Get a Better ROI from Your Digital Marketing

The latest research from Barclays Corporate predicts that purchase transactions made via tablets and mobile devices will hit the £20 billion mark over the next 10 years. Interestingly, Barclays’ survey of 3,000 consumers reveals that 52 per cent currently use Smartphones at some stage of the shopping process. In addition, the Internet Advertising Bureau UK recently reported that the first half of 2011 (from January to June) saw a quarter of a billion pounds increase in Internet advertising over the same period in 2010. These statistics suggest that online marketing can be a real asset to any business when done well. Done badly, it’s akin to pouring money down the drain. The beauty of Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) is that it can be a fast and efficient way to drive large numbers of potential buyers to your website or online store over a relatively short period of time. Once you have placed your ad you will only pay for the privilege when someone actually clicks on it. Anyone can set up a PPC account and create their first ad campaign. And while there is plenty of sound advice to be found online, for the PPC ‘newbie’ it takes time and insight to get the best results. With PPC, you can track all the marketing activity on your account to see how well each ad is performing. You can also set a daily spends limit to avoid blowing your entire budget in one go! Ideally, your online marketing should encompass both paid for advertising and search engine optimization (SEO), which will give your business visibility on both the ‘paid’ and ‘natural’ search engine results, resulting in a higher click rate and conversion volume. When you are paying every time someone clicks on your advertisement, it makes perfect sense that you want those people to be highly-targeted leads – people who are looking to buy whatever it is you are selling. If you get streams of people clicking on your ad for no good reason, or just out of curiosity, then you will be wasting your money. There’s no point in having 1000 people visit your site over the weekend if only 2 out of those 1000 visitors convert into customers. Here are 6 top tips to help you get the best from your next digital marketing campaign and improve your ROI: 1.Use Wordtracker or WordStream to find the best keywords Having great keywords or phrases is essential to every successful digital marketing promotion. Use Wordtracker or WordStream to identify the most profitable words for your ad campaign. And do check out Gtrends (accessible from Wordtracker’s site). It’s a ‘mash’ of Wordtracker and Google Trends – Enter a seed word and evaluate up to 100 related keywords at a time. 2.Include a strong negative keywords list By including a list of negative keywords, you won’t be wasting your time and money on visitors to aren’t interested in your business, enabling you to focus on the people who are. For example, say you sell ski jackets but you don’t sell trousers. Listing “trousers” as a negative keyword will ensure those people using “trousers” as a search term, won’t get your ad mixed in with their results. If your goal is simply to increase traffic to your website you may not wish to include negative keywords. But if you’re looking for better quality leads you almost certainly will. 3.Narrow the focus of your keywords/ phrases Another big money-waster is using keyword phrases which are too broad and therefore not specific enough to your target audience. Again, narrow your focus to attract quality responses rather than quantity. 4.To get the best from SEO make sure your web pages are well designed. SEO doesn’t have to cost you a bean, though many businesses choose to outsource this function to a marketing expert, as getting it right all by yourself can prove incredibly time-consuming and costly. It’s really important that your web pages are well designed and that each page has a specific purpose and is labelled and “tagged” accordingly. Bear in mind also that not every visitor will arrive at your Home page first. 5.Use geo-targeting to target regional audiences If your business is aimed at attracting local customers only, there’s no point in having an ad that’s shown to the entire UK. Segmenting your ads regionally will keep your costs down and pull in better quality responses. 6.Create multiple ads and split-test them Create at least 2 ads per Ad Group – if possible expand this to 3 or 4. The more ad variations you create, the easier it is to see what is effective and what is not. Use an analytics package to determine what words/ phases generate most clicks in the ad copy and tweak the ads that aren’t working so well for you.