Online Marketing
Online Marketing takes on many guises and strategies. A website will be launched and then the question will be asked :”if you build it, will they come??”. Hence the initial task facing you is to optimise your website so that the major search engines will both find it, and, upon finding it, assign a certain relevance to its content. We launched our site last year and, with the help of an Internet marketing agency saw the site rise to page one for our main keywords on most major search engines (well the big three : Yahoo, MSN Live and Google). Our traffic rose and our sales started to rise accordingly.
After a while it became evident that the increase in sales and traffic was slowing down. Our traffic was increasing, but by less and less each month. What to do? We again visited our Digital Marketing Agency who created PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns for us where we bid on keywords and, as a result, our adverts were shown on sponsored results on search engines. This was also a profitable project which saw us almost double our monthly sales without spending a fortune. It also made us aware that traffic was not always an indicator of sales as these adverts saw a far greater conversion rate and ARPU (average revenue per user) than our natural, unpaid traffic had supplied.
Again, though, even with constant streamlining of our PPC campaigns and on site optimisation we hit a ceiling of sales. Luckily for us, by now sales figures were comfortable to say the least and our online venture was outperforming our traditional routes to market both in terms of sales and profitability.
Following further consultations with a range of marketing and branding companies it became clear that repeat business was the way in which we were failing to grow our sales further. We hit upon a wonderful and quite unlikely venture. that of sending out promotional gifts such as promotional pens to both our existing client base and potential future clients. We discovered that in this digital world of keywords, browser titles, analytics, ROI, SEO and PPC there is nothing quite like a tangible presence to attract a customer. We had the pens ( and mouse mats ) distributed but a few months ago and the responses have been extremely positive. The pens are like small sales reps, who travel unmonitored and unpaid, bringing in a continual stream of business until they run out. Interestingly we had a new phone number put on these pens to gauge responses so that whenever a call came in on Line 3 we knew that one of our sleepers had sprung into action.
