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Five Ways to Promote Your Company on the Internet Effectively

You’re spending hundreds or maybe thousands every month on a litany of marketing activities to promote your custom integration business.

In search marketing, the difference between first and second is massive. You’re spending hundreds or maybe thousands every month on a litany of marketing activities to promote your custom integration business. Whether it’s outbound tactics, such as direct mail, yellow pages, or radio, or inbound (online advertising), you’re left wondering: “How much impact is this really having on my bottom line?” Here are five marketing metrics that deliver game-changing results.

1) Advertising Position. A surefire recipe for ceding your local market to the competition is to not pay attention to search marketing. According to Compete.com and Kantar Media, consumers click the first sponsored ad 59 percent of the time, the second 15 percent, and the third just nine percent. Google researched how organic and paid search results work together and concluded that turning off paid search ads resulted in an 89 percent drop in website traffic.

2) Share of Voice. Shoppers are conducting more than 11 hours of internet research over a period of weeks or months before buying. Are you showing up? Google your top brands, models, and services. Are you showing up in the top positions consistently? If you show up two times out of 10, that’s a 20-percent “share of voice” in your market. Your competition is eating your lunch. Your digital advertising partner should be delivering your ads into the top positions more than 70 percent of the time. And don’t forget Bing and Yahoo. Together, they account for about 27 percent of all search traffic, and are largely ignored by many advertisers.

3) Advertising Impressions. Impressions are simply the number of times your ad is served in a viewer’s browser. The more times your ads appear in front of qualified buyers across multiple devices and marketing tactics, the more likely you are to score a sale. The average consumer takes action after being exposed to marketing messages 10- 20 times. To boost impressions beyond search, display, and mobile placements, consider funneling more of your marketing dollars into YouTube pre-roll videos and sponsored stories on Facebook.

4) Measurable Goals. Your digital marketing mix should deliver quantified results that match your goals. It’s important to consider all traffic sources and conversion metrics together, sharing attribution for each lead. Resist the “last-in wins” mentality, which gives the credit to the last marketing message seen by a buyer. Each of your tactics assists the others.

5) Not Cost Per Click. Some quick thoughts on cost per click (CPC). While it’s critical to work with a vendor that can effectively stretch your marketing investment to the max every month without sinking the budget or overpaying for each click, it’s unhealthy to focus all your attention simply on the cost of each interaction. It doesn’t matter whether each “click” costs $0.49 or $10 if you’re not converting clicks into measurable goals.

My mantra of AV integrator digital success: Your customized digital search ads written with clear calls to action and trackable phone numbers must appear in the top sponsored positions (above the fold) at least 70 percent of the time in your local market. And your display advertisements must generate consistent conversions so you get the maximum number of opportunities to turn online visibility into sales.

–Brendan Morrissey,
CEO and co-founder, Netsertive.

Clicks, Calls, and Conversions

Brendan Morrissey, Netsertive Resist the “lastin wins” mentality, which gives the credit to the last marketing message seen by a buyer. Each of your tactics assists the others

Clicks: Chasing the most clicks possible is misguided. Run campaigns for specific keyword categories that indicate purchase intent. Aim for quality traffic, not quantity. Resist the urge to get caught up in raw click counts from display ads. Traditionally, it’s been difficult to measure whether a click to your site was generated by a series of keyword searches alone, or whether display banners influenced the click. Your Google analytics data also includes view-through conversions (VTC). VTCs occur when a shopper sees an image (banner) ad then later completes a conversion on your site. Also look at click-through conversions, which happen when a customer previously clicked on an ad and completed a conversion.

Calls: Embed tracking phone numbers in your ads with local area code prefixes and record calls. Decide whether a 30-, 60-, or 90-second or longer call is considered a conversion. How many calls resulted in a demonstration or sale? Your online marketing vendor should offer call tracking as a standard part of your monthly efforts.

Conversions: Which tactics led to specific actions? Some examples include tracked calls (including mobile click to call), content page emails, downloads, etc. These numbers and types of conversions will be different for each AV integrator based on its goals, website, tracking abilities, and more.

–BM

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