As we interview dozens of smart companies every week, we increasingly hear about great online marketing strategies. Many fast growth companies are getting up to half their leads from pay per click or search engine optimisation. Learn from these real life
By Amanda Gome
As we interview dozens of smart companies every week, we increasingly hear about great online marketing strategies. Many fast growth companies are getting up to half their leads from pay per click or search engine optimisation.
Their websites are a masterpiece of links and tricks to drive more people to their site. This has made an extraordinary difference to their business, enabling them to expand internationally, appear bigger than they are, and bringing in far more dollars.
Yet most of this growth has occurred in the last two years, driven by faster broadband speeds and the proliferation of online marketing service providers.
Lastly it is giving them a unique edge, not only on larger, slower businesses, which can take years to change/update their websites, but also on the many small businesses who do not understand online marketing.
So get inspired to do more online. Read these real life tips from 20 Australian entrepreneurs (and click on the links to read their full and fascinating story).
1 I discovered Google marketing made a huge impact on my sales, pushing inquiries up from five to 50 in a week. It took me a while to find the right words to advertise alongside and I now spend more on Google and rely on it for marketing.
Jeanette Darbyshire, Inspiro Bags
2 Our website receives quite a bit of traffic and we receive about five to six inquiries per week. Our largest client (Honda) found us via a Google search, which is great evidence of the importance of a good presence with search engine optimisation.
3 By using the internet we are able to better understand who our customers are so we can ensure that the content we push them is content they are interested in, and the advertising that we push to them is also advertising they are interested in. That’s the kind of targeted profiling systems we are building, which allows content and advertising to be targeted towards individuals.
4 From day one we were getting a little bit of traffic from here and there but nothing very serious. The previous owners spent a lot of money on pay per click advertising which works really well – and especially about three years ago when pay per click advertising on Google and AdSense was cheap.
But I could see that that wasn’t going to be forever, and nowadays the cost of that is at least five times what it was back then, and it’s a lot harder to get a return on investment of online advertising. So back then we made a decision to commit a lot of resources to making sure we ranked number one on Google for all types of car rental related search terms.
I have one tip (on search engine optimisation) that will beat all tips, and that is that there are no tips. There’s no secret. You just have to keep doing the best you can at making the best possible – both sites and giving as much information to people. There’s hundreds of different things you can do to help do that, and if you do them all you will rank number one.
I guess the tip would be to read up on it as much as possible (and have the knowledge inhouse). Anyone who was good enough to do the search engine optimisation for us shouldn’t be employable, because they’ll be out there making millions of dollars.
Richard Eastes, Vroom Vroom Vroom
5 We get our suppliers (pet stores) to market for us. So pet stores will do SEO for us because, as we have pointed out, if people come to buy our pet loo they will then buy treats and other things for their dogs.
Tobi Skovoron, Pup-Pee Solutions
6 At first we used radio advertising and then television to attract consumers. As internet speeds improved and consumers went on line we focused on online marketing with Google, Ninemsn and Yahoo!. We now have a fulltime staff member working on Google AdWords and another working fulltime on search engine optimisation, to generate as much free organic traffic as possible. That has been phenomenally successful. We have trebled traffic over the last six months.
Danial Ahchow, Service Central
7 We use word-of-mouth on the web – like visiting seminars and live online forums where eBay sellers learn about effective selling techniques. We targeted online exchange sites; favourable comments on feedback pages are the life blood of online exchange sites. Once one customer (in a category) uses us we see an avalanche of other users.
8 I have used email newsletters to build strong relationships with existing customers, and to build my database of new customers very effectively. The trick is to send an email newsletter often – but not too often, and to make it informative and relevant. Everything I do as an online business is by email.
9 Successful online communities grow on their own. It’s very difficult to market a community in any real way. I mean we are doing a little bit of PR which is kind of relatively free marketing, but we’re not spending money marketing in more traditional channels.
So it’s purely word-of-mouth and it grows from one network of friends to the next, and it has done from the beginning and it’s continuing to do so today.
10 When you commission a designer to build you a new website, it’s really up to you to make sure they design your new website with SEO in mind. Obviously design and usability is the designer’s job; they want to make your new site look as beautiful as possible for humans. But sometimes designers (and I should also mention developers) overlook how a search engine might respond.
You can have your cake and eat it too, so let’s look at the elements.
11 Buy search engine marketing traffic as the first thing to do. The reason is that you can keep your budgets low, ($100 per month) and you can keep the campaign small and manageable to determine what results you get.
Start with Google because it accounts for around 70% of the Australian search engine market traffic. Yahoo and Ninemsn each account for around 12% each and the minor other search engines.
Fred Schebesta, Freestyle Marketing
12 Web developers don’t get marketing. One of the key reasons you need a website is as a marketing tool for your organisation. The “tool” bit developers understand; the “marketing” bit – not so much.
Their background means that they are much more at home with codecs, calculus and commands than with the conversions, creative and correct spelling that you really need to promote your wares.
Again the result can be a well-performing website that looks terrible and does nothing to create the upsell, cross sell and customer retention and service you need.
13 The main way to build an online community is through forums. We set them up from the start. We invited and seeded comments, invited friends and waited. The planted comments were found and we stopped doing it. In retrospect the best part was people giving us a bad time – not that we thought that at the time.
But it was the best thing – it meant we did not have a tame forum. We got picked on for being sloppy about technical specifications and not describing products properly. And we got into trouble for saying shipping was free when the cost was included in the product.
One guy in particular really went on about this, but the next day we put up a comment saying free shipping except for this guy, and it was great because everyone could see that we were laughing at ourselves.
We also launched competitions, including word association and maths problems. People are so bright – we put up hard competitions but sometimes people would solve them in 10 minutes. What works are things that challenge people and where the answers are not that obvious. One of the best was Friday fun with creating an avatar. We would have a theme around cars or superheroes. The members on the forum grew really quickly.
14 I come from an old-world marketing background, but pinpoint marketing like Google provides where you’re driving qualified traffic to your business is absolutely unbelievable and explains why Google’s search engine digital marketing is a big part of what we do, and we do a newsletter as well.
Our customers like to be kept in touch, so we actually send a daily email Monday to Saturday, Sunday being our day of rest. And we find our customers are really enjoying the dynamic content in those newsletters.
What works in our emails? I think again the elements of retail apply – your product pricing, promotion, is the product the right product, is the price right, is it well presented, is it an exciting and dynamic offer?
I think what we find, much like retail, is that customers are looking for new experiences, new products, lots of variety.
15 It’s a given now that sites should be built in an SEO-friendly way from day one; doing it right means a free flow of traffic to your site. SEM is a good tool, but it really should just be something you do while you’re getting your content in place and your SEO right, unless you’re in a very crowded part of the web that makes it difficult to achieve a good organic search ranking.
Lori Silver, Clear Light Digital
16 Make really good friends in the area of search engine optimisation. Buy them a bottle of scotch. If you get SEO wrong you will have to spend a bomb to fix it. Build your web pages in ways that are easy to index, have good page titles, key words for each page, all the links you need to boost your Google ranking. We use contra to build links, affiliates and online partnerships to build links.
To avoid commission fees on search engine marketing try and negotiate a deal to grow the fees as you get results.
17 We started with a site for $1500 from Taten and added a shopping cart. But people couldn’t find us. It was six months before we started pay per click advertising and we were so fearful thinking we were going to pay for clicks that wouldn’t give us sales.
But we were wrong. We instantly got sales inquiries and it generated traffic to the website. Now about 75% of all potential clients come from the website.
We optimised our site to allow us to show up well in natural searches. Between the natural search and the pay per click advertising on which we spend thousands a month we receive over 10,000 unique visitors per month. Approximately half came from pay per click. It can get expensive – we got a Christmas present from Google last year, always a worrying sign.
Carmelina Pascoe, My Coffee Shop
18 Most of our viral campaigns are web based. What we’re setting out to do is create a funny skit that shows what we are about as a brand, but which also has a strong reaction with the customer we are trying to target so that they will pass it on to friends.
If it doesn’t have the instant shock or laugh, it doesn’t work as viral marketing. We come up with ideas by looking at relevant issues, things we think are funny, or opportunities to take a dig at.
We sit around a room – a marketing guy at Big River, our ad agency, my partner James and myself. Sometimes our PR gets involved if it has mass-market appeal.
From the idea we figure out the best media stream to launch it. Then we send the email with the web video link to about 50 or 60 of our friends and they forward it and it gets momentum. We also put it up on MySpace and YouTube and Myprofile.
19 There is a massive difference between delivering a brand experience offline versus online, and respectfully, the ad industry themselves have really struggled with bridging the gap with the web. It’s because the web is different. The web is all about building confidence, trust and user control.
There’s too much crap out there on the web, and customers, especially those in our Citizen 2.0 profile, are totally desensitised to marketing noise – they want value, service and reliability, and will be able to rapidly filter what they don’t want. But what’s different to the physical world is the concept of loyalty – there isn’t any. You’ve noticed how customers online move in waves – for example where was Facebook three months ago, and where did they come from?
This is where an intelligent, well considered online strategy really pays off. This is where businesses need to understand the notion of an integrated user experience. Companies try hard and spend multi-millions to service their “offline” customers, but why is it that very few have a targeted strategy about engaging and managing an online audience, and how this audience integrates cross-channel and into the physical world?
The world is getting more and more connected to information, knowledge and services on a global scale. They’re getting more and more comfortable transacting online. Many are able to share their thoughts and ideas (and networks) more openly that at any other time in history.
It’s all about the customer and their needs and wants. Products will need to be able to be pulled apart and put back together how the customer wants them. Immediacy and customer control is key, but don’t expect loyalty as the fundamental nature of the internet is anonymity, choice and transience. Organisations who fail to look at their current ways of doing business, including studying their customer touchpoints and product strategies, may well compromise their effectiveness and success online into the future.
20 To find new customers we use our online marketing strategies, for example SEO and SEM – a quarter of customers come from them.
But as with all service companies, you need more than those internet strategies. You need other tools such as PR, seminars – a mix of traditional and non-traditional means. We also use targeted ?marketing to attract businesses or organisations that we can develop long-term relationships with.
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