Marketing consultant Simon Moore shares his top ten tips for effectively marketing your business. The marketing tips will help your online presence as well as boosting your offline marketing strategy. Simon advises that it is generally best to exploit all elements of the marketing mix in your campaigns, and you can combine both online and offline marketing to good effect to successfully market your business.

To improve your online marketing, you should first of all try to increase the number of visitors to your website, because if you attract the right visitors in the right numbers you should see more transactions on your website.  Transactions are sales, leads, registrations, website enquiries, but as a rule of thumb, pretty much any form that a web visitor completes.  

1.            Paid search

For a quick boost to your website traffic, you need to buy advertising from the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN.  Google is the most important search engine as up to 80% of all search engine traffic originates from Google.  This type of advertising is called Pay Per Click (PPC) and your adverts will appear either next to, or before organic search results.  You have to work out which key words you want to purchase, and then anyone searching for these terms, will see your advert in a prominent location on the web page (although the position can depend on how much you are prepared to pay).  Google also ranks adverts by the number of click-throughs they receive, as it believes these adverts to be more relevant to the searcher.  So the more successful your advertising, the higher on the page your advert will then appear.  You can define how much you want to spend each week to prevent your costs from going out of control and once your budget is spent, your advert no longer appears.   

If you are not sure which key words to use, there are resources on the web that will help you. For example:  http://www.wordtracker.com 

Or a free resource from Google: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal which suggests synonyms and variations to the words you have chosen. 

2.            Organic (natural) search

These are the search results that appear in the main body of the web page when you do a search in Google, Yahoo etc.   They are not sponsored by any organisation and the search engine providers go to great lengths to prevent websites from manipulating the results to feature earlier in the results.  The search engine providers feel that their reputations depend upon the relevancy of the search results they deliver. 

A few pointers on some of the most important steps to take: 

·         Think carefully about the TITLE tags of your web pages – this is the most important tag for search engines, although they do still look at keyword tags.  Make sure that the main copy on the web page also contains the same text somewhere as in the TITLE tag, otherwise they may think you are trying to trick them.

·         Try to use some of your keywords within your page URL’s eg outdoor_lights.htm rather than 123456.htm.  Try to keep your URLs as short as possible.

·         The internal navigation is as important as the external sites linking to yours. Make sure your site is well structured and that all the pages are accessible within one or two clicks of the home page – any deeper and the search engine robots may not read and index your pages.

·         Try to use unique content on your website.  Write articles on subjects of interest and try to encourage others to contribute content if they have relevant expertise that you don’t have.

·         Try to exchange links with other websites. It is much better to link to related websites rather than random ones, such as sites that are set up purely to sell reciprocal links. The search engines will not be fooled. One or two links to key websites can be more effective than hundreds of links to any old ones.

·         Update your site regularly.  Once search engines know that the site is updated regularly they will visit more often.

·         Create a site map. Not only is this useful for visitors, it helps the search engines to find their way around your site.

·         Use header tags.  The search engines look at the hierarchy in header tags to rank the importance of content.  They will think that content within a H1 tag is more important than H2 content and so on.

·         Use different TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags for each page on your website. Look at the content of each page, and build in variations of your main keywords to create unique tags for them.

·         The age of your website seems to be an important factor.   It may take a few months before your new website is recognised by the search engines. 

Many books have been written about search engine optimisation (steps you can take to help your website appear in search results) and it would also be worth your while to read one of them eg ‘Getting Noticed on Google’ by Ben Norman. 

3.            Email campaigns

Carry out effective email marketing.  For emails to be effective, each communication needs to be relevant to each recipient.  Unsubscribing from emails is easy so your data must be segmented, personal and highly directed.  The amount of email activity you can carry out depends upon the constant building of email address lists.  There are several ways that you can do this, and these are some of the most important: 

·         Your new website MUST be able to collect the contact details, including email addresses of your visitors.  This way you can stay in touch with your visitors through e-newsletters or with special offers that encourage them to revisit.  It also helps you to build a prospect database.  The easiest way to get visitors to leave you their details is to offer something for free that they have to sign up to using a form on your website.  The sign-up offer can be varied:                                         

 i.    A straight-forward registration to become a member and gain access to more restricted content                                     

ii.    A free guide on an area of interest to them that you have written                                       

iii.    A competition they would like to enter                                       

iv.    Some free e-news etc                                       

v.    Views differ on the number of fields visitors should have to fill in when completing a form. Some simply ask name and email address, but in general, if what you are offering is worth signing up for, visitors are happy to give you detailed information.  This saves you from having to do further research to get the rest of their details.

·         The data protection act sets out the rules around holding the personal data that you have collected. Make it clear on your website what you will do with your visitors’ contact details.  If people see that you are open and responsible about how you will use their data, they are much more likely to give it to you.

·         You can buy external email lists.  You must check how old the data is and whether the addresses are personal or more generic eg info@, enquiry@.  The latter can still be used but they will generate a much lower response than personal email addresses. 

You should think about buying some professional email marketing software.  These tools give you invaluable information such as which emails bounced, which prospects opened their emails and who clicked through. Click-throughs often provide a good source of leads for telephone follow-up. 

Plus, there are other ways to increase the traffic to your website, such as banner advertising, or perhaps conducting a viral marketing campaign (eg create a web game that visitors will forward on to their colleagues and friends). 

4.            Offline marketing can increase your web traffic 

Offline marketing can also work well in increasing traffic to your website.  For example:

·         Creative display advertising in the print media

·         Publish an interesting press release that features your website

·         Put your web address on promotional goods such as pens, bags and umbrellas 

5.            Improve the transaction rate on your website.   

Besides acquiring more visitors, you also need to get them to transact more frequently with you.  To improve your transaction rate you need to:

·         Be innovative constantly with your content and content types eg videos, podcasts, press releases, free content, blogs etc. 

·         Look at cross-selling and other areas in which a visitor might be interested.  For example, if they have bought a mobile phone from you, make sure they know about its accessories, as this will encourage further transactions. 

·         Segment your customer base.  One message for all customers will not work.

·         Use very clear call-to-action buttons.  In general, the more opportunities you give online users to do something, the more likely it is they will do it – this is you should include several links to sign up to the same thing, but in different places on your web pages. 

6.            Make the most out of direct mail   

Blockbuster responses to a single direct marketing effort are more common with email campaigns than with direct mail.  And email marketing will almost certainly be your most successful channel in terms of return on investment.  This is because the cost per piece (each item that you send) is much lower with email marketing than with offline marketing channels such as direct mail and fax.  However, direct mail does offer the opportunity for greater market exposure as contact details are more readily available and can be purchased more easily. 

·         The volume of direct mail has increased by 87% over the last ten years in an environment where the total volume of mail has doubled.

·         This has not however, harmed the response levels to direct mail.  Overall, in the UK the response rate is 7% now compared to just 2% ten years ago.

·         Managers now open their own post as the number of secretaries and assistants in UK businesses is in long-term decline.  This means you should create the mailing piece to attract the managers directly.

·         To do this, your mailing piece needs to be:

·         Relevant

·         Personalised

·         Creative

·         Highly targeted

·         Sent to clean data.  Duplicate mailings are a major irritation to recipients, with 76% of people agreeing that duplicate mail annoys them intensely.

·         Directed to warm prospects. Whether online or offline, warmed up prospects produce double the response of cold contacts.

·         How do you find warmed up contacts?                                                 

 i.    Research your own data.  Make telephone calls to companies to acquire up-to-date contact details, including job titles and email addresses of the key personnel who work there.  You can often employ students on a part-time basis to do this work.                                                       

ii.    Partner with other organisations in a joint promotion to gain access to their customer lists.  This works best when both organisations gain from the partnership, for example with a revenue share.                                                      

iii.    Invite prospects to free seminars where they will learn valuable information, and in return you will start to build a relationship with them. 

7.            Get your call to action right 

Which call to action will achieve the highest response rates? 

The following are the top three for achieving an excellent response:

1.    Prize draws with a good prize.

2.    A questionnaire, with an incentive for completing it.

3.    Redeeming an offer you have made eg asking your prospects if they would like a free trial to your services.  

8.            Choose the correct response channel 

These days, more than half of all responses are made by telephone, but the internet and email are the fastest-growing response channels.   Responding by mail has dropped to just 16% of all responses.

·         Include a telephone number prominently by your call to action

·         Offer more than one response channel, preferably a phone number, an email address and a landing page that has been specifically designed to handle responses from your campaign 

9.            Make a marketing plan and stick to it 

·         Make an annual plan that sets out in broad terms your strategy and the tactics you will employ to carry it out.

·         Your plan should include the following key items:

·         A timeline that shows when every element of your plan will happen. It is important to show key industry events eg conferences, so that your plan is synchronised with the general market.

·         The profile of the prospects you are planning to contact and where you will find their details.

·         The organisations you would like to partner with for your campaign, with their contact details.

·         The responses and sales you make from your marketing activity.

·         Your budget, with each item in your plan showing a forecast and an actual cost. 

10.         Analyse your results 

You need to ask yourselves the following key questions:

i.What happened?

ii.Why?

iii. What do you need to do about it?

Analyse the channels you have used. For example: 

1. Emails
2. Direct mail
3. Telesales
4. Your website
5. Field sales
6. Conferences and events

 Did you not include some channels that you might have used eg fax, mobile text messages?  What was the overall performance against target?  Which channels performed and which did not?  Did the quantity of items sent seem to affect the performance of any channel?  What happens to the response rate, profit and ROI if activity is increased? 

Other key areas to analyse: 

·         The performance of your customer database versus your prospect database

·         The results from external data contacts purchased versus your in-house database.  Which databases were the most successful?

·         How did the timing affect the results?  Did repeat efforts perform better or worse than the original activity?

·         Does the profile of respondents reflect the profile expected in your marketing plan, whether by job titles, company types or the industries they came from?

·         Did you receive responses from people to whom you had not marketed your services?

·         Which channel saw the most responses? Was it the telephone, or emails, or the web, or fax? 

A high return on investment represents an opportunity to make more money.  You need to consider whether you can spend more money in those areas that produced a good return on investment.  For example, if you obtained a high ROI from, say, large accountancy practices, are there others you could contact?  If you only marketed to those where you had their full contact details, could you do some research to find contacts in other accountancy practices? Some key metrics to look at: 

·        Number of pieces/telephone calls that were made

·        Number of responses

·        Number of sales

·        Overall response rate

·        Sales conversion rate

·        Cost per campaign

·        Return on investment Specifically for online marketing:

·        Click-through rate

·        Number of website visits

·        Number of transactions (eg form completions, not necessarily just sales)

·        Shopping basket abandonment rate

 ****This article was written by Simon Moore. Simon specialises in marketing consultancy, and can help you with online and offline marketing, copywriting and search engine optimisation.   Simon held director-level marketing positions in blue-chip organisations and he now provides marketing consultancy for the private and public sectors.  Find out more about how he could help you by emailing: 

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