Don’t Scare Away Customers By Over Marketing

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There are so many options to personalize and remarket ads to your potential customers online, you may actually be annoying those consumers and driving them away. No one wants to see ads tailored to them on every site they visit, all asking them to come back and buy a product they browsed for hours ago.

So, David Rodnitzky put together a list at Search Engine Land, which should help you be a fine-tuned marketer, not an annoying, stalker type. Here’s a look:

1. Attribution

Because you’re using so many vehicles to get your message across, you need to know which ones are working and how well they’re working. Attribution tracking allows you to discover how a consumer got to your site, but it’s a pricey service.

2. Frequency Caps

You can use the attribution data to find out what is superfluous in your advertising strategy. Limit the number of times users see your ads on a given channel based on how well those ads work and how they work in combination with your other campaigns.

3. Change your creative

With the data you’re collecting, you can discover what stage users typically are when they see specific ads. Use that knowledge to tailor your ads content and message. Ads for users who are early in the process can be about awareness, while ads for users later in their shopping process can be focused on conversions.

4. Risk v Reward

Consider how many consumers you will alienate with ads when looking at how many more conversions you could get. If you run some ads more to get a slight increase in conversions, you may also be increasing the number of consumers who swear off your site because of over-bearing ads.

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The Could, Would, and Should Budgets for Search Marketing

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How much should you budget for paid search? You have a lot of options, but you obviously want the one that will get you the most bang for your buck. Bill Hunt, columnist for Search Engine Land, offers three options for how to think about your budget.

How Much Could We Spend?

This budget is your “pie in the sky” option. It gives you an idea how much it would cost to have the absolute best search performance possible, and you likely can’t afford it, unless you have a magical unlimited amount of money. While most don’t want to think about the high cost options they can’t afford, this option helps understand the importance of aligning keywords to buy cycles, as well as the value of organic traffic.

How Much Would We Spend?

This budget is the amount you are already hoping to spend when you decide to invest in SEO. When you first begin improving your search performance, you come in with a preset idea of what would be optimal for your budget. Of course, this is likely not optimal for your search engine performance. This is helpful for establishing what you could get for your budget, and letting you see what you would be missing out on.

How Much Should We Spend?

This is the amount you should spend to maximize keywords and provide maximum yield of business goals. This amount is what is best for your business, though it is likely not the best for your wallet immediately. It will return the investment quickly, however. It takes into account organic performance for important and expensive keywords, making you rank highly and reducing the cost overall.

Conclusion

The importance of seeing these three options laid out in front of you is to see the full range of possibilities. Most companies don’t know what they have available to them in the search marketing arena, and you can see how you would perform in each scenario.

 

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Adwords Will Soon ‘Optimize for Conversions’ By Default

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Adwords is making some dramatic changes once again. In October, Google brought back the ‘Rotate Indefinitely’ option for campaigns even though they didn’t recommend the option themselves. Now, Google will be making campaigns not set to ‘rotate indefinitely’ default to ‘optimize for conversions’.

As posted to the iNeedHits blog, Google estimates the change will increase conversions by 5-percent across the board. With the ‘optimize for conversions’ option, Google will dynamically change bids from advertisers to run ads with the greatest chance of creating a conversion.

Users who prefer to ‘optimize’ manually can do so by using the ‘Conversion Optimizer’ and ‘Enhanced CPC’ tools, which can track advertising bids likely to lead to conversion and ensure ads with high chances of conversion are being shown the most without an increse in budget.

Google will make the change the week of November 12th. This means that you’ll need to do your homework before then to make sure your campaigns aren’t automatically switched to something you don’t want.

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3 Easy Email Remarketing Tips You Can Try

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It is easy to underestimate the power of emails to create conversions. However, sending the right email at the right time can actually increase sales dramatically. If done well, a single automated email can increase sales by 10%.

Here are three email remarketing tactics that can help you start driving conversions you may be missing out on.

1) Educational Email Course – While some customers that come to your site are already aware of how your product will solve their problems, many will not come equipped with a good understanding of the problem or why the solution you offer is important.

An educational email course helps walk your uninformed potential customers from understanding their problem to the checkout. It also helps build your reputation and credibility.

By showing customers why they should trust you as an expert, as well as sharing information, you help consumers progress along the The Buyer’s Journey. Once they get to the point where they are ready to purchase, they will choose to go with the company that was with them from the beginning.

Just don’t overwhelm them with emails. Six to eight emails a month will be able to drive conversion rates up, but an email a day will send potential customers running.

2) A/B Test Your Most Profitable Campaigns – We all know why you should be A/B testing your webpages, but have you thought about testing transactional and remarketing campaigns? Most don’t, but Chris Hexton from Unbounce suggests it is just as important, if not more so.

Choose your most effective email, and begin A/B testing. Change the copy, or maybe the subject line. Maybe even try different addresses to send the email from.

3) Prompt Users to Pay More When the Time is Right – If you have multiple payment tiers or annual pricing, you should really already be doing this. Take a look at your current metrics and see which segment of users are already upgrading, and create an automated email to prompt all who would be included in this group. Now, once you have begun to understand the behavior driving upgrades, find an email that will pre-empt this type of action.

By pre-empting users with a call-to-action, they are likely to respond, especially if you can circle in on users that have been paying monthly for a few months. They will likely want to upgrade to annual payments.

While these suggestions are far from a comprehensive list of solid email remarketing tactics, they are easy and can help rejuvinate your email marketing.

 

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SEO for Siri [Infographic]

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When Siri was announced with the iPhone 4S, it didn’t bring about a revolution in search activity on phones. Most still search by typing keywords into Safari or Chrome. However, gradually, Siri and mobile apps are changing search habits and creating new opportunities for search marketers.

The Alchemy Viral crew gives us an infographic which helps cover everything about searching with Siri and mobile searching in general.

There is one error, which Search Engine Land helps point out. The infographic says Siri draws from social services, but Siri can only help users post things to Twitter or Facebook. It can’t help them get information back from those social sites.

With mobile searching poised to overtake desktop within two years, this infographic can be helpful to anyone interested in mobile searching.

Oh, and the creator of the infographic isn’t bad with spelling. They are just British, hence “optimisation,” instead of the American spelling.

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5 Reasons Not To Use DIY Marketing

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A do-it-yourself attitude can be great for entrepreneurs  It can save you money, as well as improving your abilities in a multitude of areas.  However, it can hurt you in the area of marketing. John Follis from Small Biz Trends offers some reasons why.

1) You Don’t Know What You Need To Learn – Anyone can read a book or two about marketing practices, but they won’t do you much good compared to those working with qualified teams or consultants. The field of marketing is massive and unless you are qualified, trying to do-it-yourself can hurt you.

2) A Business Owner Can’t Be Objective – You should care about your business. That seems obvious. The issue is, marketing relies on an unbiased perspective. Being able to identify the existing issues before a marketing campaign is essential, and practically impossible for the business owner to do without bias. Don’t take it as an insult to your abilities as a business owner. Steve Jobs faced this issue time-and-again at Apple, but he was wise enough to listen to his team of talented marketers

3) The Best Marketing Doesn’t Come Pre-Made – Every marketing guru tries to push a “sure-fire” system. They all make great sounding claims, and promise unbelievable results. They also ignore the main principle of marketing. Every business is different, and a pre-made system for marketing any business is guaranteed not to be the most effective method. Remember, the ones making money from these systems are the people selling them.

4) Great Marketing Requires Talent – Quality marketing comes from a combination of business expertise and creativity. Many forget the creative side of marketing, and focus on their knowledge of the business, but this leaves them at a disadvantage. Forgetting the creative side of marketing leaves you unable to connect with the audience in a meaningful way.

5) DIY Marketing Won’t Save You Money – This seems backwards doesn’t it? Hiring someone else should obviously cost you more than doing it yourself right? Wrong. You are only thinking about what you are spending, not what you’re getting back from spending. A good marketing campaign will make the money you spent back, plus some. The companies associated with great marketing have been doing it from the very start. Apple became known for their iconic marketing at the same time they were rising as a company. Having someone skilled handling marketing also allows you to invest your time on areas where you will be able to make meaningful improvements to your company.

Doing everything yourself is tempting, but anyone that hopes to succeed using that idea has to know their strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise, you’ll just end up making things worse for yourself.

 

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Possible Ex-Google Employee Offers Insights

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Andre Weyher worked on Google’s Search Quality/Webspam team for two years, according to his LinkedIn profile. Recently, he spoke with James Norquay, a digital/search marketer from Australia, offering insight that possibly could help search marketers and web marketers understand Google’s SEO strategies.

Since Matt McGee published his initial report on Weyher’s comments on Search Engine Land, Google has released a short statement denying Weyher worked on webspam engineering or algorithms, but Weyher stands by his statements.

According to Weyher, everyone on the search quality team covers a specific “market” and his was content quality and backlink profiles.

Speaking about the Penguin update, Weyher says, “Everyone knew that Penguin would be pointed at links, but I don’t think many people expected the impact to be as large as it turned out to be. At this stage a webmaster is out of his mind to still rely on techniques that were common practice 8 months ago.”

He emphasizes the shift to anchor text ratios, which has been a frequent piece of SEO advice following the Penguin update. His statement could confirm Google’s perspective on anchor text ratios.

If Weyher’s statements are to be believed, they could be a source of great insight into Google’s SEO strategies. However, even if you take Weyher’s words as truth, he would have been just one member of Google’s huge team, which he confirms when he says in his defense of the original interview, “No one within Google knows the entire picture apart from maybe 1 engineer, 1 level under Larry Page.”

 

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Majestic SEO Link Reports Now Updated Almost Hourly

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Majestic SEO are now updating their linkage data to be as recent as within hours or minutes. Majestic SEO is an advanced SEO third party reporting service, and in the the past you had to wait up to 24 hours for link reports to update.

Now, Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land reports Majestic is pushing updates out nearly hourly, allowing webmasters to see new links to their content more quickly.

This service is only available on the main site explorer reporting engine, but they hope to get it to the API and other reports soon.

 

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Why Are You Redesigning?

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Sometimes it is clear when you need a redesign. For example, if your site is still using Flash, it isn’t viewable on many smartphones, and you definitely should consider redesigning.

Other times, it can be less clear. Sometimes even bad designs are meeting the needs of your client, so it can be hard to give a good reason why they need a design. Why pay money to improve something that is working at the time?

Usually the reason most designers cite for needing a redesign is to make their site “look better.” This isn’t really a viable reason for clients however. Kendra Gaines, writer for Webdesigner Depot, has a different argument for redesigns that your clients will love.

Redesigns aren’t only a way to offer clients the latest design trends or “make things look better.” Redesigns can be a way to entirely revitalize a brand or business. A redesign can be enough to breath new life into a business or brand that might be stagnating.

Gaines uses examples from business such as Keds, who subtly redesigned their product line to re-invigorate their popularity, but doesn’t tend to connect the ideas to web redesigns. This is interesting because Webdesigner Depot just did a massive redesign of their webpage.

The website redesigned to a responsive web layout allowing their content to be available on all platforms, but it also helped refine their image. The site seems more efficiently laid out, and they have made social media buttons readily available at all times.

This redesign acts as the perfect example of what you should be thinking when trying to redesign for a client. The site was brought up to date with the current design standards, as well as adding usability features that are great for users, but they also used the opportunity to help refine their brand as a whole.

When you are preparing to do a redesign for any brand, try to remember these ideas. If you are just trying to add the newest trendy features to a site, all your work will be undone when the next wave of features hits the industry. If you subtly try to help the brand define itself, your work will be making a lasting impact on the company in a positive way.

 

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Don’t Be Intimidated By Content Marketing

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As we all know, the way to become popular on the internet is to create high quality content that engages your audience.

It is obvious when looking at the digital landscape, and even more clear if you ever get to have a conversation with any of the people working for the sites gaining popularity right now. Content strategies are always the most important issue to them for growth.

The issue with content marketing is it can be a little intimidating if you are just getting started. The good news is everyone can do it, you just have to start small.

First, you should probably redefine what you think of as content and what you think of as your product.

When trying to create a high quality product for your company to buy, it seems difficult to justify spending much time creating blog posts, but what you need to know is blog posts, webinars, and ebooks are your products as much as whatever you are selling.

Every aspect of your brand or your company that your customers experience is your product, and your content is often the first chance customers get to see your product. That makes it a bit easier to rationalize putting effort into your blog posts. That doesn’t make the feats any less daunting though.

Your company doesn’t have to start big with content marketing, however. Ray Grieselhuber, CEO of Ginzametrics, suggests starting with something small like an email marketing strategy, which allows you to send your audience more information about your products, as well as telling them how they can achieve what they want through your product. Just keeping in touch with your audience frequently with small bits of content is a good start.

From there, you can begin building a blog, offering larger portions of content, then maybe begin creating a webinar. Start with what you can handle, and build larger. You don’t have to leap into the deep end immediately.

The most important part is, of course, not to procrastinate. Just start making things to connect with your audience. Overthinking it will just make it seem harder than it actually is.

 

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