Online Marketing Facts of Life
With Billions of web pages now online (yes, there are about 2 Billion this year), those of us without the name recognition of a Coca-Cola or McDonalds must make special efforts to help web users find our web sites.By the Numbers:
Business web sites are a “numbers game”. For example, there are currently about 100 Million active web users. If your product or service appeals to 0.1% (1 in a thousand) of these, per month, then you have a potential market of 100,000 online customers a month. If, like most good sites, you are able to turn 3% or more of those visitors into paying customers, you will have more than 3,000 potential sales a month. With an average profit per sale as low as $10.00, that’s $30,000 a month. Pretty nice!
If you’re thinking “Things can’t possibly be that rosy!”. You’re absolutely right. I left out two big factors.
One factor is that your potential customers might go to your competitor’s web site instead of yours. Let’s say that 2 other companies in your market have excellent sites, like yours. If you split the potential customers evenly with 2 competitors, that still leaves a potential profit of $10,000 per month.
The other big factor is that potential customers must find your site! This is exactly what happens to many web sites owners. They don’t do what’s necessary to help potential customers find their sites. When they get too few visitors to meet their expectations, they lose interest in the Web. You can see that having your site found by your potential customers is critical to web success.
Those All-important SEs:
Most web users locate sites by way of a Search Engine or Directory type of web site. A recent study showed that 65% of web sales resulted from traffic coming from Search Engines and Directories, compared to 9% or less coming from links from other web sites (including expensive advertising banners). Some studies say as much as 85% of traffic comes from Search Engines and Directories.
There are hundreds of these Search Engines and Directories, but the top 18 or so generate approximately 95% of the traffic. Your site does not have to be successfully marketed to more than these major search centers. So, the biggest part of an online marketing effort is aimed at getting your site listed well in the most important Search Engines and Directories.
But wait! A listing that appears when your potential customer searches for a site like yours is not enough either. If you’ve ever used a Search Engine, you know that for most searches, hundreds or even thousands of listings will appear. Obviously, if your site is listed on the tenth screen full of search results, most people will never see it. Instead, they will have gone to a web site they found on the first or second screen full.
Your sites nearness to the very top listing on a Search Engine or Directory is called its “Rank”. Most people only look through the first two or three screens full of search returns and most searches show 10 listings per screen. So, at the very least you need a rank of 30 or better (within first 3 screens full) and preferably better than 20 (within the first 2). Therefore the best rankings are the “Top Ten”.
SEO:
Getting your site listed, and also winning and maintaining “Top 30” rankings, is a task done by a web marketing specialist, like me, called a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO). The process itself is also called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s a complex, challenging and ever-changing task, requiring much experience, some specialized tools and constant learning, as the web evolves.
Without an online marketing effort, the work and money that went into your web site is wasted, as far as attracting new customers via the web is concerned. For a realistic metaphor of publishing a site without Online Marketing, think of your site as notes in a bottle, which you drop at random into a very big ocean.
Do You Really Have to Market Your Site?
In fact, many owners of smaller web sites do not do any online marketing.
Some do not wish to gain new customers via the web itself. They only use their site as a kind of virtual sales brochure, to save on the production, printing and distribution costs of physical brochures. These are usually businesses with local customers only. When one of their sales people talks with a potential customer, they refer them to their site.
Some web site owners are simply ignorant of the facts about online marketing. Others do not want to commit the funds required for an effective online marketing effort. Many of these fall prey to scammers who promise fantastic results for little money.
Maybe You’ll Get Lucky?
Back at the beginning of the commercial use of the web, Search Engines were able to find most web sites all by themselves. Some Search Engines claim that they still do.
It’s still a fact that some Search Engines will find your site without any effort on your part, given enough time. However, a survey last year found that after several years of trying, Search Engines had never indexed some huge sections of the web.
You could also simply submit your pages to the major Engines yourself. But just getting listed in the Search Engines is not enough. Your site needs a high ranking as well. And more Engines are now requiring you to pay for business listings, rather than promising to list your site for free when they happen to find it or after you submit it.
Depending on luck or half-hearted marketing efforts ignores the need for optimization to get your site listed near the top of Search Engine results, where people will actually see it.
The bottom line is that unless your product or service is so unique that you have the whole web space to yourself, and unless you have outstanding brand recognition, such that everyone can just add “.com” onto your famous brand, you need Online Marketing, if you want significant traffic.
Should You Market During a Recession?
Bad economic times call for belt-tightening in many parts of a business. But marketing becomes even more important, when your base of customers and potential customers shrinks.
Here’s why you should market during bad times:
1. Get a jump on the competition:
Some businesses will cut their marketing efforts, even their services or quality, during bad times. This gives you an opportunity to reach and motivate their customers. One that you would not have during good times.
2. Got some extra time?
If you’ve been too busy to market effectively previously and have now less work to do for your customers, you may finally have the time to review and improve your marketing.
3. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”:
Economic hard times naturally call for increased efforts to maintain or expand your business, not reduced efforts. They are the worst time to do nothing. Not marketing may not hurt you that much during good times, if you have more customers than you can handle. But not actively seeking work when times are lean just doesn’t make sense.
4. Prepare now:
The next cycle of economic highs is coming. Proactive people will be preparing now to be stronger than their do-nothing competitors when the good times do get here.
Search Engine Angst:
To understand something of the current online marketing scene, you need to appreciate the never-ending battle between Search Engines, their Users and Web Owners. It goes like this:
Users of Search Engines want fast, easy access to every web site in existence, through well-made search tools or classified listings. They want honest results, untainted by money or greed.
Search Engine companies want to be successful and make lots of money. The smarter ones realize that to do this they have to convince their users that they have the most web sites indexed (although even the best engines are unaware of a huge number of sites), and that their results are an honest representation of what’s actually available on the web.
Search Engines used to make money by selling advertising space on their web sites. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that advertising does not work well on the web. The Search Engine companies have finally realized this and are now torn between presenting unbiased search results (and possibly going broke) or charging fees to web site owners for a listing. Charging usually means that the site owners with the biggest budgets get their sites ranked highest and sites unwilling to pay go unseen – goodbye to unbiased search results. Only one major Search Engine, Google has denounced this trend. This is probably one of the reasons for their rapid growth and success.
However they decide to make money, all Search Engines want to be in complete control of whether and how they will rank the sites that they list.
Web owners want the top spots in Search Engine results, in order to derive the maximum traffic to their sites. Many unethical web owners and/or marketers have used more or less elaborate tricks to fool the Search Engines into giving them rankings higher than they deserve.
All this creates an ongoing tension between the marketers and the Search Engines. The Engines continuously make changes to try to make it harder to cheat, but which usually cause problems for honest marketers. The Engines also keep trying new ways to make money. This constant evolution of the Search Engines forces site owners and marketers to continuously adapt their marketing practices.
Beware the Scams!
Scam artists have become aware of the growing need for online marketing. There are many shady operators offering to drive large amounts of traffic to your site for $10 and up. Most site owners will get email from these phonies. Watch out, all these scams are ineffective and many are criminal!
Real online marketing requires serious money, serious planning, detailed, hands-on involvement by the marketer, a lot of customization to your unique situation and a sustained effort. It cannot be done effectively with automatic software, through a link exchange or with a one-size-fits-all method.
Solutions! – Understanding My Marketing Services
A serious explanation of everything involved in an effective online marketing campaign would fill a book. I’ll just summarize the main areas that normally need to be done.
How It Works:
The basic idea is that your web site will act to convert a certain percentage of visitors into paying customers or clients. Most sites have a Sales Conversion Rate (SCR) of 3% to 5%. This is much better than other marketing methods, like direct mail, which is typically 1% or less.
So it becomes a matter of getting enough traffic so that profits from web drived customers will be much greater than your Cost-of Sales and particularly your marketing costs. In other words, marketing costs obviously have to much more than pay for themselves.
In the simplified chart above, we see how this works. Of course, this chart represents only the online aspect of your business, not your other costs and profits. The red line is your Break-Even point, the zero point at which accumulated web marketing costs are exactly offset by the accumulated profits they have driven.
During Time 1, I build and launch your Online Marketing campaign. You have invested money in this campaign by paying me, buying listings in Search Engines, etc. So the green “Profits” line quickly goes negative, as the various phases of my project are completed. The blue line shows that you already had a little “friends, family and word-of-mouth traffic”, and it grows a little naturally, to a point, due to continuing word-of-mouth, web growth, etc.
During Time 2 and beyond, your costs continue to accumulate due to my monthly (or bi-monthly) work. Traffic grows as the web marketing begins to reach the Search Engines and Directories.
After Time 2 increasing profits from the web begin to offset some of your accumulated marketing costs. Tracking your marketing results has allowed me to fine-tune your pages. The Profits curve starts upwards. The synergy of “accelerating acceleration” is beginning. This continues between Time 2 and Time 3.
During Time 3 your profits from web marketing reach and then exceed your costs. You have passed breakeven. Your Online Marketing costs will never be zero, because traffic will start to fall off gradually after two or three months, if you stop your web marketing efforts. But the marketing costs will now be an acceptably small part of your Cost-of-Sales.
Lessons From the Chart:
In real life, the curves will have some ups and downs and some months will be better than others. But if things go as planned, the trends will be like the chart above.
As the chart shows, marketing on the web is not a matter of instant riches. Like most business ventures, it takes time, effort and persistence. Reaching breakeven usually takes 18 to 24 months or even longer. This is partly because most Search Engines update their listings only once per month, or less often. Also, there is a synergistic effect. That is, the more traffic and inbound links you have, the more new traffic and inbound links you will get. This means that things go slowly at first and gradually accelerate as your traffic grows.
Web Market Planning
Your Formal Marketing Plan:
I can create a good software model of your marketing effort, using special software designed for this purpose. Like any good plan, this increases your chances of success a great deal.
A marketing plan is an optional part of my Online Marketing Services.
Consider this wise old cliché, “People don’t plan to fail – they fail to plan”.
Without planning, a clear view of the costs and benefits of Online Marketing is impossible. Without planning, any realistic analysis of Return On Investment (ROI) is also impossible. And surprises are likely to arise, which should have been anticipated.
Without a formal marketing plan, you are opting to use methods that have worked for others, not detailing any unique aspects of your own situation. And you are deciding to spend the required funds without analyzing the benefits or how long it may take to realize them.
In other words, you accept needing an Online Marketing effort. You accept that what has worked for others will also work for you. You accept that your efforts will pay off about as fast and beneficially as those of others.
With a plan, you gain perspective, avoid overlooking common problems and can estimate total time and cost to your break-even point and eventual added profits. You also get milestones to help you gauge progress and make corrections.
Developing a formal plan is expensive for a small business. Doing without this option is probably inevitable for service businesses that are already taking the risks of operating without a formal business plan.
However, eCommerce businesses really need a marketing plan, in order to gain a better understanding of their potential market, cash flow, inventory turnover, actual cost-of-sales and other critical financials.
Prudent business owners, will already be operating with a formal business plan to model their business. They will probably want to develop a formal Online Marketing plan as a module of their existing business plan.
SEO
The most “bang-for-your-buck” will come from my concentrating on the Search Engine Optimization (SEO), component of Online Marketing. This is because most web traffic comes from the Search Engines (including the Directories).
SEO involves many things, but is fundamentally about making your site look good and work well for the software robots (and the occasional human agent) that will be sent out by Search Engines or Directories to test and “rank” your site, if other preliminary efforts are completed successfully.
The job of these robots is to determine what your site is about and how important it is, compared to other sites about similar topics. The results the robots come up with and calculations done on those results will determine how close to the top of the list of search results your site will appear, when a web user does a search at a Search Engine web site.
SEO is tricky and complex and the “rules” are constantly changing. Besides underlying technical challenges, making a site equally “readable” for humans and for robots is not easy.
Our goal in SEO is to get your site into the “Top 30” rank. With about 10 sites listed per screen, that puts your site somewhere on the 3rd screen of web search results. Few web users will read past the 3rd screen – if that far.
Ideally, we would prefer that your site reach a “Top 20” rank and have your site listed on the 2nd screen of results. If your web competition is not too intense, you may even reach a coveted “Top 10” spot. Your Search Engine ranking will have a very large effect on the amount of traffic visiting your site.
Your Key Phrases:
I have developed very effective methods of analyzing key phrases, both for how effective they will be and for how much their use has already been impacted by your competition also using them.
Everything depends on defining the correct key words (and key phrases made from them). For example, if you think you’re key words are “red, white and blue widgets”, but your potential customers keep using the Search Engines to find “yellow and green gadgets”, then any SEO efforts and their costs will be wasted – no matter how high your rankings might be for “red, white and blue widgets”.
I have often found that web owners who start their own marketing efforts are targeting useless key words and phrases, such as their own business names.
How Your Site Was Made – Feuding Experts:
Specialization is at once one of the most powerful and one of the most dangerous aspects of our modern world. Web development suffers from a great deal from over-specialization. There are four specialty areas possible in any web development project, although in smaller projects there may be only one or two web developers. Most developers are much stronger in one or two of these specialties than in the others.
All too often, there is little respect and understanding between these specialties. On the contrary, there is often strong bias, hostility, disrespect and misunderstanding. It’s not just that the different specialists are of different personality types, or have differing design values and philosophies. The real problem is that each specialist can mess up a site, in terms of the needs of the others, through ignorance of the other specialties.
Please excuse my lampooning these specialists, to highlight how this problem affects your marketing.
Techs, Creatives, Usability Experts and Marketeers:
Tech:
Geeks live to code. As a “code warrior” this person writes the programming that underlies your site pages and makes everything work. They also handle the network infrastructure that makes the web work and deal with your web server computer. They probably also structure your pages into a working site and figure out the navigation that users will follow to locate and traverse your site.
Their issues might be trying out the latest and greatest technical tricks and getting speed, power and security. They are apt to consider the Creatives to be about as important to a web site as the interior decorators of a commercial airliner, in comparison to the aeronautical engineers and pilots. They may have a grudging respect for the Usability Expert, but dislike the latter’s tendency to simplify and throw out the “really cool stuff”. They think Marketeers are sleazy sales types who can’t make an honest living.
Creative:
Creatives are the commercial artists of the web. They make the animations, images, logos, titles, color schemes, etc.
The Creative’s issues are the “Look & Feel” of a site. They want to win awards from other Creatives and have cool stuff to put in their portfolios. They think in terms of flash, sizzle, entertainment and animation. A web site may be a stage for their next star performance, rather than a way for visitors to accomplish their goals and a business tool for the owner. They dislike Usability Experts for considering the usability of a site to be more important than its sex appeal and artistic expression. They consider them to be academic censors in white lab coats, with clipboards at the ready and without a creative bone in their bodies. They may not understand the web technology, dislike technology in general and be defensive about it in their high tech work environment. As commercial artists, they may respect Marketeers, yet have no concept of the possible negative effect of their work on marketing the site.
Usability Expert:
Usability specialists are concerned with the web visitor’s experience and whether the web site “works” for them. They probably get the least respect of any web specialty and are not even used for the majority of web projects.
Usability Experts know that a web site should not be designed for the Owner, nor for the Creative, the Tech or the Marketeer, but for the web visitors who will try to use it. Otherwise, it fails and is of no use to anyone.
They have a hard time understanding why no one appreciates the importance of their work or the seemingly self-evident principle that a site has to function correctly for users, first and foremost, no matter how cool, marketable or whiz-bang it is.
Usability Experts mistrust the assumptions of other specialists, the “this is how we always do it and look at the rave reviews we get from our peers” attitude – and especially the use of the latest design fads. They are pragmatists who want to actually test your site, by having real users perform real tasks on the site, then fix everything.
Marketeer:
The Marketeer is a hardheaded businessperson who considers your web site a business tool to bring you customers. They want it to look good, so potential customers are attracted, but not at the expense of keeping away the Search Engine robots or slowing customers down for an art show.
They want it to be fast, efficient and secure, so customers will trust your online presence and not be annoyed by long waits – but not by using coding that the robots will stumble over. And they want your site to work well for users so they will come back again and again. Unlike the Tech and the Creative, the Marketeer thinks about what will happen to your site in the coming months and years.
The Marketeer may feel like a latecomer, since they are usually hired long after the damage to a site’s marketability is done – and long after the purpose of the site is decided and hardened in a finished design.
Owner:
Owners may feel overwhelmed by technology and their increasing dependency on something so expensive and disruptive, which they don’t have time to really understand. They may or may not have a vision of how their web site fits into their business. They feel that the web is important, but don’t comprehend everything it can do for them, or how all the different aspects can fit together. Owners are subjected to a lot of hype and misinformation about the web and don’t know who to trust.
If I, or another of the atypical “generalists”, developed your web site, you are fortunate. Some of us smaller developers are skilled in many or all of these specialties. But even if I developed your site, constraints of time, budget or planning way require some rework of your site for marketing. And editing your site’s text is always required, in order to “plant” the proper key phrases in the proper places.
Engines Vs Directories:
What most people refer to as “Search Engines” more properly includes both the true Search Engines and the classified directories. Both of these are used to find web sites and both must be addressed in an online marketing effort.
Search Engines use software agents (robots) to visit web sites, analyze them and incorporate their findings into large databases – which web users may then search. Directories use only human “web librarians” to visit and classify web sites. The users of Directories access web sites through a classified index, similar to the telephone “Yellow Pages”. A typical Directory is Yahoo. A typical Search Engine is Google.
Both these strategies have their strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, the Directories nowadays rent search results from Search Engines and use them to augment their data. Likewise, Search Engines may incorporate some data from Directories on their sites or include it in their ranking calculations.
Real Sales:
It’s important to realize that your marketing goal is not simply to have as many visitors to your site as possible. If your site is a business site, what really matters is how many visitors actually hire your services or actually buy your products. Obviously, a 5% “Sales Conversion Rate” (SCR) with 10,000 visitors per month (500 sales) is more desirable than a 1% SCR with 20,000 visitors (200 sales). So, more traffic doesn’t necessarily translate to more web success.
Because of this, an important part of an online marketing effort is improving your SCR. I do this by improving site usability, ad copy, attractiveness, online ordering and credibility.
Mutual Links:
It has always been a good idea for web owners to seek and provide links to complimentary web sites of others. The very concept of a World Wide Web is based on this mutual linking between sites. And it remains another way to get traffic to your site.
Nowadays, mutual linking is even more important. That’s because Search Engines have begun to use the number of links coming into your web site from other sites as a measure of the importance of your site. This new “Link Popularity” paradigm now has a big effect on your Search Engine rankings – especially on Google, who pioneered this approach.
I have special software tools to help you locate complementary web sites, develop a database of them and contact them effectively to request a mutual link.
Tracking Results:
A marketing effort is much more useful if its results can be quantified, so that its effectiveness can be judged and improvements made more easily. I provide you with a monthly or bi-monthly (every other month) online marketing report. This emailed report, in Microsoft Word format, contains annotated charts, showing the progress of your marketing effort in several ways. The following charts are always provided. Others may also be included:
- Monthly visitors (shows unique, repeat and daily average true visitors)
- Search Engine Rankings (for major Engines in which you rank in “Top 40”)
- Link Popularity Vs your major competitors
- Online Sales (for eCommerce sites only)
- Online Sales Conversion Rate (for eCommerce sites only)
- Indicators of Interest (average time on site, average pages traversed)
Making Improvements:
Because Search Engines are evolving and because your site must be re-submitted to them periodically, effective online marketing requires a monthly or bi-monthly minimum effort.
Also, with the intelligence gained from tracking your results, it is usually possible to improve the optimization of your pages over time. And web sites themselves usually evolve, requiring that the new pages and contents be optimized for the Search Engines.
Non-SEO Methods:
Most web owners are too busy to take advantage of these somewhat less important online marketing efforts. And they tend to be things the owner or staff must do themselves. Nevertheless, I’m ready willing and able to help you with these efforts as well.
Although Search Engines provide the most traffic to web sites, there are other sources which may be worth pursuing – especially if you, as the web site owner, are willing to devote some time.
Besides Mutual links (mentioned above) you can garner interest in your site in several other ways.
Put Your Site in Traditional Marketing Materials:
Naturally, you’ll want to include your web address (and maybe a slogan) on your business stationary, business vehicles, yellow pages ad, product packaging, etc. A surprising number of web owners forget to do this.
Community Building:
Whole books have been written on the topic of building a community around your web site. The web is well known as the least expensive method of reaching potential customers. But even on the web, it costs more to attract new visitor traffic, compared to deriving much of your traffic from return visits. Community building keeps your visitors coming back for more.
There are many ways to build a web community, but they have one thing in common. They all take more time and work than most small web business owners feel they can provide. And they are not amenable to outsourcing. This is a shame, since they can contribute to web success. Because of this, most small businesses do not take full advantage of community building.
A detailed explanation of community building is beyond the scope of this document, but it usually involves things like:
- A newsletter that visitors can subscribe to
- Useful tools on your site that solve visitor’s problems
- A library of links to other sites on your topic
- An online forum where visitors discuss your topic and interact with each other
Participate in SIGS:
SIGs are “Special Interest Groups”. The web is full of such groups or communities. By locating the places on the web where your potential customers congregate and (very politely) marketing your site there, you can gain highly motivated traffic. Be sure to learn proper “Netiquette” for any newsgroup or forum you post to. Blatant advertising will get you more ill will than customers.
