Starting out with your own home based internet business can be a very exciting time and a very frustrating time. Everyone knows that the only way to get sales, is that first you need to get quality traffic to your website.
Lets face it, the potential for making big money drives our excitement level over the top. Add to this our desire to have the money start rolling in the door today or tomorrow, and we have the basic formula for failure. In this mindset, advertising campaigns are usually not executed in a business like manner. Our emotions cloud our judgements.
What you should never do is advertise blindly without a clear plan as to what you want to accomplish with the advertising. Let’s say that John, the owner of a small pet gate business is just starting out. He signs up with Google Adwords and sets up a campaign to advertise his business.
For this example case, we are going to assume that John does a pretty good job with his ad. His ad clearly states the benefits of his pet gates and his choice of keywords are all very relevant to his product. The first thing that John encounters is that his ad is not showing up on the first page of paid advertisers. Google tells him that he needs to increase his bid to get higher in the paid rankings. John doubles his bids.
The higher bids seemed to have done the trick. However, after several days, $250 worth of clicks, and 200 visitors to his website, John has zero sales.
After one week and no success, what seems obvious about John’s first advertising campaign?
a) his expectations were unrealistic
b) he had no advertising plan
c) he had no clear advertising budget
d) he had no form of measurement
e) he had absolutely no idea why he wasn’t getting any sales
The first lesson of advertising is that you should never start any campaign unless your are very clear about your expectations. You need a benchmark to measure your success against. If you are going to spend money, you need to get value out of that investment. Although sales is always the ultimate goal, in the early days for any business, your advertising dollars should go towards testing the market, testing your advertising messages and keywords, and testing the resulting activity on your website.
How should John determine if in fact there is an online market for his pet gates? One of the simplest ways to do this is to do a search using your keywords, and check to see whether there are any paid advertisers in the results. The more paid advertisers there are, the more likely there is a viable market. The next thing John should do is to check whether the same advertisers appear at the top of the list every day over a few weeks. If they do, then this would indicate that these advertisers are making a profit with their ads.
Once John has established that there is a market, he should review the ads that appear at the top of this list. How are they selling the product benefits, and how are they encouraging the consumer to act.
To differentiate himself in this market, John should visit the landing pages for his competitors ads, and ask himself what makes his website different.
With this intelligence in his pocket, John is now ready to develop a detailed marketing plan including specific ad testing, keyword testing and website landing page testing.
John should then set up an advertising plan with a specified maximum budget and identify the outcomes that he would like to test (click through rate, landing page bounce rate, which keywords are performing best, and finally which combinations are resulting in sales).
Most marketers will tell you that you need to have at least 1,000 clicks to make a test campaign worthwhile. Early results in any test are not always accurate. You need to acquire a fairly broad market view before coming to any conclusions.
Unfortunately we need to spend money to make money. However, every dollar you spend needs to have a purpose, or you are justing throwing money out the window.
If you are nervous about spending this kind of money without really knowing what you are doing, then I would suggest that you engage an online marketing company to help you through the first few months. Getting your marketing program aligned to your website is no simple task, but when you get it right, it can be very profitable.
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