Four Cost-effective Internet Marketing Strategies

Written by Rodney Loges, CeM

Everything is measurable when it comes to Internet marketing. That's why it is the perfect choice for your limited marketing budget during this recession.

(Read our article entitled, "Proven Strategies to Survive Recession" to understand why you must maintain an advertising presence during a recession.)

Use measurable Internet marketing strategies to target a customer's decision to buy, rather than just boost brand awareness. Researchers at Forrester see interactive marketing formats like pay per click and social networking as perfect ways to engage customers and start conversing. Increasing engagement is more likely to generate sales.1

Individuals are more likely to become loyal repeat customers through positive online engagement than they are as passive TV viewers. Why? Because studies show that consumers will sacrifice cable TV when money runs tight before they'll give up their Internet and mobile phone accounts. Reuters' Paul Thomasch reported on this in his article, "Ad industry confronts grim research on spending." The Mediabrands study he cites indicates Web search ads and zip-targeted text ads to cell phones are still viable advertising vehicles, even during an economic downturn.2

How well do you know your target audiences?

Before you charge full steam ahead with any Internet marketing campaign, you must first clearly define your key target audiences and create a profile for each segment. David Meerman Scott does a nice job of describing what he coins "buyer personas" in his book The New Rules of Marketing & PR. He suggests you know as much as you can about your customers. Summarize their goals, aspirations, and problems. What media do they use as resources? What words or phrases do they use? Create a short biography of your typical customer, and then fill your website with content directed to that persona.3

Measure outcomes to determine what actions you want your visitors to take

This "look before you leap" step is critical to your online marketing strategy. You must identify your key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you structure your website and measure its performance. A KPI is nothing more than a measurement of progress toward your goal. You might have a KPI of "percentage of income from return customers." In that case, your website needs a way to track return customer purchases differently than it tracks new customer business.4

What problem are you solving?

Now that you understand your target audiences and you know what KPIs to measure, your website must address your customer's problem and solve it. If your content does nothing more than pat yourself on the back, you miss the opportunity to connect with your customer, make him smarter, and solve his problem. Use your expertise and channel it through online content to educate your prospect and he will bookmark you as a resource.

LogiXML, a developer for business software, educates visitors to their site with a valuable resources section. You can go to their site and download white papers, case studies, free workshops, videos, and tutorials all related to the business intelligence industry.

Express Homebuyers is a rapid house buying company in the DC metro area. In addition to their blog, the site's useful information section, lists all kinds of articles and free reports to educate home sellers, home buyers, and realtors.

Now that the foundation of your Internet marketing strategy is set on three stable legs, including defined key audiences, measurable KPIs, and problem solving, it's time to address four cost-effective Internet marketing strategies to get the most bang for your buck!

1. Analytics – Measure, Track, Assess, Target

Remember, everything is measurable in Internet marketing. How do you measure? Use analytics. The key is to know what to measure. That's why identification of your KPIs is essential.

According to Google, "analytics help you identify the keywords, ads, referrals, and campaigns that contribute the most to your bottom line." Yahoo! offers analytics to "help online marketers and website designers enhance the visitor experience, increase sales, and reduce marketing costs."

Analytics helps you understand your visitor because it tracks where they came from and what they did on your site. What path did your visitor follow to conversion or where did they exit before converting? Analytics takes the guesswork out of Web design changes and guides modification to improve conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Author Eric Petersen discusses the value of analytics to your bottom line. He writes in his book Website Measurement Hacks: Tips & Tools to Help Optimize Your Online Business, "Marketers often use this data to determine how well (or poorly) their hard-earned marketing dollars are spent. By identifying every inbound marketing campaign, marketers are able to make apples-to-apples comparisons regarding how well each type of acquisition vehicle performs, usually by examining some type of conversion rate."

What does a visitor do on your site? Where do they tend to click through and remain engaged? Where are the stopping points where your visitors exit before following your call to action? If you understand where visitors abandon your website, you can work to improve the design, content, load time, and flow to keep them moving through to completion.5

2. Pay Per Click Advertising Delivers Qualified Leads

Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) delivers immediate, measurable results because it directs your defined audience to your website.

Does PPC work? Yes, if done right. LogiXML, a background – developer of Web-based business intelligence tools hired NetStrategies to manage and optimize their PPC campaigns and saw their leads increase more than 50 percent from January to April 2009.

In paid per click advertising you can turn a campaign on and off whenever you choose. You control the message, placement, and budget. You track a customer from how they found your ad through conversion. Try that with a TV ad! You can measure everything in online marketing including the return on investment of your PPC campaigns.6

PPC can help your customer find you because your ad can get your website on the first page of results for applicable keyword searches on Google, Yahoo! and bing. These ads are often listed by the phrase, "sponsored by." If you use the search terms your customers use to find your product or service, they can find you online!

3. Social Networking Builds Relationships

A growing number of people use social networks for business and pleasure. While still young in its development, now is the time for your organization to develop a social strategy and use this powerful new outlet to build and strengthen relationships and brand awareness.

eBizMBA ranked the 20 most popular social networking websites in May 2009 using the combined criteria of inbound links, Alexa rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast. The top four included Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

According to Forrester, word of mouth, blogging, and social networking will withstand tightened marketing budgets. Social media applications are useful marketing tools and a blog, Facebook fan page, and Twitter account are all virtually free.

Sophisticated marketers are shifting their focus from building awareness to motivating consideration. Social media applications like discussion boards are ideally suited for motivation.7

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, (AAAS), uses social media to enhance membership interaction and attract new members. It launched its first page on Facebook in June 2007.

According to Alison Chander, marketing manager, AAAS uses a number of group or fan pages for different activities. Science Careers currently lists just shy of 5,000 members. This fan page complements one of AAAS's websites, Sciencecareers.

Chandler sees AAAS Facebook fan pages as an outreach effort to let people know about the association and what it does. She also likes that the fan page is open to anyone, so even non-members can learn about the advancement of science and segue into membership.

"We get different types of messages through Facebook than through the website," said Alison. "The Facebook page is a wonderful opportunity for people to interact. It alleviates us having to come up with our own social networking system."

Chandler also sees the future potential of Facebook as a way to organize its members around a cause. "Though we have not tried this social strategy yet, we hope to!"

Here are a few do's and don'ts in social media:

• Do interview your existing clients and see what blogs they read. Start reading and commenting in those blogs.
• Do not write meaningless comments just to get your website link attached. Do lend your expertise.
• Do start blogging with relevant content.
• Do not be inconsistent once you start blogging. Keep it up!
• Do find out whether they Facebook or Twitter. Open accounts and participate.
• Do not Tweet or Facebook off topic. Your potential customers do not care that you are off to bed. They do care if you are testing a new and improved solution to their problem.
• Do submit your news releases to Digg, Delicious, and a newswire (paid or free).
• Do add RSS feeds to the content on your website and blog.
• Don't ignore negative comments about your company or product in social media.
• Do address negative comments and see whether you can help solve the problem.

These are all no cost ways to engage and develop relationships.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

"Search marketing is close to where value is delivered," writes Josh Bernoff (Forrester) in his article "Strategies For Interactive Marketing in a Recession."8

Bernoff is not alone in this belief. When someone types your keywords into a search engine, then visits your site, it is no different than him calling to ask a question. Upon the initial visit, that prospect believes you can solve his problem. The question is do your SEO efforts prove him right or are you using the wrong keywords and links to attract the right customer?

Full-fledged SEO is a complicated process of writing relevant content built around keywords you've researched, an inbound/outbound/internal linking plan, competitive monitoring, and more. If you want your site to benefit from a comprehensive SEO approach you should consider hiring an SEO consultant to implement an overall plan; however, there are still many SEO tweaks you can make to your website that don't cost a dime and that can, over time, improve your website's search engine rankings and qualified traffic.

Here are a few Must-Do's for SEO:

• Gain valuable links when you submit your website to free niche directories. The only cost here is the time you spend to research relevant directories and to register and submit to those sites.
• Share your industry knowledge in blogs, both your own and through comments on other blogs. This can gain a link to your site and once again, when you submit your blog to a few free directories, you help others find your organization online.
• Visit websites of your competitors often to discover what they offer to visitors. You can emulate your competition and try to do it better.
• Pay attention to keywords. Use analytics (remember number one) to find out what terms your customers type in to search for your product. Use those terms and not the words you think people "should" use to search for your product or service.
• Update your website content often. This makes search engines happy and they will reward you for it. Google visits a site at least every 90 days and Google PageRank is updated every six weeks.
• Manually submit new Web pages to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

While you may need to tighten your belt to ride out the recession, you must still maintain an online presence. Four cost-effective Internet marketing strategies can stretch those dollars and pinpoint your target audience: analytics, PPC, social networking, and SEO. When combined, these key elements of your Internet marketing plan will keep your organization's name visible and help attract qualified leads. NetStrategies is an Internet marketing company based in Northern Virginia. We help drive measurable results in online performance for our customers.

References

1. Bernoff, Josh. "Strategies For Interactive Marketing In A Recession," Forrester, February 6, 2008
2. Thomasch, Paul. "Ad industry faces grim research on spending," Business Spectator, March 10, 2009
3. Scott, David Meerman. "The New Rules of Marketing & PR," pages 118-119.
4. Reh, F. John. "How an organization defines and measures progress toward its goals," About.com
5. Peterson, Eric T. "What is Web analytics," O'Reilly XML.com, October 12, 2005
6. Vecchiatto, Paul. "Crisis sparks eMarketing boom," ITWeb, March 10, 2009
7. Morrissey, Brian. "Social media to weather recession," AdWeek, February 6, 2008
8. Bernoff, Josh. "Strategies For Interactive Marketing In A Recession," Forrester, February 6, 2008
9. Search engine marketing in a recession
10. Jefferies, Alex. "No Channel Is an Island: Web Analytics and Marketing Muscle," CRM Buyer, April 23, 2009