It’s no good having a great USP if you don’t know much about your potential clients. Being the cheapest printer in the area might not matter if your prospects are well-off professionals: they may go for the printer who goes for a mix of quality and speed, for instance.

So, for a good marketing campaign, you need to know what your customers are like, what they like about you (this is where your USP will come in), what will be the most effective methods to bring them in, how you can contact your customers and prospects, the ways you can influence their buying, and lastly, how you can take control of all the processes involved.

In fact, ‘Think P’. Look at what’s important to you and your clients and decide which parts to concentrate on:

Positioning (For example, do you want to be known as the only lady plumber in the area, or the person to go to if the Inland Revenue is about to investigate you?)

Place (For example, do you want to sell from premises, a stall or online?)

Products (For example, what lines sell best or hardly at all? Which offer the best ROI? How do you package them? Is the image consistent?)

Price (For example, how much does it cost you to get a customer? Do they stay with you one month, one year, for always? How much are they worth to you over this period? What discounts can you offer? Will they incur any costs by moving across to you and can you offset these costs for them? Can you offer ‘free’ post and packing and include these costs in your price, yet still offer good value?)

Process (For example, do you make the whole process from seeing your product to buying it, to keeping them informed and giving follow up, consistent? Do you staff? It’s all marketing. Try the whole buying process out, from start to finish, for yourself, and get a ten-year-old to do it too.)

Promotion (For example, how do you promote yourself and your products or services, and how do you carry on promoting yourself even when you’re handing over an invoice?)

People (For example, how well are your staff trained? Do they put across a good and consistent marketing message? Do they know what to do when unusual things happen? How do they come across to the public?)

Presence (For example, it’s not only your staff that makes a difference to sales, it’s your vans, shop fronts, etc, that also matter.

Purpose (For example, what do you want your prospects to do when they land on your web page or visit your store?)

So, what are your Ps? Let your own ideas spill out – and then ask your staff, clients and prospects what they think too.

 PPC marketing is best well suited for those websites that have not yet established themselves in the world of the organic search engine results, or if you have something that is time-sensitive and you want to promote it now! 

But PPC does have a downside as well. PPC can cost you thousands of dollars in marketing dollars if you do not take time to carefully plan out your PPC marketing campaign. Against popular PPC marketing is not just selecting a few keywords and designing your advertisement, actually there is much more involved. There are tips though that you can use to reduce your PPC marketing cost and create a great marketing campaign as a result.

1. Competitors
The best way that you can start off your PPC marketing campaign is to check out the competitors.  Look and see what kind of strategies that they may be using to market their business. There are tools that you can purchase that will help you have a fair idea of the advertising strategies of your competitors.  The most important thing for you to pay attention to when you are looking at the competitors ads are the keyword placement, ad body, and where the ads are being placed on their site.

2. Keyword Variations
It is important for your PPC marketing campaign to incorporate proper keywords in suitable variations throughout your website. If your keywords are not placed properly then all your other efforts will be effortless.  You need to take considerable time when you are creating your keywords. Careful research of what keywords people are searching for will aide you in your keyword search.

3.Keywords to avoid
If you begin your PPC campaign off by using hypercompetitive keywords you are setting yourself up for spending tons of money and your marketing budget will dry up quickly.  However, there are a lot of low cost keywords that you can use with proper matching techniques that will be able to save you money in the long run.

4. Call to action terms
Your call to action terms is very important to your PPC marketing campaign.  If you use words such as ‘click here’ or ‘buy here’ customers will not be as apt to follow the directions because they feel it is just a high priced gimmick.  However, if you use the words ‘sale’, ‘discount’, ‘great tips to use your flip cam’, or exact models like ‘Zophia 3-2-X-A”, you will do better – these are terms that the customers are looking for and are more apt to click on the links as long as you deliver what you promise on the other side.

By the way, if you don’t want people who are just seeking freebies, you can instruct your campaign not to show your ad when people type in ‘free’ in the search box.

5. Honest
It is ok to make a mistake but be honest and correct it and apologize to your visitor. Also when you are using PPC marketing all your information should be honest with no false information. The false information will turn your customer away. It will also leave your site with a negative reputation. If you are practicing dishonesty in your site you are only going to accrue the cost with no returns in the end result. Make sure your link leads to the promised site – and perferably to the exact page (so they don’t have to search).

6. Review your ad performance
Make sure you check on your PPC ads on a daily basis. This will allow you room for fixing any errors that you may inquire.  It will also allow you time to optimize your site if you are not seeing the results that you are seeking.

Making money with your PPC marketing campaign can make you tons of cash if it is done correctly. The more time and effort that you put into the PPC marketing campaign the more revenue you stand to generate in the end. If you do use PPC to send people to a squeeze (sign-up) page, make sure there is plenty of content on it as well (below the form, of course), as Google doesn’t favour pages with little content when you’re4 using PPC.

Contingent motivators can do harm

That’s right – carrots and sticks don’t work!

Many businesses give incentives to get tasks done.  If you want a specific task done, this system can still work.

The snag is…

…it won’t work for tasks where you want people to think around a subject. Carrots and sticks make people focus on the task in hand.

Rewards work well for narrow-focused tasks – those from the 20th century (like assembly lines) are most apposite. (I’m not including bankers’ bonuses here – that seems to be a world apart.)

The corollary is that rewards narrow the focus – if want people to see the periphery/see outside of the box, then it doesn’t work.

In these situations, intrinsic motivators - autonomy, mastery and purpose – work better.

Does that sound a bit new-worldy and dodgy? Let’s hear what the economists have to say then:

MIT

As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.

LSE

We find that financial incentives…can result in a negative impact on overall performance.

According to Dan Pink:

• There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.
• Carrots work in a surprisingly small set of circumstances.
• Those “if-then” rewards stifle creativity
• The secret to high performance is intrinsic drive.

What this means, is, if you want thinking that will make your business more money, and will keep your employees happy, then reward them by awarding more autonomy. Google does it.

Brad Gosse says it for us:

And just using SEO to solve all your business problems won’t work either! Think carefully, and include it as just a part of your marketing mix.

1. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising
2. Inbound links from other, relevant or complementary, sites
3. Articles (online and offline)
4. Email marketing  (more to come…)
5. Advertising through someone else’s email (you ‘sponsor’ it)
6. Viral marketing (if yuou’re not familiar with this term it is highly effective, and all above board!)
7. Other people’s endorsements
8. Search Engine optimisation (SEO)
9. Have a good domain name 
10. Affiliate marketing
11.  Joint ventures
12. PR (online and offline)
13. Direct mail (online and offline)
14. Networking
15. Radio and TV advertising (offline and online)
16. Using Web 2.0 (blogging, webcasts, online radio, audio, webinars, etc)
17. Classified ads (online and offline)
18. Larger ads (in papers, magazines, online banners, etc)

Each method can work very well, but here’s the caveat:

Getting people to your site is only one part of an effective marketing mix.

Make sure you look at what you’re doing in terms of an effective marketing mix: what fits in where, when you implement each part, and what you do when the traffic comes through to convert visitors into customers.

 The demand for online marketing tips and strategies have drastically grown and a new form of business has been born, internet marketing strategies. While there are companies that are all too eager to help your site and business build a clientele for a fee (including us, it must be said!), there are also many ways that can spread the word about your sites in a more cost free way.

One of this is Opt-in email marketing, also known as permission marketing.  

Opt-in marketing requires the permission of a willing customer to subscribe to your marketing materials, materials that take form in newsletters, catalogues and promotional mailings via email.

The more opt-in marketing mail is sent, the more chances there is to bag sales and more sales.

To do this, you must build a list of all those who wants to subscribe to your opt-in marketing list.  

 From your list, you will get your targeted customer, this is a good list since they already have shown interest in what you have to show and sell since they have willingly signed in for your list.   

These are the people who have liked what they have seen in your site and have decided they want to see more and maybe even purchase whatever product or service your company and site has to offer.  

It’s worth the effort

Many people would think that building their lists would take hard work and a lot of time to build and collect names and addresses. This is not so, it takes a bit of patience and some strategies but in doing this list, you open your site and your business to a whole new world of target market. Take the effort to take your business to a new level, if traffic increase and good profits are what you want, an opt-in list will do wonders for your business venture.  

There are many sources and articles in the internet available for everyone to read and follow in building a list. Sometimes they may be confusing because there are so many and there different ways. Different groups of people would have different approaches in building an opt-in list, but no matter how diverse many methods are, there are always some crucial things to do to build your list.

Four ways You Can Build Your List

 1)   Put up a good web form in your site that immediately follows the end of your content. While some may say this is too soon to subscribe for a website visitors application, try to remember that your homepage should provide a quick good impression. If somehow a website visitor finds something that he or she doesn’t like and turns them off, they may just forget about signing up. 

A good web form for subscribing to an opt-in list is not hard to do. Just write a simple short statement about how they would like to see more and get updated about the site. Then there should be an area where they could put in their names and e-mail address. This web form will automatically save and send you the data’s inputted. As more people sign in, your list will be growing.  

 2)   As mentioned in the first tip, make your homepage very, very impressive. You need to have well written articles and descriptions of your site. Depending on what your site is all about, you need to capture your website visitor’s fancy. Make your site useful and very easy to use. Do not expect everyone to be tech savvy. Invest in having good programming in your site, make your graphics beautiful but don’t overdo it. 

 Don’t waste your time making the homepage too overly large megabyte wise. Not all people have dedicated T1 connections; the faster your site gets loaded, the better. Go for a look that borders between simplicity and sophisticated knowledge.  

 3)   Provide good service and products. A return customer is more likely to bring in more business. Even then and now, a satisfied customer will recommend a business always. Word of mouth and recommendations alone can rake in more business than an expensive ad. As your clientele roster grows so shall your list. With more members on the list, the more people will get to know about what you have new to offer. 

 4)   Keep a clean and private list. Never lose the trust your customers have entrusted you. If you provide e-mails to others and they get spammed, many will probably unsubscribe to you. Remember, a good reputation will drive in more traffic and subscribers as well as strengthen the loyalty of your customers. 

 If you need some help with list building and to find where it fits into your marketing mix, call us, Cinnamon Edge on 01284 753 912 (UK).