Marketing and Sales Experience in Ireland, Marketing and Sales Advice

How to Track Your Website Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 08:59:00 +0000

Hello People!

Maybe some of you know already that Google offers a great tool for measuring your website traffic success – Google Analytics. Go to www.google.com/analytics, set up an account, add a special script to the web pages you want to track and start a great adventure of monitoring your website performance.

Google Analytics gives you handy reports on the following issues:

1. Content Analysis
2. Visitors Analysis
3. Traffic Sources
4. Goal Conversion

Among these tools you will find an answer to every question regarding your website performance. I would recommend that you create monthly reports in Excel spreadsheets, for example, which will enable you to compare the results over time. I suggest that you monitor especially these criteria:

Visits
Page Views
Pages/Visit
Avg. Time on Site
Bounce Rate
% New Visits
Goal Conversions

Hope this piece helps and wish you all see the nubmers grow!

How to Get More Returning Visitors

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:32:00 +0000

Updated Content

To attract your first time visitors to come back and to keep coming back, you must always have what to offer: nobody will keep returning to see the same pages all the time.

Involving Your Visitors

If you want people to come more often, I would recommend involving them somehow in parts of your website: this could be an online discussion forum, blog, or just simple option to post a comment.

Create a Membership Club

Another option of involving visitors into happening on your website, is to invite them to your membership club, this could be as simple as just sending them a monthly online newsletter.

Good Navigation

Having a good navigation is also important to the indexing of your web pages. There is nothing worse than arriving at a website and having difficulty understanding where to go for the information you are seeking. Have easy to use, clearly marked navigation so that your visitors click through instead of click-away in frustration.

In-site Cross Linking

Get all of your web pages indexed by the search engines by implementing your sitemap. Your web pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page. On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s) or product (s).

Web Site Design

This is also important, if you want to get indexed. Text content should outweigh the HTML content. The pages should validate and be usable in all of today's leading edge browsers. Rather stay away from Frames, Flash, Javascript, Image Maps, and Dynamic URLs, search engines dislike them all a lot.

One prudent tool to use is the “alt” attribute of pictures on your site. You simply describe the pictures and these descriptions can include your keywords.

Increase Your Page Rank

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 08:47:00 +0000

Hello People,

Hope things are going well for you and that you enjoy this weeks' post.

Linking strategies to Increase Your Page Ranking

As determined by the number, quality and type of linked pages, most search engines don't even consider websites if there is not at least one or two links pointing to these sites. Links from other popular websites back to your website are one way of increasing your site's popularity. Finding websites with similar content (but not your competitors) and high link popularity, then trading links to be posted on each site, is one way of increasing your site popularity.

Is it good to submit your website to the search engines?

The answer to this question is generally positive. If you do not submit your website to the main search engines, it may take ages (literally several months) to get listed. On the other hand, some website submitting providers overdo this and it can generate negative results.

Therefore I would recommend the following proven Online Search Engine Marketing Program: http://www.submitnet.net/. After setting up an account, the program will submit your website to various search engines at once (including Google and Yahoo!, of course), and then resubmit it on a monthly basis. Apart from that, there are many useful tools which will check your meta tags, website content and compatibility for browsers. The program is even able to manage your PPC campaigns from one source, when you pay for the service.

It is essential that when using Submitnet, you have already optimised your website using the information gained from PPC and Google Analytics reports. Run Submitnet reports and update your website accordingly. The tutorial will help you with all the steps you need to take.

How to Combine SEO with Your PPC Campaigns

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:22:00 +0000

Hello People,

First of all, I want to show off a little - I've become a Qualified Google Advertising Professional. So if you need any help with your Google Adwords, you can contact me as a professional now and I will improve your Google Adwords account performance. Visiting 3R's website you can learn more on how to Beat Google Adwords with 3R Google Adwords Campaign Management.

For this week, the question is How to Combine SEO with Your PPC Campaigns.

Well, it is not that difficult – having run and tracked your PPC campaigns for some time, you will easily find out which keywords are performing the best for you. In the next stage, you will simply include these keywords in your website more often and try to create content more relevant to these keywords. Best performing keywords should be in your meta tags as well.

You might ask how to know whether a keyword performs well or not. There are various indicators of this and you might decide which to follow. However, we recommend using them in the following priority order:

1. The most important, something you probably want most to get from your SEO and PPC campaigns, is a high number of conversions. A conversion is when a visitor clicks on any page of your website you choose and set as a conversion goal. Usually, these pages are those which show after a visitor bought something, or signed up for your newsletter.

2. Another one successful performance indicator is click-through rate (CTR).

3. Apart from the above mentioned, you should also control your costs per click (CPC). Google Adwords campaign costs are partly based on CTR of your particular keywords – the higher CTR you achieve, the less you pay for a click. So if you want to save your budget, make sure your keywords match to your ads.

4. Impressions are another measure you can see in your PPC stats. They tell you how many times your ad has been displayed. However, when you get high impressions without sufficient number of clicks, your CTR decreases and you pay more for every click. I definitely would not recommend using impressions as a positive criterion of assessing your keyword performance.

How to Track Your Google Adwords Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 12:29:00 +0000

Track your keywords

Providing that your keywords fall below the 0.5% CTR for the first 1000 impressions, they will get disabled. That is the first reason you need to track your keywords performance and modify them regularly. Remember, change your words around, use new keyword matching options, try out different capitalisation and spelling variations, use singular or plural versions as well as different punctuation and grammar tenses…

You can decide if you want to receive daily, weekly or monthly Google Adwords reports.

Google can also create your personalised report in only five minutes. Click on the tab “Report“ => “Create a report now”. You can create a report to track the performance of your keywords, text ad, image ad, URL, ad group, campaign and account.

In order to save money, you can delete the keywords that do not convert into sales from your list. It is also recommended that you “peel” those keywords that get low CTR and “stick” them to a new campaign or ad group with an ad specifically targetting them.

To finish, don’t be obsessed by getting the first position. The first position enables you to get more clicks, but not necessarily to get a high conversion sale. Why? Because clickers who aim at purchasing something will take time to look down the page. In contrast, users who just want to take a quick tour will click on the first ad.

Track your ad

Making tiny changes to your ad can have a strong impact on your CTR. Keep changing your ads around regularly. After few weeks, you will be able to detect your best performing keywords. Use them to rework on your ads. Your ad should include your best keywords. On the same way, if you detect bad keywords, delete them from your ad.

Google gives you a separate CTR and CPC for each ad so you can track their results separately:

Track your sales conversion

Google has a built-in "conversion tracking" tool that's linked to AdWords. You put their code in the "success" page on your site and along with your CTR statistics, Google will give the percentage of visitors who opt in or buy in your weekly, monthly or daily report.

Create Your Adwords Account and Your Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 12:22:00 +0000

Hello People!

Having read the previous parts of my blog, now it is time to set up your account. Go to http://www.adwords.google.com/ and follow these steps:

1. Click the “Start Now” button and sign up the form for the “Standard Edition”. Choose your target language and location.

2. Now create your first ad. Its role is to generate traffic on your website; therefore it must attract people’s attention. You have to motivate people to click on it. You must be concise, accurate and clear for you have restricted space. Be careful, characters include spaces as well. Here is the structure of ads in Google Adwords:

Headline (max.25 characters)
Description line 1 (max. 35 characters)
Description line 2 (max. 35 characters)
Display URL (max. 35 characters)
Destination URL (max. 1024 characters)

This way of creating ads is recommended by most Google Adwords experts:
Always include your exact keywords in the title of your ad. If searchers see the keywords they entered in the title of the ad, they will likely click on it.

The first description line should contain your most important benefits to grab people’s attention and to force them to take action.
The second line should list features – what exactly people get after clicking on the ad. Moreover, I suggest to put a call to action to this line.
The display URL can be used as well – after your domain address you can put anything.
Your home page may not necessarily be the best one for all your ads so your URL destination address should mirror the content and purpose of your ad.

Before starting to write your ad and your description, just have a look on these useful tips:

Get inside the customer’s head. What are your customers looking for? What do they expect?

As you have limited text space, avoid terms like “a”, “the”, “of”, “at”…

Use words like “new”, “free”, “limited offer”, “discount” to attract clickers.

Avoid superlatives like “the best product...”, “the most wonderful …” or “the top of…” It is too basic and not pertinent.

3. Now enter the keywords list that you have created with Chapter #3 of this ebook. Notice that with Google Adwords, you have the possibility to format your keywords with the four types of keyword matching options:

Broad matching: for example => marketing consultant. Your ad appears each time users search on these keywords, whatever the order or the other search terms.

Phrase matching: for example => “marketing consultant”. Your ad appears if the keywords are all present in the right order, regardless of other search terms.

Exact matching: for example => [marketing consultant]. Your ad only appears if the keywords are all present in the right order and no other terms are searched for.

Negative matching: for example => -manufacturing (use the “minus” character). Your ad for “marketing consultant” only appears if the word “manufacturing“ does not appear in the search query together with “marketing consultant”.

By using these matching options, you should be able to produce well-targeted results. Google also gives you the possibility to block your ads showing for searches conducted by people from certain countries or people who speak a certain language.

4. Next step is to decide on your daily budget. Choose the budget which fits to your resources.

5. Place your bid as well. Your bid price is your maximum bid price, which means you will not necessarily pay that all the time. You will only pay 1 cent more that the competitor under you.

Google will suggest you a bid amount, however it is not compulsory to follow up their suggestion. Just place the bid that you can afford. To find the most relevant bid, use the traffic estimator by clicking “Estimate Search Traffic”: it will give you some idea on the amount of clicks you can expect per day, the position of your ads among the others and how much you will be spending.

I would recommend you to place higher bids at the beginning. That will help you to generate traffic on your website rapidly and therefore to figure out which ads work and which ones don’t.

6. Enter your email address and your password. Afterwards you will be sent a validation email. Log into your new Google account. You just have to enter your credit card details and your campaign will be running!

7. If you wish to add a new campaign, log into your Google account and click “Create New Campaign”. Then you will just have to follow the steps that we have just detailed below.

The good strategy is to run two ads against one another in a campaign. After few weeks, delete the one with the lower CTR and write a new one to replace it. Google will automatically alternate your ads according to their CTR.

To create a new ad, just click the link “Create ad Variation”. Enter your new ad, and then click “Save new ad”. Google will alternate your different ads throughout the day.

Repeat the keyword in both the ad title and ad description to improve your chances for a click.

Pay per Click Campaigns

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 06:55:00 +0000

Hello People!

Today I will write about an amazingly effective advertising tool where you pay only when people actually see your website. In this issue I will concentrate on Google Adwords as Google has majority in the search industry these days.

What is it all about?

To support and enhance your SEO, the three biggest search engines offer an opportunity of pay-per-click advertising. This is a special form of online campaigns where you pay just when people click on your ad so that they are directed to your webpage. Your ads will be shown always your campaign keywords are looked for in the search engine, however, you do not pay for these impressions, you pay just for the clicks your ads receive.

Google Adwords Fundamentals

Launched in 1998, the Google Adwords Program is now the leader in the pay-per-click search engine industry. Contrary to its competitors, Google doesn’t list ads by only considering your bid or Cost-Per-Click (CPC). Google also checks if your clickthrough rate (CTR) is high:

Number of clicks your ad received
CTR =
Number of times your ad is shown (impressions)

High CTR = 1/20 = 5.50 %

Low CTR = 1/2000 = 0.05 %

It means that with traditional pay-per-click search engines, you have to bid more than your competitors if you want to get ranked first. With Google, you also have to get a higher CTR as your position is determined by multiplying your CTR by your CPC: Position = CTR × CPC.

In few words, it doesn’t matter how often your ad appears and how much you pay. The key thing is that people have to click on your ad. Therefore your key phrase or keywords have to be relevant to the search. If your keywords achieve at least 1.5 % CTR, it means that they are relevant.

Google Account Structure

It is important to understand the structure of your Google Adwords account when creating particular Google Adwords campaigns. Namely there are three levels in your account, as you can see here:

Your Account - Campaign - Ad Group Ad(s) Keywords

The first one, Your Account – there you have set your email address, password and billing information. Within each Campaign, there are particular settings common for all its Ad Groups, such as the daily budget, geographic and language targetting, distribution preferences and end dates. On the third level you create ad variations and keyword groups which are stated just for that Ad Group.

Other Google Adwords fundamentals you need to know to run your campaign successfully:

1. Only the top 8 ads are shown on the first page.

2. You must achieve at least a 0.5% CRT to maintain your campaign active.

Combine Headings and Links Keywords

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 08:22:00 +0000

Hello People!

The story of building up a perfect web site continues. After creating a killer meta tags, your way is to concentrate on your headings and links. What words should you have there?

Headings & Links

Headings are a very important attention-grabbing essence of your landing page. People will not read your entire page. That’s why it is smart to divide your page into short paragraphs and to highlight each of them with a killer headline which will not only catch their attention, but also tell them in a second what the whole paragraph is about.

For the SEO purposes, make sure that your headlines are marked < h1 >Headline#1 < / h1 >, <>Headline#2 < / h2 >etc. and that they are stuffed with your best keywords. Apart from the keywords, use words like "free, proven, benefit, first, discover, complete, exclusive, how to…" in order to gain people’s attention.

Another important part of a landing page are the links. As mentioned already, your links should not direct visitors to your home page or elsewhere other than the next step towards reaching your goal. What is also relevant, is the anchor text, i. e. the clickable text of the hyperlink – for the SEO purposes, stuff it with your keywords as well, don’t leave it just as “Click here to sign up”, but mention your product as well: “Click here to sign up for the Search Optimisation Workshop now”.

How to Combine Headings and Links Keywords

Here is an example if your landing page promotes a newsletter with free marketing, sales and leadership articles.

Headings Keywords:

interesting articles
valuable articles
free articles

Links Keywords:

marketing articles
sales articles
leadership articles

This means a capture on the whole list of keyword searchphrases:

interesting marketing articles
valuable marketing articles
free marketing articles
interesting sales articles
valuable sales articles
free sales articles
interesting leadership articles
valuable leadership articles
free leadership articles

How Meta Tags Will Boost Your Search Engines Ranking

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 09:05:00 +0000

Hello People!

So you would like to increase your ranking, maybe you have heard about meta tags but how to use them in a powerful way that will create wonders with your web page ranking? Let's take a tour.

Site Title Tag

This is the most powerful SEO technique you have, so use it creatively! When search engine results are displayed, the title is the first thing people see.

Thus each page should have a different Title tag with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. The title should explain in a few short words (your keywords) the intent of the page. Don't put your company name first - place your keywords first and if you feel you absolutely must have the company name in the title add it second.

Despite its importance, rather do not overdo it with the length of the Title tag; 50-150 characters including spaces should be appropriate. And do not just list your keywords, because you then risk being considered as spamming. Rather try to remain as close to a readable sentence as possible. You also should make the title enticing, so that the viewers of search engines listings will also click to see your website.

Description Meta Tag

Below the Title tag is a Description tag which will be generally the first sentence on a page. The Description Meta tag is also fairly important. Your description should also have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning as so should your first sentence. Just like the Title tag, reflect the content and try to keep there no more than 200 characters including spaces. Change the words around enough so that you can hit various typings of your keywords.

You should have a different title, description and first sentence on each page. You many also want to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance. And try to consider putting your domain name at the very end of the title.

Keywords Meta Tag

Although many people rely on them so much when performing SEO, meta tags have decreased in importance recently, but are still worth using for clarity and search results. Their initial purpose was to help search engines find out important information about your page that they might have had difficulty determining otherwise.

The Keyword tag is now the least important but is still used by some engines. As you never know when the rules of the search engines will change, or a new engine will want them, so take the time to include these tags in all your web pages. We recommend you do not overdo it with meta tags as well; your Keyword Meta should not exceed 250 characters including spaces.

If your site is especially interesting for a specific geographic location, be sure to include the actual location in your keyword meta as well.

When performing SEO, you should always use the same keywords which also appear in the copy of your page, title tag, meta description etc. Any keyword phrases which are used in your meta tags only, will not have enough prominence to help your listings for that phrase.

Don't Stop People from Buying Your Products!

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 09:33:00 +0000

Hello, people!

Hope you are all well. This week I will outline some ways of preventing cancellation of the buying process after you have got the attention of your visitors, their interest and desire for your product. You need to generate trust and to make the ordering process clear & secure.

Generate Trust

Although many of us probably do not pay particular attention to Contact Details and Privacy Policy when browsing the Internet, these are vital parts looked for especially during the purchasing process in order to make sure that you are a serious company. Apart from that, Testimonials could add trustworthiness to your landing page, too, as they are kind of confirmation and a referral from the REAL people who have already tried your products or services and who didn’t mind to publish their names (sometimes their occupation and pictures as well) and you can possibly find them, if you need to confirm their positive statements.

Last but not least, the trust in your company and products will be supported effectively when you offer an unconditional money-back guarantee if at all possible. This will prevent the fear, uncertainty and doubt about moving towards the purchase.

Make Your Ordering Process Clear & Secure

In general, over 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process. It’s a pity that after gaining their attention, interest and desire you can still lose them due to a complicated, unclear or unsafe ordering process. To prevent this, try to follow the advice:

1. When already in the purchasing process, don't hide the price for your products or services. People will not continue if they don't know how much they have to pay.

2. Tell your visitors upfront about your refund policy.

3. Tell your visitors about all additional costs and taxes they have to pay, so that they know the final price before they have to enter the credit card number.

4. Make sure that your order pages are easy to understand. Test them with your friends or relatives who don't browse the Internet very often.

5. Make sure that your order page shows an understandable notice if the customer forgets to enter the email address or any other required field.

6. Make sure that your order pages work internationally. Some countries don't have postal numbers or their regional structuring can be different from yours.

7. It's very important that your order pages are secure. Use as much encryption as you can and use the additional security services such as Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode.

8. Test your order pages regularly in order to make sure they work.

Turn Your Visitors into Buyers

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 07:52:00 +0000

Hello people,

Last week I have written about the right keywords. Once you have created your keyword list, it is essential to create landing pages which contain these keywords. This is a crucial step to get conversions. A conversion is when a customer buys your products or signs up for a newsletter or takes any action you would like him to take.

When your landing page does not include the keyword your customer typed in when looking for your services, it is not very likely that he keeps browsing your website. Moreover, it is recommended that you create a separate landing page for each of your keyword, or combination of keywords. Each of your PPC ads should point at a relevant landing page. So how to make your landing pages bring you actual sales?

Content is King

Create useful and comprehensive content that's related to your market to keep your visitors there. Adding keyword-rich text that makes sense and serves the concept of the web page improves your ranking and keeps your visitors interested. The more text, the better for search engine spiders when they index a website; it is strongly recommended that your homepage has at least 200-300 “visible” words. Moreover, the search engine spiders crawl especially the first 20 words of your website so try to keep an eye on them and make them really relevant to what your site is about.

In addition, valuable, dense and regularly updated content is one of the most important items you need for your website because visitors who stay longer while visiting a website help measure popularity of the site in the search engines. When creating content for your landing page, you should pay attention to the following elements:

The Purpose of Your Landing Page

The first step when creating your langing page should be setting a goal you want to achieve. What is it that you want your visitors to do? This could be one of the following:

1. Buy a product
2. Sign up a newsletter
3. Download a free trial
4. Read an article
5. Do a survey
6. Participate in a competition

List the Real Benefits

When you know the purpose of your landing page, you should give your visitors a REASON to move towards the goal. Remember, it is not your goal that they will follow; in fact, people are always looking for what is in it for THEM.

To achieve this, always list benefits of your products or services; not features. The difference is that benefits mean something valuable to the consumer while features are just descriptions of your product characteristics. Nobody cares so much about what material you used when creating the product, or what the technical parametres are. Usually, what matters to them is what problems your product can solve, and more importantly, how they will benefit from buying and using it.

In addition, websites offering products that managed to fix a problem usually get highest conversion rates. Moreover, try to use "you" more often than "I" or "we". Remember: Your customers don't care about you at all. The only thing they are looking for is what is in it for them.

Include a Call to Action

Once you have decided what you want your visitors to do and after revealing all the benefits they get, it is crucial to tell them what to do next. It must be crystal clear what they need to do:

1. Click here to order your SEO eBook now.
2. Sign up for the Success! Newsletter here.
3. Press Enter to continue. Etc.

In order to make a call to action more catchy and attention gaining, there is one smart trick: use the red colour always you want to highlight something to be clicked on. However, do not overdo it, since when your website is red on its whole, the particular spots will not stand out.

Keep it Simple

In order to keep your visitors focused on the steps you want them to take, keep all possible distractions away. This means your landing page should not be stuffed with links that will direct them away from the page. The only links your landing page should contain are those in line with your goal: links to your order pages, newsletter sign up forms, etc.

Keywords to Attract More Visitors

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 08:10:00 +0000

Last week, I wrote about the first and most important step to take if you want to boost your website traffic. But what to do next?

The second step of your SEO (and PPC campaigns as well) is to make the best keyword list possible. A keyword is a word or a phrase people who are looking for your product type in Google or Yahoo. For example, if you are a marketing consultancy, one of your keywords may be “marketing advice”.

Creating a rich and appropriately targetted keyword list is a fundamental step that will have a strong impact on your campaign success. Avoid expensive general keywords: you will certainly get a high rate of impressions, but not necessarily high conversion sales. Focus on specific key phrases that will get more highly targeted people to your site. That means, do not use just “marketing” as there are many people typing this word in, but they are not looking for any marketing help or advice for their business. Instead, go for combinations such as “marketing help”, “marketing consultancy” etc.

Moreover, I would advise you to apply the following methodology to choose the right words:

1) Organise a brainstorming with your co-workers, business partners, friends or relatives to find keywords relevant to your business. Focus on the needs of your target audience, what they would type in when looking for your products. Having created your customer value proposition before, this should be now much easier to do.

2) Try to make a list of 100 keywords minimum. Providing that you barely reach this goal, do use search term suggestion tool (such as http://www.inventory.overture.com/ or http://www.wordtracker.info/). These will give you an idea what phrases based on your keyword have been looked for recently.

3) Don’t forget dashes, apostrophes, spelling variations, plural versions and various tenses. Your potential customers will not search a keyword in the same way. For instance: website, web site, web-site.

4) Check out your competitors’ webpages for ideas. View the source HTML code and take a look at keywords in their meta tags. They could be a good tip for yours!When you are combining your SEO with PPC advertising campaigns, it is very helpful to use tracking results from Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing to revalue your keyword list. Try to put emphasis on those which gain the highest number of clicks in your PPC campaigns.

What Offering Will Bring You Fortune?

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:04:00 +0000

Hello People!

If you want to boost your website traffic, the first step you have to take, is to create your customer value proposition. Success in a company is governed by three key factors;

How valuable, your target market believes, your offering is.
Your ability to market, sell and service the offering.
The quality and skill set of your management team.

Many excellent companies have all 3 ingredients for success. Where strong management teams, or entrepreneurs, have a great offering, but realise they may need help in the marketing and selling of their product to reach their true potential, they should turn to external experts.

Some companies seem to find the selling and marketing of their products a particularly daunting task. The reason is that their product is often intangible. Many companies find huge difficulty in accurately articulating their Customer Value Proposition (CVP).

Without a clear definition of value to your clients, it is going to be difficult or impossible to formulate your sales and marketing messages to define why people should purchase from you. When creating your CVP, there are 5 key steps, which lead to 5 deliverables:

1. Know your Customer
Select Target Customer
Deliverable: Customer Needs, Wants & Pains Identified

2. Know your Product or Service
Identify Customer Value
Deliverable: Customer Benefits identified

3. Know your Target Market
Select Target Markets
Deliverable: Addressable Market identified

4. Know your Competitors
Choose Competitive Differentiators
Deliverable: Competitive Differentiators chosen

5. Create your CVP Statement
Create a Value Proposition
Deliverable: Value Proposition created

We are able to help with this crucial task via our 3R Customer Value Proposition full-day Workshop that is strongly recommended to take before attending the 3R SEO Workshop. However, if you decide to go just for the SEO one, we will cover the topic of CVP briefly at the beginning. Without a clear CVP statement, you cannot move forward with your SEO and PPC strategy.

What You Get from SEO?

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:53:00 +0000

Hello, people!

This week you will learn more about the magic acronym SEO (meaning Search Engine Optimisation) you have probably seen dozens of times. So how could understanding of this magic drive your website to the top positions in Google, Yahoo, or Msn.com within specific search terms your ready-to-buy customers type in when looking for your products?

SEO means that your website is "optimised" for search engines, meaning that, ideally, your web site will come up as one of the first 10 sites when people search for keywords pertinent to your business. This is essential to your website traffic which might lead to further sales generation.

Getting a top 5 search ranking in Google, Yahoo! and recently in MSN.com as well is the key factor to advertise your product online. Optimising your website will generate more traffic than all of your other Internet Marketing efforts combined. By simply getting traffic coming to your website, you have got better chance to generate more sales....

During the 3R Boost Your Website Traffic Workshop you will learn about SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns before you waste a lot of money on a campaign that doesn't work. This ebook provides essential overview of SEO and, together with the workbook coming from the workshop, it will help you to launch or optimise your online advertising campaigns with Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) or Microsoft AdCenter. However, given the current market trends in Ireland, we will focus on Google Adwords above all.

Although SEO might seem to be a simple and relatively easy-to-use way of improving your website ranking, which helps your customers find your website easier, there is also a possibility of abuse. This can finally lead to your website being excluded from the search engines listings. Therefore it is crucial to know the difference between techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design (so called “White Hat” SEO) and those that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimise their effect (referred to as “Black Hat” SEO or spamdexing).

Another interesting fact to know is that search engines change their search criteria daily. There are usually very subtle changes an average website owner does not have to track. Their purpose is to prevent spamdexing or at least make it as difficult as possible.

Well this is just shorly now, will write about this topic somewhat more in the coming posts. However, if you cannot wait and are hungry for information on SEO, contact me now.

The Importance of Creating a Web Page that Sells

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 09:26:00 +0000

Are you 100 % sure that your web site encourages visitors to buy your products? Or are you loosing potential customers who have found you but don’t know how your offering can be of value to them?

Once I was browsing the Internet looking for a laptop shade. It is a special widget to prevent from reflecting the sun when you want to work with your laptop outside, sitting on the grass somewhere in the park in a lovely sunny weather. But, being a non-native English speaker, I did not know the exact name for it at that moment and I was trying various keyword combinations, such as laptop screen protector, laptop foil, prevent sun shine laptop, use laptop outside etc. And I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

Anyway, there are just few companies that sell this “device” and fortunately, I found one of them after typing in “laptop screen outside” desperately. Browsing the pictures of funny black gadgets sticked to the screen, I already saw myself sunbathing at the beach during my most busy working hours. But I didn’t buy immediately. I sneakily picked the keyword “laptop shade” they used on the website and continued my search in order to find more attractively-looking shades.

This short story is probably something you get through every day, maybe without conscious realising. And your customers do as well. Once they find you, you probably want them to buy from you, not to leave for another company. For this purpose, your website can be an enormously powerful tool if you build it the appropriate way.

Why More Visitors Will Buy from You

First of all, consider your target niche. Who is looking for a laptop shade? A young, fashionable “lady” eager to look well at every moment (well, I’m not, but…), or “Mr. Sayso”, a builder notoriously careless of the design but prefering utility functions? In fact, they might be both really interested, but to address their individual concerns and desires adequately, pick just one of them and try to attract THEIR senses and create an emotional momentum that will appeal specifically to THEM.

So close your eyes now and think. Who is looking for your products? What kind of people is most likely to buy one? Who will buy even more than one? After all, who is prepared to pay fortune for your products?

Having done this exercise, there is time to think of the content of your website. It is recommended to pick just one page that will be dedicated to one particular group of people looking for one particular product. As this will be the page where your potential customers will “land” from their Internet search, we call it a Landing Page.

All your pay per click campaigns, whether you use Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft’s AdCenter or whatever else, all these ads promoting your particular product to a particular audience should point at your landing page developed exclusively for this product and this audience.

To achieve high conversion rates, which means that a high percentage of your visitors will finally buy something; each single word should mirror THEIR perceptions, THEIR opinions and, most importantly, it should refer to THEIR wants.

So what is the process to develop a landing page that will boost your revenues?

7 Steps to Make Your Landing Page Bring You Actual Sales

1. Define the purpose of your landing page

The first step when creating your landing page should be setting a goal you want to achieve. What is it that you want your visitors to do?

2. Create an irresistible desire for your product

To succeed, always list benefits of your products or services; not features. What is the difference? Benefits mean something valuable to the consumer while features are just descriptions of your product characteristics.

3. Include a Call-to-Action

Once you have decided what you want your visitors to do and after revealing all the benefits they can obtain, it is crucial that you tell them what to do next. It must be crystal clear what they need to do in order to buy the product.

4. Keep it simple, stupid

To keep your visitors focused on the steps you want them to take, keep all possible distractions away. That means, your landing page should not be stuffed with links that will direct them away from the page.

5. Generate trust

Although many of us probably do not pay particular attention to Contact Details and Privacy Policy when browsing the Internet, these are vital parts looked for especially during the purchasing process in order to make sure that you are a serious company. Apart from that, Testimonials could add trustworthiness to your landing page, too, as they are kind of confirmation and referral from the REAL people.

6. Make your ordering process clear and secure

In general, over 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process. It’s a pity that after gaining their attention, interest, desire and even after beginning of the purchase you may lose them due to a complicated, unclear or unsafe ordering process.

7. Optimise your title, meta tags, headings and links

You should always use the same keywords which also appear in the copy of your page, title tag, meta description etc. Any keyword phrases which are used in your meta tags only, will not have enough prominence to help your listings for that phrase.

What Should an Effective Landing Page Look Like?

To give you a better idea on the issue, we have created a sample landing page for our 3R Success! Newsletter. Its purpose is to make people sign up for the monthly newsletter with sales, marketing and leadership articles.

You can view the landing page here:
http://www.3r.ie/landing_pages/success_newsletter.htm

Moreover, if you are interested in the issue, you can download a free Boost Your Website Traffic eBook after subscribing to the 3R Success! Newsletter.

This article was written by Simona Antosikova and Peter Lawless from 3R Sales and Marketing - http://www.3r.ie/. For previous articles like this, visit 3R's Articles. Alternatively, subscribe to Success our free monthly Information Bulletin with sales and marketing articles.

Turn Your Story into Website Traffic Boosting Tool!

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:11:00 +0000

Do you feel you have gained so much experience in your business that you would be able to teach others? Is there any way to benefit from your stories and advice?

Become Known on the Internet

Publishing is somewhat similar to Speaking. If anything interesting or important happens in your company, do not hesitate and tell everyone about it immediately! The best way to do it (when we consider ‘low cost options’) is to create an article and to send it to various Internet portals all over the world. It will be published in many places and overwhelmingly, this is not considered an advertising tool, but an article or news among other interesting articles and news on an knowledgeable website or in an ezine, for example.

Therefore, you should adjust your style when writing for this purpose. Do not use catchy words of your typical adverts. This should be rather more serious however, try to make it as informative and enriching as possible.

9 Rules of Effective Online Publishing

Always refer to your target group.

Don’t speak about yourself all the time.

Give valuable and relevant information.

Keep it simple, stupid (KISS).

Make it clear and easy to find relevant information.

Use a call to action.

We think pictures – make sure that you include them as well.

Use correct fonts and always check for spelling and grammar.

Make it trackable – and track it regularly. This will give you ideas on what to improve.

Generate More Traffic to your Website Offering a Valuable Content

In today world the role of the Internet is vital. Therefore it is crucial to create a traffic generating website, unless you are 100 % sure that your target market does not use the Internet at all. However, at any stage, the online presence makes you more recognised and respected and a website is a relatively cheap marketing tool with a long life span.

In order to attract your visitors’ attention and to keep them browsing for longer than 6 seconds, your website should contain the following:

The right marketing messages and testimonials for each of your niches including your customer value proposition statement.

2-3 articles advising people within your particular niches in areas that you can give them professional advice.

Interesting and updated news that matter to your target group.

In Minutes, Let the Whole World Read Your Story!

To submit an article means to publish it on a web site which is not yours. There are various portals which welcome any articles on different topics. As it could be a tough job to submit dozens of your articles to these numerous sites one by one, some of the portals also offer a service of automated article submission.

This is an easy and fast way to let the Internet audience know about your great masterpiece. However, it is not the main reason of the articles submission. The more important role of it is its contribution to your search engine optimisation, as at the end of each article you can insert your contact data, i. e. your URL. This smart and sneaky linking strategy increases your Google, Yahoo! or Msn.com ranking.

Here I would like to share a few such portals which could be beneficial to your own publishing:

www.articlegeek.com
www.uniterra.com
www.isnare.com
www.simplysearch4it.com
www.bigarticles.com
http://r-b-e.net/articles/
www.articlemarketer.com
www.hotlib.com/articles
www.freearticle.org
www.ezinearticles.com
www.articlecube.com
http://www.articlesfactory.com/
www.articletrader.com
www.ideamarketers.com
www.marketing-seek.com
www.connectionteam.com/su3bmit.html
www.articleson.com/
www.articlesexpress.com
www.marcommwise.com/addkbank.phtml
www.goarticles.com
www.webmasterslibrary.com
http://www.articlecentral.com/
www.articlecity.com

Start Your Own eZine with Passion

Although this may seem daunting at the first sight, starting your own eZine could be as beneficial as creating your website. In a nutshell, you offer your mailing list a set of rich-content articles giving information about your products, services or about your company itself. Accordingly, you will place this content on the ezine website which will in addition generate revenues from banner ads or affiliate programmes of your partners.

To succeed brilliantly, you should choose a specific market niche your ezine will be clearly designated for:

Offer interesting and valuable content that will address your target audience.

Think about the objectives of your articles – what do you want to tell people? What do you want them to think about? What actions do you want them to take having read your article?

Create interesting headlines for your articles. Always check your grammar and spelling.

For search engine optimisation purposes, use your keyword phrases and include your snippet containing a link to your website at the end of each article.

Following all these steps obediently, you will feel great about receiving emails with thanks and positive reviews from your potential customers, and, what is more, your website traffic will increase muchfold. At the end of the day, your revenues will mirror this development closely.
Make your eBook a Power Selling Tool

As the first advantage, compared to a classical “stone” book, an eBook is much easier to distribute. It will attract new people to your business and create awareness for yourself. Apart from that, it will create an image of you as an expert in your industry:

You should have a sufficient knowledge in your area of business in order to write an ebook.

The title of your ebook is very important. It could start “How to…” or the “Do’s” and “Don’ts’” in order to attract the attention of the readers.

You don’t have to create 700 pages’ ebook. It could be even a small brochure.

You can decide to do a series of short stories with an ongoing plot and continual marketing promotion.

Create a nice cover for your ebook.

Tell everyone about your ebook. Put in on your website and submit it to various ebook portals.

Teach About Your Products via eManuals with Sheer Elation

You can offer eManuals for free in order to generate more traffic to your website, or you can even sell them. Teaching your target group how to use your products effectively, will build rapport within your target group.
Don’t be afraid to present yourself as an expert on handling with software or other products and services you are offering:

Find a product you are able to write about easily and you have a lot of experience with and sufficient knowledge about.

Create your eManual – make it clear, easy to read and understand, make sure that you cover all relevant points.

Publish the eManual on your website and submit it to as many various directories, portals and ezines relating to your business as possible.

You can also include a link to your eManual in your email newsletter.

Promote your eManual wherever possible.

Blog with Spectacular Success

Blogs have become a popular source of information, advice and entertainment recently. Using them for marketing purposes, you can create awareness and build rapport with your online audience in an effective way. Moreover, submitting your blog to various blog directories will help your search engine optimisation. This tool is great especially if you target young people:

Find a suitable blog site where you could set up your own blog. It is easy. Usually, a wide choice of various templates is available and you need just basic computer skills.

Place a picture of yourself to your profile.

Start blogging and publish regularly. Make your posts interesting.

We think pictures – put at least one with every post you submit.

Don’t be afraid to share secrets of your success with the readers. They love reading about successful people and they look for advice on how they could belong to them as well.

Professional blogs nowadays are very personal.

Manage your comments and be active – respond to people’s questions and make statements to their ideas.

Tell everyone about your blog. Put a link to it on your website and submit it to various blog directories.

Publish Online to Improve Your Website Ranking

As determined by the number, quality and type of linked pages, most search engines don't even consider web sites if there is not at least one or two links pointing to the web site. Links from other popular websites back to your website are one way of increasing your site's popularity. Finding websites with similar content (but not your competitors’) and high link popularity, is one way of increasing your site popularity.

As you can see, this is a continuous process which will cost you a lot of time and demand constant effort. That’s why knowing more about the issue could save you great deal of energy. Think about devoting a half day of your precious time to acquire considerable knowledge on search engine optimisation and the way to do it most effectively: combining it with your pay per click campaigns.

Many of our hugely successful customers find that 3R half day SEO Workshop can spring board them to success. In some cases the workshop combined with all your expertise is all that you need. In many cases our customers are happy to have regular meetings, to benchmark their progress and keep you on track to building a consistent system that works.

This article was written by Simona Antosikova from 3R Sales and Marketing - www.3r.ie. For previous articles like this, visit 3R's Articles. Alternatively, subscribe to Success our free monthly Information Bulletin with sales and marketing articles.

Speaking As Your Mum Has Not Taught You

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 10:54:00 +0000

Speaking is something we usually pick up automatically. Most of us never deal with it as something special. Every day we say hundreds of words (although I have read somewhere that on average a man speaks all in all just about 10 minutes a day!) and usually we do not bother with the way we do it at all.

This is a common mistake. Your mother has taught you to speak your language and at school they did their best to teach you how to speak and write grammatically correctly (hopefully they were successful!). But Speaking is still something more than that.

Recently, research has been done which explored what people generally are most afraid of. Do you know what ended up on the first place? No, it was not death nor physical pain. It was speaking in public!

So it is natural to be nervous when you are about to start your speech in front of large crowds. It stems from the past when people were hunting animals. In dangerous conditions fear was their daily companion. However, they learnt how to use this stress to fight with greater power. The question is how to transform our fears into strength nowadays.

According to the people skilled in public speaking there are a few basic tips that could help.

1. Be well prepared.

This is the number one advice on a successful presentation. However, remember that sometimes the content of your speech makes up less than 50 % of your success. You could end up describing important results of a nation-wide survey on an interesting topic without building any rapport with your audience. Think about improving your mimicry skills, voice strength, gestures or try to maintain their attention using some of the presentational facilities, such as a projector, a flip chart or any of the visualisation tools which could enrich your performance and increase the attention of your target group.

During the preparation phase you should definitely practice the whole speech several times in order to find out how long it will take. It is recommended that you try it in front of a mirror so that you can see yourself and work on how you look.

On “D” day make sure you take everything you need with you and look your best. Dress appropriately and smile. A good mood will put away all the stress and unease.

2. Breathe deeply.

Shortly before you start keep calm. Breathe deeply, imagine yourself sitting somewhere on the beach. Relax. If you are relaxed, your sense of ease will transfer to your audience and they will listen to you with respect. Do not show any signs of stress.

3. Listen to your audience.

Finally, do not forget about the people who will have to listen to your words. Assuming that you were thinking of them also when preparing your content and the structure of the presentation, now standing in front of them you should be able to read their faces. Are they interested in your words? If they are yawning, you should immediately follow up with an interest-gaining question or a humorous remark that would wake them all up.

Speaking as a Marketing Tool

Speaking plays a very important role in marketing. If you want to organise a seminar, a product presentation or just to take part in a debate, you need to have strong communicating skills. If performed the correct way, all these events can help to increase your popularity and brand awareness as well as to create positive attitudes towards you and your company.

The fact is that not every human being has developed the ability to speak impressively in front of the public. If you do not think you are the right person to do it, rather ask someone else from your company to represent you. Alternatively, you can hire an expert coach who will help you to improve. At the end of the day I think that anyone can master this art if they practice regularly and with passion.

Once you have honed the way you speak, the next step is to find or organise suitable events where you can prove your qualities. You should try to take part in every possible event related to your business. After doing some research you will soon find out that there are various speaking opportunities available for free. It is just up to you to find an interesting topic and make sure that your content is worth listening to. You can start to cooperate with your local TV or radio station, give a lecture at the nearest university, or arrange a debate or a seminar yourself. Then just do not forget to ensure that relevant audience comes.

Another thing related to speaking is the way you communicate on the phone or during a personal meeting. You should always be open and kind, precise and concrete. Although these are not one-to-many events they are also crucial if you want to create positive relationship with your clients.

To conclude, the goal is to leave a positive impression under all circumstances. Furthermore, if you want to succeed, the key rule is to always tell the truth.

Direct Mail Not a Hostile

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:35:00 +0000

Are you fed up with your overloaded letter and email boxes? Probably we all are. It is a paradox that we marketers do not like them ourselves despite the fact that we are responsible for many of these messages.

Now I will introduce you the world of direct mail and tell you something about the reasons why we still stick to it so much.

Firstly, all you need is a good database of contact addresses and a head full of creative ideas. Additionally, a sense of ethics and efficiency must not be omitted. In some cases you can create very expensive DM campaigns but in general you can influence the amount spent on any of these campaigns by deciding on how big an audience you want to address.

Will That Pay You Off?

What are the biggest benefits of this kind of campaigns? Are there any reasons for using them prior to the ‘classic’ massive advertising?

One of the advantages of this direct marketing tool is its measurability. You will see more clearly how important this is in the detailed submission about the marketing effectiveness and efficiency. As Jay Conrad Levinson said, unless you measure, you will not know which campaigns have been effective and which have not. DM campaigns are trackable because you have the evidence of all recipients. You are then able to track their responses so that at the end you can compare the number and costs of the direct mails sent, with the number and revenues of those who responded to the campaign and bought your product or at least visited your business.

Another positive thing about DM is the fact that it is addressable. This means that you send it to your customers and when managed appropriately, you are able to give each individual letter or email a personal salution. This leads to the fact that the recipients feel that somebody is taking an interest in them, knows them and is offering something that could be of a high value to them personally. Therefore they are more likely to read through the message and to respond to it.

Send-Out Cards Campaigns

Moreover, they feel even better when they get a greeting card on their birthday or at Christmas. This a very sneaky way to alter positive attitude of your clients or prospects. It works because it makes them feel good and they associate this feeling with you. This can make them want to pay you back somehow and they will think of you as well when it comes to buying the product you offer. There are also some automated on-line services which will arrange all of this for you, such as http://www.sendoutcards.com/. All you do is create personalised cards using a wide range of the tool provided which enable you to insert your own hand-writing, signature, photos etc. all of which make your card look original and personal.

How to Create a Good Direct Mail Campaign

Please, just don’t use boring phrases like ‘the best’, ‘low price’, ‘extraordinary’ etc. They will very likely spoil all your effort and keep your ‘audience’ away from reading on. Words like this are just too general. Do you realise how many times a day you see such kind of cheap ‘claims’? Would you like to create additional ones? No way! Your product is different, original, it has its unique value, so please communicate this everyone. And do not copy the mistakes of your ‘marketing colleagues’.

Your DM campaign should at first attract the attention. Do not be afraid of devoting a lot of time and money to creating and executing it well.

If you decide to send your direct mail electronically, I would suggest that you order a paid service like e. g. http://www.newsletter.ie/ or http://www.constantcontact.com/. These services will enable you to create good-looking email campaigns (when you send them regularly they are often named ‘newsletters’), to send them out, to collect responses and to analyse the campaign results very easily. The greatest advantage of this kind of tool is that while securing professional look it will save you a lot of time. Finally, these services are not expensive at all.

Last but not least, I should definitely mention here the ethical factor. If your campaign does not comply with DM standards your clients will dislike you and the effect will more likely be negative.

To Advertise or Not To Advertise?

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:24:00 +0000

Well, I do not think that this guestion is of the same significance as Hamlet’s To-be-or-not-to-be? question. In other words, sometimes you can survive even if you do not advertise as well. What are the reasons then for the popularity of advertising of all kinds among the marketing managers?

These advantages of advertising come to mind at once:

- It addresses a mass audience.
- It has strong effects on brand awareness.
- It builds relationships and (hopefully positive) feelings towards your brand.
- It creates a picture of the promoted product and places it in people’s minds.
- It creates a unique selling proposition.
- It can enhance the value of the brand.

I believe there are many more of advantages to advertising.

But there are also a few drawbacks:

- Advertising costs money.
- Business leaders are often against high advertising budgets.
- It is hard to measure its effect.
- There is always a risk that the campaign will not be successful, that the audience will not be convinced by it.
- There are other more efficient means of marketing communication that will increase your sales with much lower expenditure.

Again there are certainly more disadvantages. So why we do not stop throwing money into the ‘advertising bin’?

There is one piece of advice on this. You should always make sure that what you do is effective, i. e. that any single cent you spend creates relevant value in terms of higher revenues, increased profits or at least more sales leads.

To achieve this it is strongly recommended to aim directly at your correct target market. If you sell language study stays abroad for example, you should aim at a particular group of people who you would like to offer your services to. Then look for ways how to attract them.

In some areas of business, especially in the B2B sector, advertising is often replaced by other more effective ways of creating new relationships with prospects, such as referrals, testimonials, speaking at conferences, publishing articles etc.

And the Winner Is...

Well, it depends on your business, your situation, the product you offer and everything and everyone you are dealing with and that is dealing with you. You are the only expert in your own business and you are responsible for its success. Nobody else can make the decision for you. I have just outlined several ideas you can follow on your way towards the correct decision. I hope this step will lead you to success!

Which Forms of Advertising May Be Most Effective?

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 11:20:00 +0000

If we want to answer the stated question it is necessary to define two basic expressions, forms of advertising and effectiveness.

According to the marketing literature there are several forms of advertising. The most often used ones are the following:

Local Broadcasting,
Nation-wide broadcasting,
Cinema adverts,
Newspapers, magazines,
Directiories, classified ads,
Flyers,
Brochures, catalogues,
Posters,
Online, Banners,
Pay Per Click,
Outdoor, Billboards,
Eye-catchers,
Advertising in motion and others.

The above-mentioned division is based prevailingly on particular media types. In the recent research we did in January 2007 among Irish respondents both Newspapers, magazines and Directories, classified ads categories were used most frequently. In 2006 they were used by 82 % of 28 respondents answering this question. Most of them inserted in both media categories 2-5 times in the researched year. Irish respondents did not use eye-catchers nor advertising in motion at all in 2006.

However, it is not that easy to define advertising effectiveness. In fact, there is another term which is quite often mixed up with this one. It is efficiency. What is the difference? Well known managerial expert Peter Drucker states, that effectiveness means „doing things right“, while efficiency means „doing the right things.“ As you can see, it is essential to draw your attention to the efficiency because otherwise you could end up spending unnecessarily too much time on doing correctly those things which are absolutely useless.

Now let’s put this piece of theory into advertising practice. Advertising effectiveness means how successful the advertising is in communicating the message. On the other hand advertising efficiency means the financial return on the advertising expenditure.

It is very complicated to assess the advertising efficiency of any mediatypes or advertising campaigns. Nevertheless, there are some forms of advertising which are easier to measure. I mean especially those with direct response, such as direct mail, for instance. There you can state how many people responded to the mail you had sent to them. The efficiency of other forms of advertising could be measured dividing net profits from the campaign by the amount of the advertising costs. Anyway, you have to keep in mind the fact of the combined influence of various elements of the surrounding at the particular time on your campaign results. Since your advertising is not the only issue that can raise your profits. There are seasonal effects, price changes, and what about the advertising of your competitors?

That is why we do not dare to mark any advertising form as more or less efficient. It depends also on the type of product or service being promoted and, what is more essential, on the budget of which you dispose. If we choose the services of a small language school in Dublin City Centre, for example, there are different possible ways of promotion. One of them is going the so called Guerrilla Marketing way. This means, according to Jay Conrad Levinson, the founder of this amazingly simple marketing concept, that you use very cheap ways of telling peoples about your existence and profficiency. Instead of money you use your creativeness and time. There are hundreds of various techniques applicable to this approach. I print here just few of these guerrilla marketing weapons:

business cards,
hours of operation,
word-of-mouth,
community involvement,
telephone demeanor,
customer mailing lists,
testimonials,
brochures,
flyers,
public relations,
referral programme,
satisfied customers and others.

As they are very cheap or even in some cases do not create any spending, these tools can be of the highest efficiency – the only thing you care about is the profit they create, you do not have to worry about their costs.

Applying this approach to our language school, it is useful to combine as many of these tools as possible, to implement them and to measure them followingly, as Mr. Levinson says: „You can actually double your profits by measuring the results of your marketing. Some weapons hit bullseyes. Others miss the target. Unless you measure, you won't know which are which.“

Another very useful thing is the webpage. Of course, there are special kinds of businesses where a website is not so useful, especially in the area of business-to-business. On the other hand customer oriented companies need to pay great attention to their internet presentation. There are various recommendations but I will mention them in the article dealing with „Online“.

Anyway, you can visit our website, where you will find more on the Advertising Effectiveness and Efficiency.
Just click here to read my previous article on this topic.

Advertising Saves Society

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:36:00 +0000

You will find many definitions and views on advertising. According to the Wikipedia advertising is paid communication through a non-personal medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled.

Creative Arts or Effectiveness?

Watching various advertising awards nowadays you might think that advertising is above all about creativity. Well, not really, I would say. In my opinion, creativity is just one of many aspects an advert should encompass. It is the main way to gain peoples’ attention, which is crucial to tell them something or to persuade them to buy what you sell. I have read a definition by Mr. Tellis I liked a lot: “Creativity is a productive variation of the common standard”. Here I would underline the word ‘productive’. Advertising is not an art, it is a means of selling goods or achieving other objectives which lead to increasing company’s profits or to increase in the value of company’s shares..
That is why any advert must be efficient prior to creative. You can develop an amazing campaign full of beautifully executed creative ideas. However, unless your sales increase (or unless you gain other goals defined at the beginning of the campaign) you cannot say it was successful. I plan to devote more space to this issue of effectiveness and efficiency in my later posts.

Anyway, another one of the most discussed elements of advertising is its morality. I would like to explain here my own view on this.

Can Advertising Be Moral?

I have always admired those remarkable creators of adverts who have been able to say something more than just ‘Buy this product, it is good for you.’ There always have been such people. Let’s say, Mr. Toscani, for example, who made those well known photos on normally unacceptable issues which are not generally spoken about publicly. He showed death, illness and sex. Uncovered, just as he saw and understood them. Of course, his posters were banned in a few countries. However, his adverts were widely discussed and this also led to the popularity of Benetton, which soon became a brand for those who are not afraid to be different, who have an original view of the world.

I like this guy as he understood that advertising above all is a way of communicating through which you can influence people, start a wide discussion or just make them think. The way he did this was a bit controversal, I agree. But on the other hand, I think he brought a valuable insight into the advertising world.

Another such example is the recent campaign for Dove. This cosmetics company aimed at one thing: to make people think and understand what beauty is. They do not offer their own explanation. They just show average girls you can meet anywhere on the street. No slim blonde models anymore. The beauty accessible in real life, the beauty of your partner, neighbour or friend. They want to prevent us women from being so keen on dieting and make-up. These are not as important as many of us believe. And a lot of men as well! They do not say anything about their products, they just show their logo (which accurately represents the cosmetics industry which has also had a certain influence on the beauty opinions recently).

You can argue that there is always that hidden focus on selling goods through advertising. It is true, as this is at the end of the day the main goal of every means of marketing communications, even of public relations and sponsorship. We do business in order to earn profits not to be charitable.

Therefore, advertising will always be here in whatever form, but it is in the hands of its creators to ensure that it is not being misused. They can influence people through their spots, posters or banners in a positive or negative way. They can change our views on beauty, love, relationships, money, food etc. I just hope they will follow the line established already by these few courrageous pioneers of ‘moral advertising’.

I think that the real advertising expert (or guru, if you want) is the one who is able to sell goods and give out a life-improving message for human society at the same time. It is also vital that he can identify the correct words that need to be spoken to the masses. I hope I will be able to do this one day as well.

Start Anew

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:44:00 +0000

Hello people,

Christmas is over, Valentine was here the last week and that is the time I am coming back to Ireland to continue writing this blog (apart from other million things!).

As I have already pointed out, my cooperation with 3R Sales and Marketing consultancy continues and from now on I am working as a Marketing Executive there. I want to share all the new things I will learn during the next several weeks/months/years (?) because I know there will be plenty of useful and inspiring information.

While I was away from Ireland, I was thinking about this blog and I decided to give it a certain structure, so that you will know what I am going to write in the next few months.

So here is my planned outline of the topics for the next period:

1. Adsport – how to...

Advertising
Direct Mail
Speaking
Publishing
Online
Refferal
Testimonials

2. 3R Success Framework in my eyes

Assessment Phase
Strategy Phase
Execution Phase
Monitoring Phase

3. Marketing as a Science – Formulas and Numbers

Effectiveness measures
Efficiency measures

These main topics I want to describe in more detail and to present my own views of the particular parts. That means that sometimes I will write about an individual topic from the outline more than once.

I want to publish a new post every Monday morning.

You know, sometimes certain problems can arise, to keep this plan precisely. However, I will do my best to hold the stated direction and to write as good quality content as I am just able to do. Furthermore, I will often add something about what we are currently working on in the company.

To make this blog more effective, I would welcome any advice or comments on my posts. In some cases, I may touch some debatable topics and mention just one opinion, so it would be great if you enriched my writings with your own views of the situation.

So that is all for now, enjoy your life and next week I am back again with something new for me and maybe also for you!

Simona

ADSPORT - the Ultimate Lead Generation Tool

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:36:00 +0000

Hello, people!

Christmas is approaching and as I also want to celebrate it in the family circle, I am coming home, back to Slovakia.

Therefore this is the last posting of my internship series. However, my acting with 3R Sales & Marketing has not finished yet and I am coming back on the St. Valentine’s day. I will continue with my blog as well, so please let me know any advice or views on it.

Today I would like to introduce a set of tactics called ADSPORT. Have you ever heard about it? Probably not, as it is a new lead generation tool invented by Peter Lawless himself (what I was really surprised when I found it out…).

You know, in order to increase the number of your leads you can use loads of various techniques – starting with TV advertising up to cold calling or newsletter campaigns… All these techniques can be digestedly set into 7 tactics:

Advertising
Direct Mail
Speaking
Publishing
Online
Referral
Testimonials

I will be soon working on a complete list of as much as possible techniques which belong to the particular categories. The list of all these will be then available at 3R Sales & Marketing website.

When you think in range of ADSPORT you will not forget anything important when planning your lead generation campaign implementation. However, this tool can be sufficient only if you do mind such issues as proper targeting and finding appropriate niche market, which is one of the most important steps you should undertake in order to bring your business up. Then you should not forget to take a look at your own offering and ask about the reason people buy it.

Having these questions answered, together with your initial complex marketing strategy, you can benefit from using ADSPORT lead generation. Wish you good luck!

So that is all for now, enjoy your life and in February I am back again with something new for me and maybe also for you!

Simona

Pay per Click Advertising Campaigns

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:15:00 +0000

Hello, people!

Last week I told you something about SEO. Now I would like to focus more on its very handy supplement and support of high traffic for your site. The tool is called Pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns.

These two most successful techniques for getting ranked high can positively influence each other and implementing them both you will get excellent traffic results.
Read these few rows and you will learn basics about these campaigns before you waste a lot of money on other campaigns that may not work. Maybe you will then think about learning more about PPC campaigns. Sometimes it is really very effective to launch your on-line advertising campaigns with Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

So how to start seeing results in terms of real leads without massive marketing spending?

Whether you intend to go with Google or you just prefer Yahoo, for both of these biggest search engines offering the opportunity of PPC campaigns you should do the following:

You have to create your ad/description first. Try to follow these advices:

1. Get inside the customer’s head. What do your customers looking for? What do they expect?

2. As you have limited text space, avoid terms like “a”, “the”, “of”, “at”…

3. Use words like “new”, “free”, “limited offer”, “discount” to attract clickers.

4. Avoid superlatives like “the best product...”, “the most wonderful …” or “the top of…” It is too basic and not pertinent.

5. Always include your exact keywords in the title of your ad. If searchers see the keywords they entered in the title of the ad, they will likely click on it.

The next step is to upload your keyword list and set up the maximum rates you are willing to pay for each click. Both Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing offer great tools for tracking your campaign results, so this is also very useful to check.

So now you know maybe something more about PPC campaigns. If you however feel not completely satisfied with this bit, I would suggest that you visit Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing.

Apart from that, we in 3R Sales & Marketing are currently working on an e-book which will embrace the issue of combinig SEO with PPC campaigns in more detail. Please, contact us, if you were interested in it.

So that is all for now, enjoy your life and next week I am back again with something new for me and maybe also for you!

Simona

How Does SEO Marketing Really Boost Sales

noreply@blogger.com (Simona Rusnakova) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 13:00:00 +0000

Hello, people!

This week was really exciting for me as I have for the first time the opportunity to participate on couple of meetings with our clients. I saw some parts of 3R Success Framework in practice and I found it very interesting.

And there is still so much to do with our website! I want to make it as good as possible so that costs me some time as well.

Dealing with this issue, I have recently heard much about SEO. This acronym means Search Engine Optimization and this is the way how to promote your site without having to pay much money. In order to get some traffic to your website you must lead those who are looking for your products directly to the pages where you offer it. This is the cheapest way of doing marketing, the most effective one.

So what is SEO about?

In general, SEO has two main areas:

Changes to a site's code (referred to as "on-page factors")

Getting links from other sites (referred to as "off-page factors").

Although SEO is a simple and relatively easy-to-use way of improving your website ranking, which helps your customers find your website easier, there is also possibility of abuse. This can at the end of the day lead to being excluded from the search engines listings. Therefore it is crucial to know the difference between techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design (so called “white hat” SEO) and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of (referred to as “black hat” SEO or spamdexing).

However, you can await great results of your web page ranking if you put these white hat SEO techniques in practice:

Site Quality and Relevant Content
Site Title
Meta Tags
Good Navigation
Right Keywords
Site Popularity
In-site Cross Linking
Web Site Design

We are preparing now an On-line Marketing Guide which will offer genuine how-to-information about combining Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing with your search engine optimization. This will be soon available probably for free at our website, so you can check it there and learn more about SEO.

By the way, our company, 3R Sales and Marketing, managed to reach the first position in Google listings within the words „sales marketing Ireland“ in front of other 34,800,000 results (Does SEO Marketing Really Boost Sales).

So that is all for now, enjoy your life and next week I am back again with something new for me and maybe also for you!

Simona