social media if you don’t have any brand equity online
• Why you need to use your name on social media
• How to brand yourself on your Facebook business page
• How Mari brands herself and what she does to craft the brand she represents

So grab a coffee and take a look – it’s only takes about 6 minutes.

I have often written about the importance of internet marketing.

Today, if you want to find new customers, expand your business or grow your reputation, the internet is the place to be.

By utilising the power of online copywriting, blogs, article marketing and social media, you can drastically improve your company’s exposure within the marketplace.

Still not convinced?

Well the lovely people over at Pingdom have generated a list of mind-blowing internet numbers for 2010.

Below are just a few of the stats, for a more detailed analysis take a look at their site.

Email

• 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
• 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 480 million – New email users since the year before.
• 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
• 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
• 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
• 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.

Websites

• 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
• 21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.

Internet users

• 1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
• 14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 825.1 million – Internet users in Asia.
• 475.1 million – Internet users in Europe.
• 266.2 million – Internet users in North America.
• 204.7 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 110.9 million – Internet users in Africa.
• 63.2 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
• 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
• 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
• 7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
• 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
• 30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
• 70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.
• 20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.

Videos

• 2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.
• 35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• 186 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 84% – Share of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 14% – Share of Internet users that have uploaded videos online (USA).
• 2+ billion – The number of videos watched per month on Facebook.
• 20 million – Videos uploaded to Facebook per month.

Still think there’s no need to get your company online?