Tips for Effective Marketing

Each business has limited funds allocated to marketing. For the purposes of this article, we'll include advertising dollars in the overall marketing budget too. The percentage allocated is not nearly as important as how the funds are used. Following are some tips for ensuring you get the most bang for your bucks.

Use your Website to it's maximum potential.
From a marketing perspective, forgetting about customer service and sales operations opportunities, your website should be getting the lions share of marketing and ad dollars. In today's business environment your website should be the center of your marketing universe. As such, all other marketing initiatives should push traffic to your website. Radio, Print and TV Ads, if used should direct potential business to your website. If you buy into this thinking, then it stands to reason that your website better be up to the task of making the visit worthwhile for visitors.

Your website must be at minimum, useful, responsive, easy to use and navigate and interesting. For many visitors, they will be referred to your website by another website such as search engines or directories or industry portal sites. Make it easy for this potential business to find your website by carefully crafting text content and Meta tags. Research and use the most relevant keywords, page titles, and descriptions then monitor your rankings at important sites.

Test that your website is easy to use, and communicates effectively the messages that you intend. Don't rely on your own internal judgment for this subjective feedback, get outside help, and know for sure. Keep the website content current and useful. Try to find reasons for visitors to want to return to the website regularly when developing content, but keep the content relevant to what it is that you do. Loads of pretty pictures and animations sometimes make sense, but ensure that your website is highly responsive. Give the visitor great navigation tools, make it easy for them to find what they are looking for. Site maps, Jump menus, and search pages are always handy. Don't make them have to think too much when they see your site. Interesting always is nice.

Trap all errors, especially the infamous "404 Page Not Found" errors. Analyze these errors and try to fix them. But at the very least make sure that you get those users to your website with a meaningful page in place of a generic error page.

Finally, make extensive use of log information. Log everything and dice up the logs often using available tools to help you analyze visitor behavior diligently. What pages are visited the most? How long are the pages viewed? Which website referred the visitor to your site? What company do they work for? What platform are they using? What region of the country or the world do they reside? When is your site the busiest? When is traffic light? How many visitors do you get on average by the hour, day, week, or month? Is the trend rising or declining? What is the close ratio of web-based sales leads? Is the ration increasing or declining? If you don't know the answers to all of these, and many other questions, you're without.

Use Web Promotions and Give-away programs
Web promotions are excellent ways to capture visitor information and profiles. The simple questionnaire and optional email list can pay big dividends if executed diligently. Visitors will volunteer their contact information more often than not if there is something in it for them, and it is easy. Identify useful or desirable free information, services, or trinkets in exchange for their contact information. Inform the visitor as to how you intend to use the information. Treat this information as confidential and state your privacy policy prominently on your website.

Use Self-updating CD-ROMs to distribute information.
Catalogs, Software, Presentations, Training materials, Brochures White Papers, Articles, are all candidates for distribution on CD. While the CD carries some initial production costs, like the website, it will serve you well for quite a while and is easy to reproduce in required quantities as needed. CD-ROMs make great centerpieces to company collateral packages, and excellent trade-show give-away items. Make sure the CD, at minimum, points the viewer to the company website. For maximum advantage, the CD should be able to check for updates to information and facilitate customer service activities by interacting with line-of-business applications via the Internet.

Use Email, Email response systems, and email lists.
Don't send email to recipients who have told you not to do so. For all others, useful information in the form of email newsletters can generate substantial mind-share. Your website should be capturing the addresses of those visitors interested in participating in your email programs. For convenience, it should be easy for a visitor to subscribe, or unsubscribe themselves on the website at will. Subtle advertising may be acceptable in some programs, but the majority of content should be highly useful and relevant to the recipient. In some cases, using auto response software on the website makes sense. Just test the system often, and ensure that all email correspondence received by your company gets quick response. Always close the loop on email communications as quickly as possible, particularly in customer support or sales situations.

Gauge print, TV, and Radio ads with Internet-based promotions.
Mail order advertisers consider it prudent to test their campaigns against each other with some form of coded metrics. It allows them to test copy, pricing, even demographics for best response rate. You should be doing this too by leveraging your website and your web traffic analysis. By directing traffic to specifically coded web pages, you have effectively tracked the impact of an ad. This is a highly effective way to gather meaningful feedback on some of your institutional advertising, where you might otherwise have no concrete response rate information at all.

Everything points to the website
Make sure every single form of external communication prominently displays the website.
Every brochure, newspaper ad, presentation, employee email, etc. should point to the website as a requirement. Assuming that the website is getting the attention it deserves, in my opinion at least 50 to 75 percent of available marketing and ad dollars, then you should make sure that your customers are encouraged to visit the site by any means you have. Don't forget telephone on-hold messages and customer support communication.

About KeyResults
KeyResults specializes in Marketing and Sales Communications Services and is located in Houston, Texas. They can be reached at 281-376-5378 or email: info@keyresults.com. The company website is: http://www.KeyResults.com.

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