Market Research

Branding goes beyond have a common look and feel to everything that leaves your office, although that is certainly an important part of your branding strategy. Ideally, your brand becomes so recognised that people can use the name of your company as shorthand for all of the value attributes that are associated with it.

Research current opinions

Before you can create a new brand for your business, you need to know what your current brand identity is. Even if you never created a brand, you will have one in people’s minds. Existing customers can tell you what values and attributes they associate with your company, as can your employees and business partners. If you are a new company, you can compare and contrast your product line with existing products and ask prospective customers what attributes about your products would make them switch from the products they buy now.

Identify chosen values

From the list of attributes and values identified, select all of the positive values that you feel are core attributes of your business, or that you want to be known for. Weed out any values that are shared by other companies in your industry, such as good customer service. If any negative values are identified, find a value that puts a positive spin on that value. For example, if people think your company is “slow”, assert that your company “takes the time to do it right”. The values that remain should be those that are necessary and sufficient to define your business – all of the values that are distinct to your business and no others.

Visually represent those values

Design a logo for your business that expresses all of the core values you have identified. The logo should use images, colours, and fonts that combine to express your values. It is well worth hiring a professional for this, rather than attempting to do it yourself with some clipart and a basic graphics program. Your logo will form the visual centrepiece of all of your product packaging. You will be using colours and fonts from your logo to create thematically consistent product literature, product packaging, and advertising.

Make a promise

Finally, create a tag line for your business that goes with the values expressed in your logo. The tag line is not simply a memorable rephrasing of your core values. It expresses the emotional reason why someone wants to do business with you. Think of the original Federal Express tag line, “When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight.” That tag line conveys the desperation of the customer, and promises that the problem would be solved with rock solid reliability, so they do not need to worry about it. The emotional reason being promised is peace of mind.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

Since you pay for every click on a Google Adwords campaign, having a poorly thought out campaign can quickly run into quite a bit of expense for very little return. On the other hand, a well thought out campaign that is tightly focused on a strategy for success can produce an excellent return for the money spent. The key is using the best strategy for your needs.

Define one goal per campaign

You may want to accomplish many things – increase leads, generate sales calls, sell more products, or register more customers for your mailing list. Each goal should have its own campaign. Track the results of that campaign against your expenditures to determine your conversion rate and your costs per conversion.

Research, research, research

You should do three types of research. First, research the most popular keywords for your particular niche. Once you’ve identified these keywords, find out what other ads are targeted to these keywords to discover the type of ad copy that is working, as well as the landing pages these ads lead to. Finish up with research of product review websites and forums to hear what your prospective customers are saying about these products.

Be irresistible

You’ve discovered what your customers want, what they like and dislike about your competitors, and what words and phrases attract their attention. Craft an irresistible ad coupled with a landing page that makes an unbeatable offer. Make sure that your offer is better than the competitors in all the ways that matter to your prospective customers.

Divide and conquer

Do not attempt to have your ad be all things to all people. Create different ads for display traffic and search traffic. Create different ads and landing pages for mobile users and desktop users. Create different ads based on geographic location, or any other meaningful differentiation tracked by Google.

Match ad and sales funnel

Each stage in your sales funnel should have a different ad. People who are seeking information will respond to a different ad than people who have already made up their mind and are ready to buy. By including keywords tied to the buying stage, such as “review” or “purchase”, you’ll be able to target the right stage with your ad.

Start small and grow

Use exact match keywords to focus your Adwords campaign on your chosen keywords. By tracking your conversion rates and costs per conversion, you can determine which of those keywords are working the best for you. At that point, begin adding variations of those keywords, for example including the names of nearby towns as well as the major city. Drop any keywords that are performing below average.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: Stock Xchange)

More and more people are using mobile phones as their primary means to access the Internet. While once you only needed a mobile website if you were a restaurant or service provider whose number someone might be looking for, virtually all businesses must now be conscious of how their website appears on mobile devices. These seven secrets will help to ensure your mobile website is a success.

1. Divide and conquer

Your website is divided into zones or sections. You have a section of navigation, one or more sections of ads, a header section, and a content section. The more that you can divide your website into these different sections, the more control you have over the order in which those sections appear for your mobile website. If your navigation, ads, and content are all one big section, you will not be able to change their order of appearance to enhance the mobile experience.

2. Respond automatically

Many website templates are designed to be responsive. Responsive websites at a minimum allow the width of the website and the size of the text to be adjusted. WordPress-based websites can use plugins that detect whether the device viewing the website is a mobile device or not, and provide entirely different user interfaces for different devices.

3. Allow freedom of choice

Just because your visitor is using a mobile device, does not necessarily mean they want to be limited to the information available on your streamlined mobile website. Give them the option to view your regular website, and do not automatically send them back to the mobile version if you detect they are using a mobile device.

4. Target your audience

Use your website analytics to determine which devices your target audience uses, as well as which levels of operating system your target audience has installed upon those devices. Develop your mobile website with that operating system and device in mind, then test on all of the major devices, such as iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows phones, with backward compatibility to the operating system versions still in use.

5. Use easily resizable text

Do not develop a Flash website, unless you want to develop a duplicate non-Flash website for mobile users. Avoid popup windows, fixed display widths, and floating images or text boxes. Popups are difficult to close on a mobile device, fixed display widths require scrolling back and forth to see the entire display, and floating images or text boxes that are insignificant on a computer screen can obscure most of the content on a mobile device.

6. Put your phone number in text

Mobile devices will convert any phone number into a click-to-call hot spot. However, this only works for text phone numbers. The mobile devices will not touch phone numbers that appear in graphics, depriving you of an easy way for potential customers to reach you.

7. Keep to one page

Have all of the content in an article available on a single page. That way, website visitors who start reading your content and then pass out of range of a signal will not be frustrated and unable to finish the content.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

Google Analytics can provide a wealth of information about the health of your website and the activities of your site visitors. However, you need to take specific actions to unlock the more powerful features. If you’re ready to step beyond a simple count of how many site visits you receive, use the following functions to get more out of your analysis.

Track progress toward goals

Which goals you care about will depend upon your overall website strategy. Someone who is interested in building community or raising brand awareness may care how long a visitor stayed on a site. An online magazine may want to know how many total pages a visitor viewed. If you are selling something or collecting user information in exchange for downloads of free PDF reports, you may want to know when someone reaches a specific URL such as a thank-you or download page, or takes a specific action such as clicking on a Buy Now or Download button.

Turn on goal tracking by selecting Conversions from the Google Analytics dashboard, then creating a goal. If you create multiple goals, such as clicking Add to Cart, clicking Checkout, and reaching the thank-you page, you’ll know exactly how many people you lose at each step of your sales process, and can fine tune your process to keep as many as possible moving through the process.

Measure by traffic segment

The default analytics lump all website visitors together. By setting up specific traffic segments, you can determine if your organic search results produce more sales than your pay per click traffic, or how visitors that see your Google ads differ from visitors that see your Facebook ads. This helps you to determine your most profitable places for spending your online marketing budget. To create traffic segments, click on Advanced Segments from the Standard Reporting dashboard. You can use the pre-created segments provided by Google, or create your own. Segments can be discrete, such as assigning each social media source to a different segment, as well as overlapping, such as also aggregating all social media sources into a single Social Media segment. Once the traffic segments are created, go back to Conversions and apply the traffic segments to your goals.

Watch for spikes

Rather than viewing data by month, which is the default, you should also view the data by day. This allows you to notice immediate impacts of new content on your site, as well as discover which sources are sending you an unusual level of traffic. You can investigate the referring blog or website to determine if it is a fluke or if this is someone or something you should respond to. If it is a fluke, you can remove the referred data from future consideration in your analysis by selecting Advanced, Exclude, Dimensions, Source/Medium, and then specifying the referral source.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

You know you need to continuously produce content for your blog in order to maximise your search engine rankings. You know which keywords you need to include in order for your website to rank for the searches you are targeting. What you may not know, however, is what you can possibly say about that keyword that could be of interest to your readers. That’s when you need help choosing a blog topic.

Answer a customer question

The easiest way to come up with a topic for your blog is to use your blog as a venue for customer service. Answer your most common customer questions, whether they are about how to use a specific product, the difference between two of your products or between your product and a competitor’s product, additional functions or purposes for your product, or additional products or services that go well with your existing product. Not only do your customers feel that you listen to their concerns and truly care about them, there are likely to be people who are not yet your customers who have the same question, and because you were able to answer it, they will become your customers.

Post a poll

This also allows your customers to feel that their opinions are valued. You can ask about features you are considering for future releases of a product, potential new products, or open-ended questions regarding what they want most. This sort of inexpensive market research can be a good starting point for more in-depth research down the road.

Run a contest

Contests are excellent ways to swell the readership of your blog. You can use the same contest for multiple blog entries by asking readers to send in photos, artwork, or writing on a particular topic, then posting the best of them and asking readers to vote for their favourite, and finally by announcing the winner. Some topics of perennial appeal include the most creative use of your product, the most in need of replacement product, and the person who most deserves a free product.

Visit the library or book store

Finally, if you are still unable to come up with a blog topic, you can visit an endless source of inspiration – your local book store or library. Go to the section where your products are represented. For example, a plumber would visit the home repair section. Pull out a book that catches your eye and is related to your industry or product list. For example, the plumber might pull out a book on home renovation for older homes, whether they were built a few decades or a few centuries ago. Look at the list of chapter headings, and consider which you could speak to. Then create blog postings with those titles.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

There’s a story told that during World War II, the RAF wanted to add additional plating to their bombers, in order to protect them from anti-aircraft guns. Since additional weight would decrease the bombers’ range, they could only plate the most crucial areas. They analysed the bullet holes in the returning bombers, mapped out where most of the holes occurred, then presented their findings with a suggested plan to plate those areas. A quick-thinking officer pointed out that the planes didn’t need protection in those areas, since they flew even with numerous bullet holes. The planes that had been hit in other places were the ones that hadn’t returned home. Successful product development and marketing requires asking the right market research questions.

Ask open questions

Closed questions are those that can be answered by selecting from a list of options, such as “Do you prefer option A or B?” Open questions are ones that require explanation, and usually begin with the words what, how, or if. Ask what they want or need in a specific arena, how getting it will make a difference, and hypothetical questions about their general situation. By using a mix of all three types, you will find out details about the way that your customer or prospect currently does things, including the things that work and the things that don’t. A successful product needs to be better than existing products in important areas, while still doing all of the important things that the existing products do well.

Identify both issues and costs

It’s not enough to ask what their biggest challenge is, or what causes them the most frustration. You also need to put a price tag on the solution. How much is that challenge or frustration costing them? The upper limit of your product’s price is the sum of all the money saved by all of the problems it solves. You can follow up with the confirmation question, “If a product solved those challenges, what would that be worth to you?”

Understand motivation

Ask them what their top goals are, and then ask how their life or their business will be different if those goals are met. What would achieving those goals look like? By understanding their picture of success, you will better understand the emotional needs that your customers believe their goals will satisfy. For example, two executives with a goal of 10% sales growth might have vastly different pictures of what that success will look like. The first might be happy that no employees need to be made redundant, while the second is thrilled by a promotion and even bigger challenge. Pitching your product to appeal to a sense of safety and security would attract the first executive, while repelling the second.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

Before you settle on the best type of Internet marketing for you, you need to know what you are marketing. Do you merely wish to raise awareness of your business or brand? Or do you wish to make online sales? If you are making online sales, is it an entirely electronic transaction, with online delivery of electronic content, or will you need to integrate with a physical sales and distribution function? All of these decisions affect how and what you will market.

Electronic products

The easiest online sales for an Internet marketer are information products. These products are e-books, videos, or web-based seminars wherein all of the content is delivered electronically, without any physical component. Such products offer certain advantages from a marketer’s standpoint: instant delivery (and gratification) to the customer, zero delivery cost, zero production cost, and infinite scalability (you can sell a million units as easily as ten).

Physical products

In this era of service- and idea-based economies, there are still plenty of physical products that are made and marketed. Arguably, these can even be some of the most exciting and valuable offerings for Internet marketing. When one is in the business of making and selling such products, selling on the Internet is an essential part of modern business strategy.

Product support

In the world of e-commerce, certain “old-fashioned” principles are becoming more important than ever. This is true whether you market information products or physical products. While it used to be possible to get away with bad or mediocre service, nowadays companies are severely punished for this. Customer complaints not only get posted in conspicuous websites but can even go viral, compounding the damage considerably. Your Internet marketing needs to be aligned with customer support, such as scanning Twitter and other social media for mentions of your product and company, to identify and address customer satisfaction issues.

Manage expectations

Purchasers of information products expect instantaneous delivery. If you require backend processing that will take some time before the product will be available, make sure that the customer is informed of this during the purchase process, before the final sale. Similarly, physical product sales should include information regarding shipping times, as well as how long your business requires for fulfilment before the purchase will be ready to ship. Additional customer contact can be made informing the customer when the product has been handed off to the shipper, as well as providing tracking information to further manage expectations of delivery.

By carefully managing expectations and customer service, Internet marketing can lead to a highly successful web-based business with either electronic or physical products, enjoying superior profit margins compared to sales from a physical store.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

There are two basic schools of thought when it comes to blogging. The first is that blogging is like journaling, in that you simply write whatever comes to you, without regard to people’s feelings on the subject matter. You will eventually attract an audience for your words that is in tune with your point of view. Most personal blogs or pundit platforms ascribe to this school of thought. The second school of thought is that blogging is like a cocktail party conversation, where any one thing that you say to any guest is part of the greater conversation occurring at the party. To this way of thinking, the wisdom of your words will relate not only to how good your blog is on its own, but how it relates to what everyone else in your industry is saying on their blogs. Are you a leader, follower, or voice in the wilderness? Most business blogs ascribe to this school of thought.

Understand the conversation

If you want your blog to be perceived as part of the conversation of your industry, it is important that you understand the topics of conversation being covered. One way to find out what topics of conversation are hot in your industry is to use a service such as Bottlenose which will either show you a list of the latest topics (under the Now tab) or a visual representation of which related topics are close to your chosen area and which are more distant (under the Sonar tab). Another search tool is Topsy, which by default shows Twitter topics, but can also show topics from other social media.

Another way to find out what conversations are happening in your industry is to follow other industry blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, Pinterest boards, etc. The point is not to copy the blog entries verbatim, which will cause your search engine rankings to be penalised, but rather to add your own spin, interpretation, or commentary. This has the bonus of allowing you to comment on the original blog with a link to your blog entry, saying that the blog inspired you, and increasing your backlinks.

Answer questions

Using your blog to answer questions is like focusing on a single interaction during the cocktail party. It’s a good idea, but should not be your exclusive means of generating blog topics. Sources of questions can come from your customers, either in person, via phone, or electronically. You can find other questions at industry-specific web forums or general web forums such as Quora. Finally, you can find lots of questions (and answers) for your industry by attending Tweetchats, which are scheduled chat room type events held via Twitter.

Once you locate questions that are applicable to your business, you can create a blog entry to answer those questions. Odds are good that if one person spoke up to ask the question, there are plenty of other people searching the Internet for an answer to the question as well.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

You’re probably familiar with the 80/20 rule. For example, 80% of your profits will likely come from 20% of your customers. However, this rule breaks down when it comes to the Internet and social media. 80% of the content on the Internet is produced by less than 15% of the people. When it comes to social media, the number is even lower, with 80% of the content being produced by less than 10% of the people.

As a result, you can quickly get your name, reputation, and products widely dispersed throughout the Internet and social media sphere if you get these key influencers to mention you. To do that, you need to grow your influence with these influencers.

Locate the Key Influencers

Before you can influence these people, you need to know who they are. Do a search for your area of influence – or for your customer’s area of influence, if you are doing this as part of your Internet marketing services for them – in influence ranking services such as Klout, PeerIndex, or Kred. Note the names, websites, and blogs of any people who are ranked highly for your area of influence.

Look at services that compile the most influential blogs for your area of influence, such as AllTop. You can also find people who are influencers by searching active LinkedIn groups and Facebook pages for your topic, noting not only who the organiser is, but who are the most active commenters. This requires slightly more research than simply taking the names given to you by a ranking service, but a side benefit of the research is that you may discover groups and pages you want to follow in this process.

Once you have identified between ten and twenty key influencers, you are ready to begin growing your influence with them.

Join the Conversation

Using a feed reader such as Google Reader, you can aggregate all of the blogs of your key influencers. This allows you to see at a glance what topics are hot within your industry. You can also aggregate Twitter streams and LinkedIn groups using a social media aggregator such as HootSuite. Again, the purpose is to easily see what the key influencers are saying.

Once you’ve listened to what they’re saying for a while, and have a sense of the values and culture embraced by each of your key influencers, you can focus on the ones that most resonate with your goals and values. Promote their work with your list, and let them know you’re doing so. Become a customer of theirs. Comment on their posts. Contribute to their groups, pages, or forums. Refer customers to them. In general, present yourself as a knowledgeable, helpful person who is aligned with their values and culture.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

Many people will tell you that to make money online, you need to have a blog. You need to be blogging regularly, engaging with your customers, and providing content that keeps them coming back. But that’s really only the first step toward creating a blog that makes money for your company.

Choosing Content

When choosing the content for your blog, you can, of course, write about the specials your company is currently offering, new hires, new products, and other traditional company news. That’s what’s important to you. But here’s a news flash – that’s not important to your customers.

What your customers care about is solving their problems. If your new product can do that, great! Otherwise, they don’t care, and quickly skim over your blog entry. Moreover, writing about your company in your blog is not going to win you any new readers who don’t know who your company is.

Instead, make a list of the most common questions people have asked you, and write blogs that address each one. Ideally, have someone videotape you giving the answer, so that you can have a video blog as well as a written blog.

Those common questions are what people are looking for online, and that means they’ll be finding your blog. It’s a great way to get (and keep) new customers who value you for your expertise.

Expanding Your Reach

If all you do is change the type of content you offer in your blog, you’ll still have done a great thing to move your blog forward toward generating money for you. But it still requires someone to search for the subject of the blog and click through to your website in order to engage with you.

Expanding your reach moves you past that limitation. When you expand your reach, you allow those people who have read your blog to share your blog posts with people in their social networks. The thing is, however, that they won’t share your blog posts just to do you a favour, or because you want them to. They’ll only share your blog posts if you make it easy and worthwhile.

You can make it easy for people to share your blog by including one-click buttons that allow the blog content to be shared on all major social media sites. If your blog is a WordPress blog, the Digg Digg plug-in allows you to specify which social media sites you want to allow sharing for, and introduces a floating or fixed, vertical or horizontal button bar to let your blog readers share your content with one click.

It also needs to be worthwhile for them to share the content. That goes back to choosing the right content. If it’s information worth reading, it will be information worth sharing.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: Stock Xchng)