Last updated 12 days ago
A good-looking website is not necessarily an effective website. When you're investing in traffic-generation strategies such as Pay-Per-Click advertising, Search Engine Optimisation or Social Media Marketing, it's important to convert as many as possible of those hard-earned visitors into leads for your business.
Last week we looked at effective website layouts. Now, you've got a website with a good layout that drives traffic. But, do you have content that will captivate the reader and ensure they browse through your site long enough so you can get your message across?This week's infographic will cover six top tips to captivating website content.
Resources:
1. http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
2. http://www.smk.net.au/article/a-video-is-worth-18million-words
3. http://www.smk.net.au/article/a-video-is-worth-18million-words
This infographic is written by Matt Dillon, an Internet Marketing Consultant for ReachLocal, and illustrated by Casandra Maclachlan, Graphic Designer for ReachLocal. Matt has been in the online marketing industry and specialises in marketing communications and digital advertising.
Last updated 1 month ago
The internet has revolutionised how we think about our purchases today. As a business owner, it is important that you understand how your customers come to their final purchase decision.
In the past, customers' main source of information was off the shelf. In other words, they may have become aware of the product through a radio or TV ad, however, they did could not 'review' or obtain more information about the product until they physically went in-store and took the product off the shelf. This concept became known as the
first moment of truth or FMOT.
Since the advent of computers and the internet, information is now readily available to consumers. Which means that today's consumers make a purchase decision long before they ever visit a store.
The internet has become the primary source of discovery and research for many consumers.
It really has transformed the way we consider our purchases and how we come about to the final decision.
This is the process that occurs between the purchase decision to buy and FMOT, in which the consumer conducts research and looks at an average of
10+ sources before they make a purchase decision.
So, as a business owner, it is imperative that you understand what ZMOT means for your business.
Exactly, what can you do to help your business capture the right customers at the right time? And in this way, win at the zero moment of truth...
Read this insightful white-paper written by the Todd Ebert, Vice President of ReachLocal Marketing in HQ to find out the tools of the trade, and powerful solutions available to you.
While you're at it, don't forget to sign-up to receive the latest tips ad advice from ReachLocal and be notified when there's a new ebook available to download.
Last updated 1 month ago
Local businesses need not ‘guess’ how their advertising dollars are working for them in 2013 - “Phew!”
The technologies available today use a variety of metrics and reporting techniques to help local businesses identify what’s working, and in turn evaluate their true return on investment. I emphasise the word ‘true’, because it’s not just about basic metrics such as impressions and visits that I am referring to – this is taken into account in addition to what really matters – customers and sales, and from this - how much money and profit is the business actually making from their search engine advertising?
Let me walk you through the three elements to look out for to calculate your true ROI ($ - Profit) from your local search engine advertising investment and get you thinking about what makes a successful search engine advertising campaign. This article is ideal if you are currently running a local search advertising campaign yourself, or if you’re hiring a company to run a campaign on your behalf.
First things first, If you are looking for tips on how to generate ROI - i.e. set up, manage & optimise a successful search engine advertising campaign, my advice would be to either:
A) Invest time (months or years) into learning Google AdWords inside out, or
B) Hire an experienced team of search engine advertising professionals to do it for you.
What this article will not do: This article will not teach you “How to generate R.O.I” from local search engine advertising. That lesson is for another time.
1. Know Your Customer’s Buying Process.
It is important to understand the path new customers follow before they spend money with you. This process totally depends on the nature of your products & services, as well as the individual customer’s buying behaviours. Why is this important for tracking ROI? Because you need to first identify the customer touchpoints and what marketing and advertising initiatives you can run to reinforce your business and ensure that the potential customer remembers your business first when they’re ready to buy. This will also help you determine how much money you’re in fact investing into your advertising, and what how ‘fast’ you obtain your return on investment.
I’ll give you a comparison example:
Example A) I have a client who does skip bin hire. A typical buying scenario for his business is quite short. People normally call up, ask some questions, then decide to order & pay via credit card right then & there. In this scenario, calculating true ROI is just a matter of determining how many of those leads generated from the search campaign eventuated into sales.
Example B) Another client of mine runs a wedding reception venue. When his customers find him on Google, they could follow a variety of different buying paths after coming to his site via his ReachSearch advertising campaign. They may also conduct research across a variety of sites, and target the prospect via display advertising or retargeting to enhance brand awareness and stay top of mind. Very rarely would a bride land on this client’s website, decide from the photo gallery that this is the wedding venue of her dreams and then call up to book and pay over the phone. In this scenario, calculating true ROI would take into account any other activity or advertising that’s influencing the potential customer’s decision to purchase. All of this, may also assist you in identifying the proper price structure for your products and services.
Both examples clearly illustrate the need to understand your consumer’s buyer process, to help you calculate your return on investment.
2. Decide What You Need To Track & Track It.
Once you know the path new customers follow to your business, you must get clear about what a conversion looks like for your business. Focus on the metrics that equal revenue. A click to your website does not equal revenue.
It’s 2013 and we still see search engine advertising agencies measuring their client’s results purely on clicks/visits, click-thru rates & form submission conversions only. All of these metrics are important to understand and focus on, however they only provide a guide to results.
The majority of Australian local businesses we deal with still receive the bulk of their website enquiries via phone. All phone call enquiry data from your search engine advertising campaign can & should be measured & recorded. You can learn more about phone call tracking here. Through this technique, you are able to gather a number of valuable insights to help you not only understand your customers needs and wants better, but also determine the sales from your campaigns. Further, you’re able to hear the two way conversation, and from this, you can see if your staff are maximising their opportunities and taking advantage of precursors to sale in speech. From this insight, you can determine if a specific training is required to help you maximise sales over the phone.
Additionally, you need to consider what other forms of contact need to be measured on your site. How many enquiry form submissions has your advertising delivered? How many online bookings & sales? How many Live Chat leads? Who downloaded your brochures and did they turn into new business? If you’re running your own AdWords campaign, this page will teach you how to track your online conversions. This page will show you how we do it at ReachLocal.
3. Review & Analyse Your Conversion Data
This step involves time, no doubt about it. Some businesses cannot physically afford the time to review every lead that comes into their business. Here’s where you need to make a decision.
Is it worth putting some time aside to analyse your conversion figures? I think for most small businesses, it definitely is. Properly analysing your conversion data could help you save a lot of money in the long term on potentially wasted ad dollars! (From any medium)
Each individual business may choose a different strategy for reviewing their results, depending on factors such as how many leads they receive, their customer’s buying process, the nature of their products & their profit margins.
The most thorough example of local search engine advertising R.O.I calculation I have seen is this:
I have a client who does spare parts dismantling, receiving literally hundreds of inbound leads per month from his ReachSearch campaigns. He actually hires an admin lady to sit down once a week for a couple of hours to review a sample selection of the calls coming through his campaigns. She listens to the phone call recordings on our desktop or mobile app reporting platform, which also allow her to rate & type in notes on each call.
She records what product the caller was interested in, which salesperson took the call, how did they handle the enquiry, did the enquiry lead to a sale, etc. The salespeople provide quote numbers for each lead so they can track latent conversions (People who may enquire then call back days or weeks later etc.) This information is invaluable, because my client now has the ability to understand what actual sales were derived from his advertising spend with us.
Once you have performed these analyses, you can do simple calculations to figure out your R.O.I.
eg. [Profit of sales] - [Ad Budget Spent] = R.O.I
How do I know this process works? Because I’ve witnessed it first-hand.
In 2012, my client base (which consists of about 40 local businesses) achieved the following results:
146,546 website visits,
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Over 4000 online conversions such as email enquiries, brochure downloads & online bookings.
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29,309 phone call enquiries, which was a mixed of sales, bookings, and inquiries.
All of these results were delivered & tracked via targeted local search engine advertising campaigns on sites like Google, Yahoo! & Bing.
29,000 phone enquiries from the web sounds like a huge amount of inbound leads for just a handful of small-to-medium sized (mostly Newcastle NSW based) businesses. But through a methodical business assessment, and agreement on the goals for the campaign – we were able to generate the results that our customers wanted from their campaign, and help them grow their business cost-effectively.
What’s been your experience?
What have you found difficult when it comes to measuring ROI from local search engine advertising campaigns? How do you determine campaign success? I’m sure any clever insights on R.O.I calculation would be much appreciated by our fellow readers :)
Dave Eddy is an Internet Marketing Consultant with ReachLocal Australia, and is based in the Newcastle Office. Dave has worked with hundreds of local businesses in a wide range of industries and is extremely passionate about helping his clients grow their market share online.
