CPR For Your Online Marketing

Is your online marketing stale, old, outdated and in need of life support?  It is very critical that local businesses make sure that their marketing efforts are working at driving results. Internet marketing has been around since the mid-90's and some local Philadelphia companies have been ahead of the curve but I have seen countless advertisers that set it and forget it.  This post is for those that want a refresh of their strategy and want some direction of how to improve their existing online marketing efforts.

We will look at how to give CPR to your online marketing.  Each area has a couple subcategories to it and hopefully it will help bring your advertising to life.

• C - Conversions
• One of the most important thing to look at your internet advertising is from a point of conversions.

• Are you tracking your calls from your online marketing?  Is your email marketing getting the right amount of responses?  Are you benchmarking your marketing?
1. Call tracking is nothing new but it is very important at answering some fundamental questions.
1. Who is calling you
2. What are they calling about
3. How is your staff handling incoming sales calls
4. What is your closing ration on first time callers
1. To learn how to set up call tracking, email me at elaylon@gmail.com.
2. I recently read this interesting article on email marketing and how to get the best response rate.  I used it some of this information with my own email marketing and increased my open rate by 30% (results below).  Getting more conversions from email marketing is difficult but if you time it right, you can increase your odds.
   
3. An important fundamental part of marketing online is benchmarking your advertising.  Below are key things to look at that should help you improve your conversions.
1. Click Thru Rate - Is your campaign achieving INDUSTRY standard CTR? It is important to benchmark against your industry.  When I work with my clients, we benchmark their pay per click on their specific vertical or industry.  Each area of business is different.  You wouldn't benchmark a party rental client with an attorney so make sure you are using applicable information.
2. Analytics -  Making sure your website is meeting benchmarks is vital to your success as a business.  With Google Analytics you can set up and watch conversions on your website.  You can see if the traffic is meeting your goals or not.  If it is not, take steps to change it by A/B testing your tweaks to the website.
3. Closing Ratio - If you are tracking your calls into your business, as we talked about, you will want to make sure you are closing an acceptable rate.  Again, every business is different but as you learn what your closing ratio is it will help you benchmark success.  Do you close 20% of leads or are you closer to 50%?  Each industry is different so learn what your industry average is and then work toward that goal.

•  P - Four P's of marketing

• Promotion
• What is your call to action?  One very important thing to look at with your digital marketing is to see if you are promoting your service the correct way.  You will want to get your audience to take action.  You need to find the pain and make sure your solution solves that pain.  In your search engine marketing you will want your text ads to be brief and have a call to action.  Promote deadlines in your text ads to generate clicks to your ads.
• Product
• When working in online marketing you need to make sure you have a good product mix.  With the three areas of online advertising being Search, Social and Display, local companies need to know which product or service fits with each platform.
• Search Marketing is a fit for 90% of businesses but you need to make sure that you can make the right investment to get a good return.  As one example, the education field is expensive so if you are a smaller college or university you need to make sure that you understand the cost before diving in.  Search is great for almost every business but specifically I've seen great returns from companies that work in medical, education, party rental, weight loss, flooring, industrial testing (yes that's correct), prosthetics (yup), and much more.
• Social is tricky because return on investment is not always clear.  It is very hard to track but there is a growing need to have a good clear strategy so that you can be successful.  Social is good for highly personal purchases or word of mouth products such as spas, salon, gyms, dentist and attorneys.
• Display advertising can be a fun way to be creative with digital marketing.  With that said, it is a branding medium.  Make sure you understand that the goal of any display campaign.  Display is used to push your message to a new audience. Understand that conversions are going to be low but those are not the goal.  Display is great for long sales cycle products like education, finance, real estate and automotive.
• Price
• The way to look at this P is what are you paying for your internet marketing.  Where is the focus of your budget and do you have a good mix?
• I personally advocate to my clients that you should have a 40/60 split in your marketing.  40% online and 60% offline.  I typically deal with local businesses in Philly and most of them are just now moving into online marketing.  These companies still have traditional marketing outlets that work for them so I typically want to ease them into digital marketing.  Soon we will be in a landscape that will demand 50/50 or better.
• Place
• Placement of your online advertising is critical to success.  You need to be fluid and aggressive at the right time.  When talking about the search engines we see that a lot of companies ONLY advertise on Google and do nothing with Yahoo or Bing.  I've seen countless times, with my advertisers, that we actually get much high rate of return on Yahoo and Bing.  The total conversions might not be higher but we see a much lower cost per click and lower cost per lead.
• There are many verticals that do much better on Yahoo/Bing.  This article highlights this trend.  
• The article also noted that only 42% of advertisers doing PPC marketing had running campaigns on Yahoo/Bing.  This again shows the opportunity for those that make a move to get aggressive.
• R - Return On Investment
• Marketing is very difficult to track and even in the highly targeted and trackable world of internet marketing it is challenging to pinpoint specific ROI.  Below are some ideas of how to look at the return on you online marketing.

• CRM System - I use Salesforce to manage my pipeline and make sure that I see a return on my efforts.  Make sure that you have a system in place to watch the entire sales process from cultivating to close.
• Tracking Software - It's important to have a system tracking your advertising.  The human eye can only catch so much. Having an analytical program helping to run your marketing helps make sure that you don't have any holes in your day to day efforts.  It's best to leave the number crunching to the computer and you focus your efforts on the strategy and results.  ReachLocal provides a great tracking software to accomplish this mission.
• Sales Tracking - Make sure the types of sales you are getting are producing enough margin to be successful.  It's basic but many times advertisers dump a lot of money into a product or service that has low margins and you get a slippery slope of declining returns. E-Commerce, if not done correctly, is a classic example of this.  New laws might even the playing field a little but many local businesses get into e-commerce with the thought of pushing product easily.  The problem with many local businesses is overhead.  True e-commerce companies have little or no overhead so they can compete with narrow margins. Make sure to keep your marketing focus on promoting products that give you a high ROI.

If you want a CPR analysis of your marketing efforts, feel free to visit www.EricLaylon.com or email me at elaylon@gmail.com.

Get Your Ego Out Of Your Marketing

In a culture that is all about ME, ME, ME...the consumer wants the message to be what the business can do for THEM, THEM, THEM.  Throughout our society we are inundated with messages about the best this and the #1 that.  As our culture moves toward a me first attitude, the marketing message, for a lot of local businesses, has mirrored this trend.




We see it all the time with marketing in the Delaware Valley.  We see hospitals promote their top doctors by placing a huge pictures of their
faces on the advertising.  We hear commercials on the radio that speak only about the awards that a business has received over the years.  We also see it on websites that put their glowing testimonials all over the place.  Consumers are rarely going to trust the credentials that are being promoted BY THE BUSINESS in their advertising.  It is important that people understand that you are a credible business but there are much better ways to do it than to push it in a marketing message.

It is important that your message be framed around what you can do for them and that is even more important when working in digital marketing.  The changes that Google is making in their algorithm make it necessary to provide good quality content and have a positive reputation online. You can read more about the changes here.

Below are a few ways to have better messaging and not shout how great you are:

• Reviews
•  As I talked about in my last post, online reviews are critical in how to run your reputation in 2013.  Reviews are also going to achieve great word of mouth about your services. With ego in mind, you will want to take some of the following steps to get the message about how great your services can be.
• Search Your Business Name
• It's the simplest thing yet most business owners have never done this. As a business, or marketing professional, you need to know what is being said and Google will tell you the good, bad and ugly. Click above and do it now!
• Other people are doing this before they do business with you so now you will know what your strengths and weaknesses are.  The next step is to go about fixing it.
• Promote Great Reviews
• When someone leaves a great review, use it to promote why other people should use your services. You can promote it through your social media by highlighting the individual.  You can use Facebook Fan of the Week.
• Make sure to respond to great reviews...matter of fact, respond to ALL reviews.
• Traditional Marketing
• In your traditional, or offline marketing, make sure to encourage people to search your reviews out.  You will want to make sure you've done the above mentioned actions before going this route.
• Content Marketing

• One of the most effective ways to self promote is through articles and blogs.  Most good businesses win awards and favorable standing in their community so you will want to make sure to promote that in your own way.
• Social
• As new awards come along, make sure to link to that organizations social pages and to start up a dialog with them by thanking them for the award.
• Promote to your own network of followers that you have just accomplish said award.
• Blog
• Blogging helps self promote by linking to the article, website or social page.  As you develop your next blog entry, make sure to link to the award.
• YouTube
• If you have won an award and there is an award ceremony, make sure to video tape it and place it on YouTube.  What greater way to show your stuff then by actually showing it.
• Messaging
• Make sure that when you are developing your marketing message that you keep the end user in mind.  Don't waste your time with hyperbole about your product or services.  Let your messaging stay on point and have the product or service stand on its own two feet.  If you are doing your job right then the positive mentions will do the work for you and if it doesn't, you know you need to fix something...and quick.

For more information about digital marketing online in the Philadelphia area and beyond, visit www.ericlaylon.com.

Faking Online Reviews

Maintaining a positive online reputation is vitally important this day in age.  With the amount of research consumers do before making a purchase increasing every month, it is important to have your best foot forward with your online reviews.  Even with small purchases, people want to read multiple reviews and recommendations as they do not want to waste their money on a shoddy service or product.

I've helped many clients improve their online reputation over the years but it still confounds me that people think that they can game the system and put up fake reviews.  With the level of monitoring major websites like Yelp, Insider Pages, Amazon, Google Place and others put into their platforms, it is getting harder and harder to place fake reviews.  Yelp specifically is watching this with a very close eye.  They are watching IP addresses to see if a user is using the same IP address when putting reviews up.  They are also watching the time gap between reviews.  If someone places multiple glowing reviews for the same business, it will get flagged.


With all this monitoring it is very difficult to force positive reviews.  Also, as consumers get smarter, people are savvy enough to see fake reviews.  No product or service is perfect so if you have a 100 plus 5 star reviews no one is going to believe it.  If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, smells like a duck, it is probably a duck. Don't let your reviews be a bunch of lame ducks.



With that said, producing a really strong online reputation takes both an online and offline strategies.  Below are a couple tried and true ways to get the ball rolling.

• Survey Monkey
  
• If you have not used or heard of Survey Monkey, it is a free and useful tool to survey your customers.  How you can use this program is to include a rating feature into the end of the brief survey.  You can link the survey to your Google Place listing or Insider Pages. This way when someone is done filling out the survey they can leave a quick review.

• Email Signature
• A simple and useful way to increase reviews is adding a link to your email signature.  What this will help with is promoting your online reviews to each and every person you email.
• In Store Signage/Handout
• Just like every location should have a Facebook/Twitter sticker in their window, you should be including the review websites you want to promote at your physical location.
• Every small business owner should also be giving a handout to each paying customer that promotes the different areas to put a review.  You can also use a QR code to help them get right to the page that you want to have them review your business.
• LinkedIn
• This is primarily a B2B strategy but it can work in all walks of business.  Getting reviews on LinkedIn is as easy as asking for them.  You can send request and get other people, that you are linked to, to review you and your business.
• Claim & Respond
• Make sure you are claiming all of your listing on the various review sites. This is the first step in making sure you can control the message.
• Responding to both GOOD and BAD reviews is imperative. You must show that you are engaged and are listing to the feedback.

Below are a few pretty important DON'Ts

• DON'T put up your own reviews
• DON'T pay people for reviews
• DON'T con people into leaving a review
• DON'T respond negatively to a negative review
• DON'T do nothing...get started now.  The sooner the better.

For more information about online reviews or digital marketing, please visit www.EricLaylon.com.