INTERNET MARKETING LEARN THE BASICS AND GET IN THE GAME

Transcription

1 INTERNET MARKETING LEARN THE BASICS AND GET IN THE GAME redlineinteractive.com d t f redefine online th Avenue Southwest, Calgary, Alberta T2S 3E6

2 INTERNET MARKETING LEARN THE BASICS AND GET IN THE GAME INTRODUCTION...3 CREATE A KEYWORD STRATEGY...4 OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE...7 CREATE WEB CONTENT ONE FISH IN A SEA OF SOCIAL MEDIA...17 CONVERT SITE TRAFFIC INTO LEADS NUTURE LEADS WITH MARKETING...26 BE MOBILE-FRIENDLY...29 MEASURE, ANALYZE, REFINE, REPEAT CONCLUSION...34 WE RE HERE TO HELP... 35

3 INTRODUCTION The ads in the newspaper and yellow pages aren t quite working the way they used to, are they? Billboards no longer pulling their weight? Are you pouring money into a traditional marketing campaign and getting little return on your investment? If you ve downloaded this ebook, chances are that you re a marketing professional or business owner who has detected the shift in marketing methods from offline to online. It s true: the game has changed and unless you learn the new rules, your sales and your business will suffer. The good news is that internet marketing has a remarkable ability to collect sales leads and increase sales. The goal of this ebook is to introduce the basic concepts of marketing online so that you can be a competitive player in your industry. Starting with keywords, we ll work our way through eight essential steps in designing and developing effective internet marketing strategies. Broken down into basic steps, it s not as hard as you think to set up and broaden your business online presence. Expect to come away enlightened. Expect to come away with a better understanding of internet marketing jargon, acronyms and techniques. Expect to come away with an enthusiastic desire to join the online corporate community and effectively market your business on the web. redlineinteractive.com / 3

4 CREATE A KEYWORD STRATEGY noun A word or phrase that people type into search engines in order to find what they re looking for. Remember the yellow pages? When you wanted a pizza or a plumber or a party clown, you hauled that dog-eared behemoth from off the shelf, thunked it down on the table and flipped to P. Likely, you rarely if ever use the yellow pages anymore, but you still need to find a pizza place now and then and when you do, you probably turn to the internet. Arguably, the yellow pages was the genesis of the internet search; it was a tool for finding a business that could fulfill your needs. What s interesting is that the interaction with the yellow pages and the internet is the same: look it up by keyword. WHY KEYWORDS ARE KEY Keywords form the nucleus around which an online marketing system revolves. They represent your product or service on the most basic level and they are the force that draws your potential customers toward you. Ideally, you want to optimize the use of keywords in your website and online marketing strategies so that potential customers can zero in on your business. To use the yellow pages analogy, using keywords is like making sure that your pizza place is listed under Pizza, Delivery and Restaurants. By making use of keywords and phrases, the people who are looking for you will find you, driving the right kind of traffic to your website. The tricky part is figuring out which keywords to use. Besides being relevant to your business, keywords need to strike the right balance of popularity and competitiveness. A few choice keywords need to be accurate, succinct, and need to efficiently communicate what your service or product has to offer. The bad news is that figuring out which words and phrases to use to accomplish that task can be difficult; the good news is that there are methods and tools available to help analyze and test the effectiveness of keywords in terms of their ability to drive traffic to your site. redlineinteractive.com / 4

5 CREATE A KEYWORD STRATEGY continued... In this section and the next, we ll share some tips on how to choose the right keywords and phrases to steer search engine users to your website. We ll tell you how to make sure they re working properly and what to do if they re not. Ultimately, a keyword strategy is something that will never truly be finalized. It s an ongoing endeavour that will evolve with industry trends and product demand. However, as labour intensive as keyword research and maintenance can be, the payoff is well worth the effort. HOW TO BECOME A KEYWORD MASTER 1. Generate keywords. Sit down at your computer, open up Google, and think of the words someone would type into the search field in order to find your business. Think about words and phrases that really get to the core of your product or service. Is one of your words your brand or business name? Scratch it off the list: for small and medium sized businesses, your brand name is not a word people will use to find you because they don t know you yet. Are any of your words stand-alone adjectives, like great? Scratch those off the list, too: descriptors do not represent your core product or service. Put some thought into it and generate a healthy list of keywords and phrases to work with, perhaps ten or twelve. Tools to help choose keywords and determine competitiveness: Trellian s Keyword Discovery Google AdWords Keyword Tool HubSpot s Keyword Grader Tool redlineinteractive.com / 5

6 how to become a keyword master continued Choose keywords. From the list of keywords, the next step is to narrow it down to about five that are the best in terms of competitiveness and relevance. a. Some words are especially popular and competitive on the internet. Words like business or restaurant or sales are very competitive, which means that so many websites contain those words and would appear on a list of search results that it would be hard to stand out among them, let alone at the top of them. The goal is to pick keywords which are not tremendously competitive and are rather more specific to your business (in the industry, these are referred to as long tail keywords ). b. Be sure to choose keywords that are relevant to your business. An obscure phrase or industry jargon might rank you higher on a search results page, but if it s too obscure, potential customers likely won t use it to find you. Think of it like a spectrum: you want your keywords to strike just the right balance between competitiveness and relevance so that customers can find you but that your website isn t lost among myriad other businesses. And remember, these keywords don t need to be perfect right off the bat. We ll be analyzing and measuring their effectiveness at driving traffic to your site and we can change them or refine them if need be (skip ahead to section eight if you can t wait to find out how). At this point, the keywords don t need to be perfect, they just need to be. 3. Optimize for keywords. With the list of golden words and phrases in hand, the next step is to incorporate them into your website. This is going to require a delicate hand: you don t want a website slathered in keywords and dripping keyword phrases, you want a lightly seasoned, keyword-healthy website. The next section offers some instruction on how to do it right. redlineinteractive.com / 6

7 OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE Now, we re going to put your keywords to work. The goal here is to strategically insert keywords into the content on your website in such a way that a search engine will deem it worth a high rank in a list of search results. Basically, that is search engine optimization (SEO) in a nutshell: doing what it takes to earn a high ranking. To earn a blue ribbon in the SEO contest, your website should be listed among those presented on the first page of search engine results. Some people who scan the first page of search engine results will click through to review the second page of results, but they are very few. You definitely want to aim to be a first-pager. TELL ME MORE ABOUT RANKING You know that keywords are important; you know that ranking highly is important; but how exactly do keywords work to earn a high ranking? Here s what happens: a computer program called a web crawler regularly and methodically browses websites. Usually, a web crawler belongs to a search engine, like Google. Web crawlers are constantly on the move, absorbing the text of websites and indexing it so that the search engine can use the data in order to produce search engine results. They don t just visit each website once, either; they know that content on a website can change and the want the most up-to-date information to present to search engine users, so they will visit some websites quite often and absorb new text, including keywords. Aha! Keywords! If your website makes good use of keywords, a web crawler will eat them right up and use those keywords to index your website. That way, when a user types one of your keywords into a search engine, the search engine displays a list of websites that contain that keyword and your website will be among them. Ideally, your website will be among the first ten of them. Incorporating keywords into your website and making sure the content of your website is web crawler-friendly is referred to as On-Page SEO. But because web crawlers use more than one algorithm to calculate a website s search result ranking, we have to pay attention to other factors. There is also something called Off-Page SEO which refers to your website s authority on the world wide web and is determined by what other people have to say about your site. In optimizing your website for search engines, we ve got to address both On- and Off-Page SEO; we ll start with the easy one first. redlineinteractive.com / 7

8 9 KEY ELEMENTS OF ON-PAGE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION 1. Page titles A website s page title is the text you see at the top of a web page and it is also the title that the web crawler sees. You see CBC News Canada ; a web crawler sees <title>canada - CBC News</title>. The web crawler reads the website s HTML code and recognizes the text between the <title> tags as the page title. As you might imagine, you want the text in between those tags to contain keywords, but there are some other tricks of the trade to employ: Make the page title fewer than 70 characters long. If it s too long, the keywords embedded within it become too diluted and won t be noticed. Put keywords as close to the beginning of the title as possible. Make it readable by humans. You don t want it read as gibberish, like canada news news canada news. (More advice on how not to use keywords to follow shortly.) Include your business name at the end of the page title. Use different page titles for each page of your website. Think of each page title as an opportunity to shout out your keywords. 2. Meta description Meta descriptions cater to human readers rather than web crawlers, but are important SEO elements nonetheless. A meta description is the short blurb of text you see under each result on a search engine. For example, under the NHL.com link on a page of Google search results, the text offers an abbreviated description of what you can expect to see on the website, The official National Hockey League web site includes features, news, rosters, statistics, teams, live game radio broadcasts, and video clips. This short description indicates to the searcher whether or not the result is relevant to their search. Even though web crawlers don t pay any particular attention to this information, it s still good practice to include some of your keywords in the meta description. The meta description is not actually visible on your website, it is only ever used to summarize your website to searchers. It lives within the <meta description> tags in your website s HTML code and is only ever partly displayed by search engines (<150 characters) so you want to keep it as brief and informative as possible. redlineinteractive.com / 8

9 9 KEY ELEMENTS OF ON-PAGE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION 3. Headings Headings are just what you would expect: text of more prominent size used to label a section of content. Within HTML code, a header is anything surrounded by <h1>, <h2> or <h3> tags and the lower the number, the more prominent the text. Web crawlers are more likely to read the text within these tags than they are the rest of the text on the page so it is wise to include keywords within the headings whenever possible and practical. Consider, though, that using too many <h> tags dilutes their importance to a web crawler rendering their ranking abilities less effective. Therefore, each page on your website should really only have one <h1> tag. If the page has a lot of text, like a blog post, then it s not unreasonable to use a few <h2> or <h3> tags, but don t go overboard. 4. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) If HTML is the back-end code of your website, then a cascading style sheet is the template into which this code is put. The CSS of a website defines how the headings and links and other visual elements should appear on your website. The great advantage of using CSS is that it does all the heavy lifting of organizing and maintaining styles within a website so that the HTML code doesn t have to. Web crawlers don t waste their time reading CSS they don t care what a website looks like they read only the HTML web content. If the HTML of your website is forced to contend with all the layout-related information, the relevance of the HTML text is diluted so that your keywords become a bit lost. Bottom line: use CSS. 5. Images Visual content on your website is, obviously, meant for enjoyment and education of its human readers. However, there are still some SEO best practices to follow with respect to images Don t use too many images. Images slow down page load time which aggravates both users and search engine optimization. Give your image files a name and use the <alt> tags associated with images. Because web crawlers read only text on a website, you can get them to at least read the name of the image file and the short description of the image within the <alt> tags. Include keywords in the image file names. Don t miss this opportunity to subtly inject more keywords into your website. Be sure to separate different keywords within the file name with dashes so the web crawlers read them as individual words. 6. Domain information Search engines reward older websites. The longer a domain name has been registered, the more points it scores with a search engine. The way they see it, longer commitment to a domain name registration means that a website is less likely to be spam. Spend the few extra dollars to extend your website s domain name registration and show search engines that you re serious. redlineinteractive.com / 9

10 9 KEY ELEMENTS OF ON-PAGE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION 7. Google crawl frequency When a web crawler reads your site, it updates the information it has on file for the website including keywords. Because we are all minions of the all-mighty Google, the frequency with which that particular web crawler reads your site is of utmost importance. You want Google to crawl your site as often as possible. How do you entice it to visit? By regularly producing and publishing fresh content on your website. We ll discuss this in more detail in section three. 8. URL Structure A URL is a webpage s web address, like A website has more than one URL each page of the website has one. Ergo, Redline s Contact Us page URL is How these URLs are structured has an impact on a website s search engine optimization. Because it s all managed in the back end and involves things like the content management system and programming framework, improving your website s URL could take a fair amount of effort on the part of your web developer. But once again, the reward is worth the work. Here are some good URL structure principles to which your website should adhere: Apply a 301 Redirect where appropriate. Whenever a website moves or the name of a website page changes, the HTML code known as a 301 Redirect will automatically route visitors from the defunct address to the new, valid one. Apply a 301 Redirect to yourwebsite.com so that it routes visitors to It s a tiny little thing that can have a lot of impact because web crawlers will crawl and index each version of the website separately. Avoid deeply nested URLs. From an SEO standpoint, it s much better to have a short URL rather than an enormously long, deeply nested one. An example of a deeply nested URL that earns very little SEO credit is: Structure URLs to be short and sweet. Include keywords in your URLs. The main URL for your website may not contain any of your keywords and that s OK. But that s no reason the URLs of your internal pages can t incorporate a few keywords. Just make sure the URLs remain clean, short and gibberish-free. Separate keywords with dashes. This principle applies only to internal pages. If you re able to reasonably include more than one keyword within a URL, be sure to separate the words with dashes so the web crawler will read them properly as individual words. Ensure that your web pages have static URLs. Whether a page s URL is static or dynamic is generally the work of your web server software. Search for instructions on Google to find out how to create static URLs using your web server software. 9. Keyword stuffing Keyword stuffing is a term that refers to the practice of cramming as many keywords as possible into a website s text. If a few keywords is good, a ton of them must be better, right? Wrong! Not only does this offer a ridiculous, unreadable experience for your human visitors, web crawlers are not easily fooled and can detect the overuse of keywords. Prepare to be ranked near the bottom if your website says nothing but pizza good good pizza hot delivery pizza pizza. redlineinteractive.com / 10

11 OFF-PAGE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Off-Page SEO can be tough to improve. As mentioned above, this type of SEO involves your website s authority on the internet and is judged by the number and quality of inbound links* to your website. Improving your Off-Page SEO is kind of like standing on a rooftop and shouting Hey everybody! Like me more!. It s just not that easy. Making it even more difficult, search engines not only judge your site by the number of its inbound links but by the quality of those links as well. An inbound link from The Globe and Mail is a lot more valuable than a link from a tiny blog with ten readers. Sure, they both count as inbound links, but search engines aren t stupid. They know who The Globe and Mail is and they rank websites with those kinds of inbounds links higher. Fortunately, there are methods by which you can gradually and authentically improve your Off-Page SEO. One of the best ways to earn inbound links is to regularly publish fresh content on your website. Attract a little link love by creating interesting, remarkable content which others will naturally want to share by providing a link to it on their own website. You can further improve your chances of finding link love by sharing your fresh content via social media sites (think Facebook and Twitter). In the next sections, we ll discuss how to create and share great web content. * Inbound links are links to your website posted on other websites. For example, if a blog writer includes a link to your website in their blog, you ve just earned yourself an inbound link. redlineinteractive.com / 11

12 HOW DOES YOUR WEBSITE RANK? As an experiment, take the time to find out how well-optimized your website is before you make any changes to it. Use HubSpot s free Website Grader to analyze your site and give you a score between 0 and 100. The higher the score, the better optimized the website is for search engines. HubSpot has analyzed over 3.5 million websites with its Website Grader tool so you know that if you score a 45, then you scored 45% better than the other 3.5 million websites. Don t be too discouraged if your initial score is pretty low. You haven t optimized yet! Apply the tips and tricks outlined in this ebook and you can look forward to some good numbers in the future. A good tool for gauging your website s search engine optimization is to find out its MOZ rank. A MOZ rank is a link metric developed by a group called SEOmoz. It measures how popular a website is based on the number of its inbound links. High quality inbound links earn a higher MOZ ranking. Your website s MOZ ranking is. redlineinteractive.com / 12

13 CREATE WEB CONTENT Armed with a few choice keywords and working on a newly optimized website, you are now ready to start blogging! Actually, blogging is just one way to create fresh, engaging web content for your site visitors. There are several types of web content which can be put to good use in attracting potential customers to your site: images and photos podcasts webinars animations slide show presentations videos news releases ebooks While there are a great many forms of web content, in this section we re going to focus on leveraging the blog. Blogging results in a 55% increase in website visitors. 2 Companies that blog have two times the Twitter followers as non-bloggers, and 97% more inbound links. 3 redlineinteractive.com / 13

14 BLOGGING objective It may be tempting to launch a weblog that describes all the best features of your product or service and why potential customers should buy it. That strategy, however, will secure zero online cred. Rather than a marketing brochure, think of your blog as a magazine article. Aim to contribute to your industry s online community by sharing your expertise, informing readers of industry news and developments, and generating buzz. Think of your blog as a tool to educate your potential customers rather than a podium from which to preach about your product. That being said, there s no reason you can t use a few of your keywords in your blog posts here and there. SETTING UP A BLOG The first step in setting up a blog is to determine a method for publishing material online. There are several publishing platforms that will enable you to publish your blog on your website some free, some for a fee so there are a few things to consider when deciding which tool to use. A few blog platforms options: WordPress TypePad Drupal Posterous First and foremost, a blogging platform must be easy to use; if you have trouble using it, you re not going to be motivated to fight with it very often and your blog will suffer for it. Second, it s a good idea to choose a platform that offers a content management system (CMS) that allows you to easily add content to you blog text, images, videos without forcing you to learn HTML. A website with a CMS will enable you to publish blog posts quickly and easily without having to wait for your webmaster to update the website. Third, make sure that your blog will be a part of your business website. The whole idea in creating a blog is so that your business website publishes new, fresh content often, so setting up a blog as a stand-alone website would not accomplish your goal. Every time a new blog post is published, you are giving web crawlers a new reason to visit and index your site and you are presenting other internet users with the opportunity to read and share new information. Search engines reward dynamic websites with high rankings, and high rankings mean more visitors and the potential for more leads. So, load up your business website with a lot of spider food. (Web crawlers are spiders they like to eat fresh content you get it.) redlineinteractive.com / 14

15 BLOGGING CHOOSING A BLOG TOPIC Staring at the clean slate of a brand, new blog, you may be asking yourself, What on earth am I going to write about? Not an unreasonable question. The answer depends upon the purpose of your blog. Will you educate readers about issues in your industry? Will you discuss problems that your potential customers face which your product or service could help resolve? Will you discuss the reasons why Star Wars is better than Star Trek? Yes, yes, and uh no. The topic of each of your blog posts should be relevant, current and educational, but not an ode to your wonderful product and most definitely not a discussion about fictional space sagas. A great way to get started is to compose a list of the top ten questions that your current or prospective customers ask about your industry or product. Write one blog post to respond to each of those ten questions and you ve already written ten posts. Publish one post a week for ten weeks and you ve laid a solid foundation for your business blog. To generate more ideas for blog topics, read one expert s tips on Developing Blog Content Ideas. Above all, keep it interesting for your readers and let your expertise and passion for the topic shine through. redlineinteractive.com / 15

16 BLOGGING continued... WRITING A BLOG POST When you re finally ready to sit down and begin typing, here are some practical bits of advice to heed. Grab attention with the title. This is the first thing the human reader sees and the most likely bit of HTML that a search engine will read (because it will be enclosed within a <h1> heading). Make sure it is keyword-rich and concisely communicates the subject of the blog post. Publish well-written, well-formatted text. Make sure your blog post is an interesting, cohesive read; use bullet points and sub-headings in order to break it up into easily-digestible sections. Include images or videos. A good image or video clip help to make your blog post memorable to its human readers. A visual can also dilute the density of a blog post to make it more fun to read. Include links to relevant content. If your blog post references something else online another article, a video, a website be sure to include a link to the other content. Also, make sure that you include links to your landing pages (to be discussed in section five) so that readers of the blog post can easily click through to your landing pages and turn themselves into leads. Call readers to action. At the end of each blog post, include a link and/or instructions for readers who want to take the next step and act upon what you ve elucidated. Basically, you want to provide an easy way to turn readers of your blog post into leads. (Again, we ll discuss this further in section five.) BLOGGING TO CONVERT We ll be discussing the finer points of lead conversion in section five, but ultimately the goal of each of your business blog posts is to turn a reader into a lead. Your blog is a platform on which to present not only interesting information to readers but to encourage them to take the next steps towards becoming actual customers. When blogging, be sure to include appropriate calls-to-action (CTAs) that are closely related to the subject matter of your blog post. For example, a CTA may be a link at the end of a blog post to a webinar where a reader can learn more about how to use a product to solve a particular problem. If you pique a reader s interest, be certain to tell them where they can get more info! redlineinteractive.com / 16

17 ONE FISH IN A SEA OF SOCIAL MEDIA Social media: it is the next generation of marketing; it is global; it is viral; it is penetrative; it is the way of the future. It s also kind of intimidating from the standpoint of a small- or mediumsized business owner. However, with a little understanding and a few handy tools in your virtual tool belt, your business will be able to swim in the sea of social media. From an online marketing perspective, social media provide terrific channels for communicating directly with your current and potential customers. They help to quickly distribute business content and are key elements in the development of online communities that generate industry buzz. In this section, we re going to suggest some tools to use to monitor your business social media presence and we ll examine how to leverage the marketing capabilities of the three big sharks in the sea: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. MONITOR SOCIAL MEDIA Google Alerts. Set up several Google alerts which will notify you by when your business or product or keywords are mentioned online. These s will help you keep track of relevant online buzz. Twitter Search or HootSuite. Use these tools to monitor mentions of your brand on Twitter. If you want to get really fancy, use CoTweet to manage multiple users on a corporate Twitter account and assign employees to respond to or follow-up on particular tweets. Google Reader and RSS feeds. In Google Reader, set up RSS feeds to notify you of mentions of your business or keywords in popular websites such as Flickr, Digg, and Delicious. Review your Google Reader daily to catch mentions. Facebook Insights. Assuming your business has a Facebook fan page (if it doesn t, consider this a directive to set one up!), use the Facebook Insights Dashboard to review stats about your fan page. Monitor things like fan growth and page views to gauge your Facebook page s ability to interact and engage with fans. redlineinteractive.com / 17

18 TWITTER 140 characters broadcast across the internet can have an incredible impact. Revolutions, elections, disasters tweets about these things have connected people across the globe and wrought tremendous change. (Still a little fuzzy on what the heck Twitter is exactly? Check out Tweeternet s explanation.) With over 200 million tweets per day and upwards of 139 million unique visitors 1, is it worthwhile for your business to wade into the chirpy fray? Start by using Twitter Search for free to figure out how often your business, your competitors, your industry and your keywords are being mentioned on Twitter. Gauging your presence on Twitter this way will help you to determine if you should invest the time and energy to create and maintain a corporate Twitter account. If it appears that it would be worthwhile to contribute to the online conversation about your company, then take the plunge and set up a free account for your company. To learn more about how to use Twitter for marketing, check out The Myths, Legends and Hazards of Twitter Marketing. Meanwhile, a few quick tips: Use the name of your business as your Twitter user name. Use your business logo as the profile image for the account. However, if written from a first person perspective, it might be more appropriate to use a photo of the employee who maintains the Twitter account on behalf of the company. Create a custom Twitter background that displays information about your business. Use Twitter s advanced search to help determine industry influencers and customers that your business should follow. redlineinteractive.com / 18

19 FACEBOOK Think of your business Facebook fan page as an online community centre. It will provide a base from which to build a community of advocates for your business who will help increase word-of-mouth marketing. As well, it provides a critical channel though which your business can communicate with customers and potential customers: it allows you to be a part of the conversation. Not having a Facebook page for your business is not an option! If you haven t already set up a Facebook page for your business, make that your first foray into the social media fray. For more information on how to set up a stellar Facebook page, read AllFacebook.com s article on Facebook Page Strategy. redlineinteractive.com / 19

20 LINKEDIN LinkedIn is the realm of the business professional. This network of over 100 million professionals and 1 million businesses always has room for one more! To insert your business into the LinkedIn network, start by setting up and completing a profile for yourself and a profile for your business. Take some time to make sure that you provide as much information as possible on your profiles, writing interesting and accurate descriptions of your experience, knowledge and passion. As well, be sure to include links to your business website and your business blog on each profile. After having created profiles for you and your business, take advantage of two useful LinkedIn features: LinkedIn Groups allows users to generate a topic for discussion and then participate in its discussion. Participate! Groups are a fantastic place to network with other professionals and to share relevant blog content. LinkedIn Answers is a forum for users to ask and answer questions. It can potentially present great opportunities for you to a) address questions directed specifically to your business, and b) address indirect questions for which your business can provide an answer or solution. Become a trusted answerer by providing accurate, pertinent information with handy references to your blog posts or other web content. Ultimately, LinkedIn Answers can be powerful generator of high-quality traffic to your blog or website. If you want to learn how to leverage LinkedIn for marketing, check out some online resources: LinkedIn s free video, Start a Conversation with Groups GigaOm s 33 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Business LinkedInForMarketing.com s Networking: Finding People Who Want to Do Business with You redlineinteractive.com / 20

21 CONVERT SITE TRAFFIC INTO LEADS A few weeks after having nailed down your keywords, optimizing your website, launching your blog and stepping into the social media arena, you ll likely start to see an increase in traffic to your website. You have built it; they have come. Now it s time to turn those visitors into leads. The key to developing sales leads out of website visitors is to focus on conversion. Concentrate on making your website into a funnel where all experiences on the website eventually tumble towards the same objective: a form into which a visitor enters his or her contact information. Beautiful and functional though a website may be, unless it is a funnel, it s not earning its keep. In this section, we ll take a closer look at the following four steps in creating and maintaining a sales and marketing funnel: 1. Decide on a compelling offer. 2. Create calls-to-action to promote the offer. 3. Launch a landing page where visitors enter their contact information in order to take advantage of the offer. 4. Test, measure and iteratively improve the effectiveness of the process in producing leads. redlineinteractive.com / 21

22 creating and maintaining a sales and marketing funnel STEP 1: DECIDE ON A COMPELLING OFFER Make it worth their while! Design an offer that your potential customers will find compelling enough to warrant giving you their name and address. As a basis for the whole funnel strategy, the offer must be attractive, engaging and targeted properly. Typical offers include things like research reports, ebooks, webinars and archived slideshow presentations. Whatever it is, it needs to be designed to appeal to a specific target audience: if you re sales consultant, you want to create an offer that will appeal to sales professionals who want to improve their sales techniques. Ultimately, the offer and the form that a person fills out in order to receive the offer is a conversation starter, so it should be designed to start a conversation that will lead to a sale. STEP 2: CREATE CALLS-TO-ACTION A call-to-action (CTA) is a button, link or image associated with an offer that, when clicked, directs a user to a specific type of web page called a landing page. A landing page is designed to collect a small amount of contact information from the visitor and in return, the visitor receives whatever was offered. Upon submitting this information, a visitor is transformed into a lead with whom your sales team can follow up. Combined with an enticing offer, an effective call-to-action will help convert a high percentage of visitors into leads. On the next page is an example of a call-to-action at the bottom of a HubSpot blog article and the landing page to which it leads when clicked. For more tips on how to create saucy, enticing calls-to-action, check out the following articles online: Call-to-Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices from Smashing Magazine. Good Call-to-Action Buttons from UXBooth.com 7 Tips for Effective Calls-to-Action from HubSpot redlineinteractive.com / 22

23 creating and maintaining a sales and marketing funnel STEP 2: CREATE CALLS-TO-ACTION continued... Call-to-action Landing page redlineinteractive.com / 23

24 creating and maintaining a sales and marketing funnel STEP 3: LAUNCH LANDING PAGES As described above, a landing page is the destination of a call-to-action button or link. A simple form sometimes asking for as little as a name and address is enough to generate a respectable number of valid sales leads. What follows is a helpful, little list of Landing Page Do s and Don ts: DO create a separate landing page for each offer. If you are offering several free webinars, create a landing page for each webinar. (Note: this rule doesn t preclude the practice of pointing multiple CTAs to the same landing page.) DO make sure that your CTAs are actually linked to their corresponding landing pages. Make sure that the CTA to download Webinar A actually links to the landing page that will enable the user to download Webinar A, and not Webinar B, C or D. Triple no quadruple check that CTA button functions properly and leads to the right place. DON T be coy or ambiguous in your wording of the CTA. A button that that reads Click here for a nice surprise! will yield far fewer valid leads than a button that reads Download our FREE Webinar now! DO direct your users to a Thank-you page after they have submitted their contact information so they can access the offer. DON T direct people from third-party sites (Google AdWords, for example) to your website s homepage. If you re paying to advertise your business online, create a landing page for users who click on those ads and make sure the landing page is relevant to what was offered in the ad. redlineinteractive.com / 24

25 creating and maintaining a sales and marketing funnel STEP 4: TEST, MEASURE AND IMPROVE When it comes to the conversion process, the phrase one size fits all definitely does not apply. One CTA that leads to one landing page will not entice all the members of your online audience to convert to leads the same way one flavour of ice cream will not entice everyone to buy a cone. One conversion pathway (CTA glanding page glead) is simply not enough. Create several CTAs and several corresponding landing pages so that you can monitor conversion rates and determine which conversion pathways work and which ones are dead ends. Iteratively test offers, CTAs and landing pages and collect the results so you can make informed decisions about which conversion pathways help to achieve your goals. Vary the wording of the CTA on your homepage, or change the CTA completely; move the form on a landing page above the fold; adjust the offer: whatever it is, don t be afraid to experiment. If it doesn t work and the conversion rates drop, you can always switch it back to an older version. The objective is to keep tweaking until you find a few good conversion pathways that increase your website s lead conversions. redlineinteractive.com / 25

26 NUTURE LEADS WITH MARKETING Leads! With any luck, you ve got a burgeoning list of bewitched potential buyers in your hands and you re ready to turn them into customers. Unless you happen to be in possession of a magic wand however, the process of converting leads into customers will require some nurturing and finesse. The elusive goal in customer conversion is to stay connected with a lead until the point at which he or she is ready to make a purchase. You want your leads to raise their hands and elect, of their own accord, to further engage with your business. To accomplish this, your sales team must develop relationships with potential customers by sending them valuable, targeted, and timely messages. In this section, we list several of the best practices for conducting an effective marketing campaign. BEST PRACTICES OF MARKETING Preparing a recipient list 1. Create opt-in opportunities. On your landing pages, make sure your lead forms include that little checkbox to opt-in to receive messages from your business. 2. Encourage people to opt-in. Whether it s to receive a free ebook or subscribe to a regular newsletter, give your leads a compelling reason to opt-in. What s so great about your ebook or exciting about your newsletter that will make people want to receive them? Clearly list the benefits your recipients can expect to receive when they opt-in. 3. Send messages only to the opt-ins. Only send messages to those who have explicitly opted to received them. redlineinteractive.com / 26

27 best practices of MARKETING continued... Writing and sending messages 4. Keep your messages relevant to their recipients. Check to see what offer converted your lead, what products they may have purchased, and what other offer material they ve downloaded in the past. Use this information to write and send relevant messages that your lead will actually be interested in. 5. Get personal. Put a real name and a real address in the From field of your . Also, personalize the message to the recipient so they remember why they visited your website in the first place, such as Thanks for subscribing to our newsletter. 6. What s in it for me? Make sure that your message offers something of value to the recipient. Are you sending an just to crow about how great your product is? Or are you offering a solution to a problem the recipient might be facing? Clearly explain the value of the message in both the subject line and the body of the Avoid image overload. We ve all gotten that from a business that is so full of images or is nothing but images that it takes far too long to download, if it downloads at all. Avoid the image-heavy ! Include a few, clickable, call-to-action images if you like, but make sure there is enough text in the to explain the message and communicate its value. 8. Adopt a consistent schedule. Daily, weekly, monthly however frequently you decide to send messages, choose a schedule and stick to it. You want the recipients to expect and look forward to your regular Comply with laws. Acquire and read your country s federal regulations regarding messaging campaigns to ensure that your business practices comply with all applicable laws. Converting recipients 10. Include instructions. After having opened your , it should be very clear what the recipient is supposed to do. Click here to read more. Register now to take advantage of this offer. Include a call-to-action in the that is connected to a landing page where the recipient can choose to further engage with your business. 11. Ensure a coherent flow. In the same way that a call-to-action on a blog post leads to a specific and relevant landing page, make sure that the CTA in the leads to an appropriate landing page. Think of the landing page as an extension of the message and make sure they flow together smoothly and coherently. redlineinteractive.com / 27

28 best practices of MARKETING continued... Measuring the campaign s effectiveness 12. measure the click-thru rate (CTR). Measure how many recipients clicked on your call-to-action and made it to your landing page. The CTR will help you determine how compelling your offer and your message were to leads. 13. Experiment to improve. Aim to improve your CTR by adjusting the timing or content of your message, the offer, the CTA or the subject line. 14. Ignore the open rate. The open rate measures the number of recipients who actually opened the . Increasingly an unreliable metric, the open rate is not worth tracking. 15. monitor the unsubscribe rate. There will always be those who no longer wish to receive your regular s, but if that unsubscribe rate exceeds 5%, there might be problem. Double check your opt-in policies and procedures to confirm that you re sending s only to the opt-ins. 16. measure the conversion rate. Measure how many people reconverted into leads by accepting the offer and resubmitting their contact information on the landing page. As in step four of section five above, be sure to experiment with different landing pages and measure the results to determine how to improve the conversion rate of your campaigns. BEYOND Nurturing leads does, of course, require more than just sending out s. Consider how you might reach out to those who chose not to opt-in to receive regular s. Are there are social media platforms to which your customers and potential customers tend to gravitate? Are there other online methods you could use to reach out to people? Download Redline s ebook What on Earth Are You Waiting For? Launching Your Company s Social Media Presence to learn more about marketing via social media. redlineinteractive.com / 28

29 BE MOBILE-FRIENDLY Though it would ve been hard to imagine five years ago and pretty much inconceivable ten years ago smart phones and mobile computers have come to be indispensable. While some industries might look upon this massive cultural shift with dread (we re looking at you, newspapers), the internet marketing industry can welcome it with open arms. Mobile internet marketing is one more opportunity to reach customers and potential customers through quality, entertaining content that can be easily consumed on the go. Embrace the coming of this new age of mobile communication! OPTIMIZE FOR MOBILE In the world of internet marketing, being mobile-friendly has come to mean a broad range of things and can conjure ideas of txting, tweeting, checking in, blogging, and app downloading. Regardless, the overall intent of internet marketing firms these days is to make sure that, at the very least, existing marketing materials are accessible on mobile devices. Ultimately, the message is Optimize for mobile. Developing a mobile app for a business is a great way to interact with customers online, but it s also the most difficult, the most expensive, and the most time-consuming of internet marketing projects. For the most part, small- and mid-sized firms are better off optimizing their SEO and campaigns, collecting and nurturing leads and taking advantages of social media platforms before launching into a grand, mobile app endeavour. For that reason, we believe that the most important thing to do to optimize for mobile is to simply make sure that your website can be accessed and easily navigated on a mobile device. redlineinteractive.com / 29

30 5 STEPS TO OPTIMIZE FOR MOBILE 1. Website Measure how many recipients clicked on your call-to-action and made it to your landing page. The CTR will help you determine how compelling your offer and your message were to leads. 2. Calls-to-action Make absolutely sure that your CTAs are visible and functional on mobile devices. 3. Forms Confirm that the forms on your landing pages can be filled out using an Android or iphone-powered device. It would be a shame to lose leads just because people can t see or click on the submit button, for example. 4. Download offers If your offer involves downloaded material, ensure that the material is accessible and readable on mobile devices. 5. Video According to Bytemobile, 60% of all traffic on mobile devices in 2011 will be for video. The same study reveals that 10% of mobile web users account for 90% of mobile web traffic, which means that a relatively small group of people is using up an awful lot of bandwidth. With this in mind, it is conceivable that as mobile bandwidth becomes harder to come by, its cost will rise and heavyweight applications and videos will become impractical and unpopular. Instead of trying to fight a bandwidth battle, it makes more sense to focus on developing lightweight methods for engaging users. For example, offer a 60 second video with a text summary for mobile users next to the 10 minute video for the WiFi-connected. Whatever the media, just make sure you don t punish the mobile device users. For more tips on mobile-friendly marketing, access HubSpot s free webinar, How Companies Adopt and Measure Mobile Marketing. redlineinteractive.com / 30

31 MEASURE, ANALYZE, REFINE, REPEAT From keyword strategy to mobile-friendliness, you ve run the internet marketing gauntlet. Think you re done? Oh no, we ve only just begun! The truth of the matter is that internet marketing is an ongoing process, a long-term commitment to the goal of converting ever more visitors into leads and ever more leads into customers. If you ve taken the lessons from the previous seven sections to heart, the immediate results from your online marketing efforts will definitely improve, but our goal is to continue to grow your sales in the years to come. Make no mistake: we re in it for the long haul. This section outlines the key elements for measuring, analyzing, and ever-refining your online marketing strategy. 5 STEPS FOR ANALYZING AND REFINING INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGIES 1. Implement an analytics program. Choose and implement a software program that will gather data about the volume and habits of visitors to your website. Google Analytics is a website traffic analysis tool that is easy to use and is available for free. 2. Identify opportunities for improvement. Determine exactly what it is about your website or about your conversion process that you want to improve. Do you want more people to visit your blog? Do you want to convert more homepage visitors to leads? Tackle these challenges and always be on the lookout for other opportunities to improve. 3. Set a goal for success. In order to figure out if you ve reached a goal, you have to have set one in the first place. Make it measureable, reasonable, and achievable and set a timeframe for its completion. For example, Increase homepage lead conversion by X% over the next X weeks. 4. Refine your strategies. Analyze your website s traffic and figure out what conversion pathways helped to achieve your marketing goals. Then, to put it simply, use more of what worked and less of what didn t. We discuss more details about what to analyze and how to make refinements in the sub-sections below. 5. Evaluate your success. Determine whether you met the specific goals you set. If you didn t meet the goals, set new ones and experiment with variations in your conversion pathways. If you met the goals, continue to evaluate the website s performance to make sure that it continues to perform well over time. redlineinteractive.com / 31