Defining Advertising Objectives for Small Business is a post from: Need Help Marketing?

When you advertise online you need to define what you want to achieve. In marketing this is referred to as a conversion. You can think of a conversion in terms of your customer making an order, calling your business, signing up for a newsletter, etc. These are the goals you have in mind when you start advertising either online or offline.

For small businesses, advertising can be perceived as an costly expense, but if you don’t measure your return (ROI) you have no way to judge either way. Some business owners will even ask how much their marketing or advertising budget should be.  Then we have to go back and ask the fundamental question of what are you trying to achieve?.

Put another way,  how much must you spend to achieve your goal, and what does a conversion mean to you in terms of dollars.

Step 1: Decide what you want to achieve?
What do you want to have happen if someone responds to your advertisement. Is it to order your catalog or make a purchase? Starting with this, you can then determine where you might want to advertise or how to word your ad.

Step 2: Are you Spending on Search Advertising?
Studies have shown that small business use search engines to get found online, so you are probably already spending money on search ads. And if you are, then are you over spending? Or should you be advertising somewhere else? Without understanding how much a conversion is costing you in terms of advertising spending you will not know if there is a cheaper alternative.

Step 3: Have you made the conversion easy to do?
After you have generated interest and someone has responded to your ad do you make it easy to make an order, or find your catalog request form? These are key questions to ask yourself. If you have an effective ad but do not have a landing page or any easy to follow process after they click or respond to the ad you will lose customers.

Step 4: If you are heavily spending on one medium have you tried another?
Lets say for instance you only print flyers or advertise in the local paper. If you haven’t tried another audience or another medium such as paid search advertising or sponsorships how will you know if your returns for money spent is expensive or not. You might see better or worse results but then you will know if you are spending too much for each conversion or where you might be able to improve.

Step 5: Branding
Some people may suggest that all advertising is good because it gives you exposure in terms of brand awareness. However for most small businesses advertising is something that needs to generate results through conversions. If you are not getting conversions than it really doesn’t matter how much brand awareness you have. Perhaps you are marketing to the wrong audience, or using the wrong message. And hopefully you have made it easy to convert for those that wish to buy from you.

Image Credit: City on Fire (via Flickr)

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Small Businesses Raise Search Spend in 2009 is a post from: Need Help Marketing?

Research from WebVisible shows that small business spending on search advertising has risen. This is primarily due to the effectiveness of this medium.

Average spending by small-business search advertisers was up 91% year over year and 93% quarter over quarter in Q3. The average number of keywords purchased was also up.

Worth noting is that Microsoft’s new search engine Bing also resulted in the highest click through of the top search engines. If you are not yet listed in Bing as a local business take a look at our earlier post on setting up a Bing Local Business Listing
Other research in the small business space also indicates that in addition to email marketing, search engine advertising will be increasing into 2010.

Key findings related to Search Engine ads and visitor actions include:

93.1% – Click through to a website
49.2% -Submit an email
49.0% – Print Landing Page

If you are new to search engine advertising then we would suggest you consider testing it out. Even if you have a small budget you can still run some ads and see what your results look like. In fact most companies take a small budget to try out new keywords to see what words perform the best, before they spend a lot of money on a longer term campaign.

Source: eMarketer

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A/B Test Splits and How to use them is a post from: Need Help Marketing?

We have heard so many times that small changes can have a big impact on your bottom line. Well this is also the case with A/B Tests, because you can test different scenarios online and see which tests perform better.

A/B Testing Explained

A/B Testing involves testing two scenarios against each other in it’s most simplest form. In more advanced forms you could use multi-variate testing for more than two tests. So lets provide some examples to understand the power of A/B testing.

Some examples of where you may want to try out A/B testing is in your email, on your website and landing pages.

a) Email A/B testing could involve sending two emails with two different subject lines to half of your newsletter list. Just to see which subject lines performs better and generates more opens and clicks.

b) Website A/B testing could involve displaying one offer on your home page to some of your visitors and another offer to other visitors. Put another way, half of your visitors would see either offer 1 or offer 2.

The key takeaway from A/B Test Splits is making sure you maintain a controlled test to ensure what you are testing is really the two variables. Testing on different days of the week, or different times of the day can have an impact on your end results. And it may have nothing to do with the variables you are testing in the A/B test. Otherwise you could misread the test results and come to the wrong conclusions since the test was changed because of other factors.

What do you try and test?

You really need to decide what you want to test and try to keep it simple at first. Creating two offers or two emails can seem like doing more work at first. But if you don’t test you may not know what you are missing out on. Which could include higher clicks, more orders,  be more work upfront but can also have a big impact even for small changes.

What colors you choose and where you put your call to action buttons makes a difference in getting noticed.

For ideas on where you might get the best improvements look at what others are doing.

Online Resource for learning about A/B results – ABTests.com

ABTests.com is a great place to learn and share what A/B testing has done for others.  ABTests is providing an online directory highlighting success stories using A/B Testing.
A recent such case study highlights a Driving School that was able to achieve a 15% improvement on their home page.

To perform the home page testing they used Google’s Web Optimizer which is a free tool that you can use on your own website.

Big Takeaway

Increasing the visual weight of the primary call-to-action improved conversion.

Read the details

More Resources:

A/B Testing – Wikipedia

ABCs of A/B Testing from Google

Photo Credit: mil8 on Flickr

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Great Call To Action Buttons is a post from: Need Help Marketing?

All of your marketing efforts may be wasted if the call to action is not obvious. On your website, and landing pages call to action buttons are key to your marketing success.

1. Choose your words with care

We are talking about action buttons. So you should use verbs to indicate buttons are actions to take. Examples include “Download”, “Order Now”,”Buy Now”,etc.

What is your user trying to do? If you are used to hearing your customers say “give me a quote”, your call to action would be? “Request Quote”, for that type of request. Using this type of thought pattern will help you to create effective call to action buttons. Use the same words your customers use, and not industry terms or wording that is overkill. Simple is better.

2. Emphasis (color, size and positioning)

Make sure you emphasize the action items. What is it that you want your customer do on your website or order page. It goes without saying but don’t make me think about what I need to do. You want your action buttons to be big, and use high contrast to stand out. Some readers just scan pages and you want them to zero in on the call to action.

All three points should really be separate topics.

a) Which colors you use will have a dramatic effect even if the wording and positioning are the same. Some people have emotional responses to color like red or black. And color can help cut through the clutter.

b) Size will help to stand out too. If you create a large button it will be easy to see. Even if you are not reading the visual queues, and written instructions on the page.

c) Positioning the action button on the bottom left can help. Remember people read from left to right. Of course if you want you can also move the button to the right of the marketing text and keep it surrounded by a white background.

3) Too many Action Buttons

If you have one or two action buttons that is plenty. Keep your landing page simple with as few distractions as possible. You may have noticed when clicking on a search engine ad that you are directed to a landing page and not a company’s website. This is because in order to make sure you get the desired action you need to focus on leading the reader to the next step.

Real Examples:

PBWorks.com

Things

For more information on Landing Page marketing we have an earlier post titled:

Effective Web Persuasion for Landing Page Conversion

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Effective Web Persuasion for Landing Page Conversion is a post from: Need Help Marketing?

Being aware of the decision process is crucial to persuading consumers and encouraging buying behaviors.

Back in 1898, Elias St. Elmo Lewis developed a new framework for describing consumers interests through four stages called A.I.D.A.

Awareness/Attention
Interested
Desire/Decision
Action
S (Permanent Satisfaction - key to repeat sales)

In his book, Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Web Sites (New Riders Press, 2002), Andrew Chak applies the AIDAS model above to mapping website visitors.
Using this principle he recommends designing web pages and landing pages for four main user types.

Browsers – May not know what they are looking for; what they want; but do have an unmet need

Evaluators – Are aware of their options;knowing comparable options;looking for detailed information

Transactors - Have already decided to buy, and need to quickly go through the ordering process

Customers – Have completed an order. To ensure there is a repeat sale their satisfaction levels need to remain high to order again. (Important Tip: Continue communicating with previous buyers/customers)

Also keep in mind your sales cycle and applicable time frames. An example would be buying a computer, which could take time to final make the order after deciding what to buy and from where. Using the internet websites are also key elements in driving impulse sales that are short in duration or have low dollar value. An example would be buying flowers online for valentines, etc. The difference is you will probably not put a lot of thought into it spanning several weeks of deciding.

Key Questions to ask yourself when designing your  work flow:

1. Do you have what I want?
2. Why should I get it from you?

Remember sometimes your customers will purchase on the first visit. Others may not, they may return later to continue their evaluation stage before pulling the trigger and ordering. Therefore you must provide clear paths for people to follow: “Order Now” vs. “Compare us to our competition”.

How many times have you visited a website and tried to look for credibility such as return, and shipping policies, secure online order pages, 1-800 numbers, live chat, etc. These facilitate both your new customer ordering now and someone just sizing up your company to see if your website looks legitimate.

Remember: Without having a consumers’ attention (Stage 1) and interest (Stage 2) they will not get to desire to act (Stage 3).

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How to Improve Survey Effectiveness is a post from: Need Help Marketing?

Here are some thoughtful ideas around creating better and more optimized surveys. You probably only want to ask questions that you can action or follow up on. And never ask for more than you need!

1. Every question you ask takes time to respond to, so don’t ask too many. Or else you will lose the goodwill of the survey respondent filling it out.
2. Never ask vague questions that let them sit on the fence. Or you will find people tend to stick to the middle responses and remain neutral.  You ideally want the responder to be providing an opinion in order to gain insight. Example: Asking for a range of Extremely Satisfied through to Dissatisfied, versus instead “How well do you think we did?”.
3. Initial questions you ask can indeed influence later responses.  Asking a question about their favorite consumer brand of detergent for example. Now the responder is thinking about what they connect with. But remember that could lead them to respond differently if you later ask “rate our detergent with others you prefer”.
4. Have an option for a responder to skip questions or submit as many responses as they like. Do not require them to finish the whole questionnaire. You can probably remember responding to very long surveys and not wanting to really think about your responses so you can just finish.
5. Similarly keep some of your questions fun so as to keep people interested in continuing, without boring them.
6. If you are going to add rating scales, why not think about making the scales generate an emotional response. Easy User Experience through to Completely Confused

Resources:

Please leave your suggestions in the comments, or links to more resources on this topic.

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