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- Big Bold Business Book Effort LaunchesI’ve been part of the Big Bold Business marketing team for almost two years now and finally getting to see the collaborative literary effort from over 70 New Jersey women business owners come to fruition is really quite an accomplishment. So a well-deserved kudos to publisher Donna Thompson of Woodpecker Press and editor Joyce Restaino […]
- Internet Marketing: What Works and What Doesn’t?At Samson Media we practice what we preach. We employ the same mix of email marketing, social media, search engine optimization, blogging, YouTube videos and other techniques to our own Internet marketing efforts as we offer to our clients. It’s our way of trying things out to see what works and what doesn’t as a […]
- The Best Event Calendar For WordPressThe All-in-one Event Calendar is a very robust and versatile plugin for WordPress. This free plugin, made by The Seed Network, a group of Canadian developers, combines a clean visual design with a powerful set of features that have been designed with business, organizations and communities in mind. All In One allows you to create […]
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To promote all the beautiful wall coverings, fabrics, awnngs and, of course, window treatments, SamsonMedia created this lively promotional video to highlight the company’s wares:
As part of a program titled Marketing Techniques and Social Networking: How to Connect with Your Customers, sponsored by the Passaic County Department of Economic Development, Gene R. Sower, President of Samson Media will present “How to Harness Social Media for Your Business and Not Lose Your Mind in the Process!”
Sower’s presentation will be part of a larger program featuring a key note speech by Sally Glick, Principal of the firm and chief growth strategist for Sobel & company.
The free program will be held February 29th, 2012 from 8:30am to 11:30am at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ.
Other presenters will include Paul Gourhan, Creative Director of PMW.net who will discuss the importance of branding your company, and Ron Jones, of William Paterson University, who will discuss reaching your customers via advanced selling techniques.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER & FOR DIRECTIONS
(registration requests should be sent via email to: ecodev@passaiccountynj.org)
The free program is partly funded by the US Small Business Administration and will be hosted by the Passaic County Board of Chosen Freeholders, the Passaic County Department of Economic Development, Downtown New Jersey and several chambers of commerce, among others.
With over 60 minutes of video uploaded to YouTube every second, it’s not a secret anymore: videos are an important aspect of marketing strategies. Blogs, with their short, to-the-point structure, are perfect for embedding videos and audio messages. When you’re using video and audio for marketing, blog improvement, or website navigation, you can enhance content and grow your following.
- Multimedia is shareable. What makes people share content? It’s interesting. What can add interest? Topping the list are infographics, videos, and audio. These kinds of multimedia make plain text more interesting, thus more shareable.
- Multimedia gives readers options. Not everyone wants to read, not everyone wants to watch, and not everyone wants to listen. By mixing in multimedia, you give readers the option of choosing their own way.
- An audio blog is great for people on the go. A podcast, also known as an audio blog, is an effective way to communicate content. By adding a podcast to an already stellar, keyword-friendly blog, you’re giving yourself the opportunity to show and tell.
- Videos are highly engaging. If YouTube’s popularity teaches you one thing, it should be that people love to watch videos. Funny videos, educational videos, cute animal videos…anything. Online, video is the medium that bridges visual content and the real world. Be authentic and be yourself, and you’ll be making great videos in no time.
- Sound Adds Clarity. When you’re reading, it’s easy to skim. For many online marketers, combating the “skimmer” is a huge problem. How can you ensure you’re getting the point across as intended if people are just jumping your text? While readers can skip words, listeners can’t turn their ears off for a few seconds and skip sound. Whenever you want to add a little emphasis and clarity to your message, let sound guide you.
- Voice is appealing. Words can only take you so far. The human voice, whether recorded by yourself or a professional voiceover talent, is immensely appealing. Add voice, and your blog is instantly more personal and personable. Voice reaches people on a level that writing does not.
- Videos and audio help convey your brand and personality. Just like voice conveys personality more easily than text, audio and video are an easy way to carry your brand’s unique personality through your content.
- It’s good for SEO. A video or podcast alone does not make a good blog post. The key is adding a keyword-rich description or transcript that will give you a good SEO boost. Sound and video files, when embedded on your website, will encourage visitors to spend more time on that particular page.
Website Audio, the greater category to which audio for blogs belongs, can increase website stickiness, improve content retention, and has even been shown to improve sales. When you start using audio on your website, you can record the content yourself, but for clarity and to ensure the appropriate tone, you can consider enlisting the help of a professional audio marketing company.
The primary purpose of a landing page is to to attract warm leads into your sales funnel for a particular product or service. It’s not typically used to make the final sale although, depending on the product or service, it could be. It’s really more of a lead qualifier since usually anyone who found your landing page was conducting a search in the first place that led them to your offer. How you get those warm leads and potential prospects to your landing page and how much it costs to do so in the first place is the crux of the whole thing, of course.
But before we get into how to generate traffic to your offer you should make sure that your landing page has a very clean and simple design with a singular message and call to action. You want to give your landing page visitors only two choices: fill out the form or leave. Maybe, a distant third choice would be a link to additional information about the company, etc. But you basically want to make the landing page airtight, without any leaks or holes.
NECESSARY COMPONENTS
Any successful landing page should have the following components :
- Typical landing page components
DRIVING TRAFFIC
The only way to drive measurable traffic to your landing page is via a pay per click (PPC) campaign where you bid on relevant keyword terms in an effort to come up in the search results. Most PPC campaigns drive leads to a specially-created landing page instead of the main company website. The reason is two-fold: you can measure your conversions down to the exact cost per lead and even cost per sale. And by creating a dedicated landing page with a singular message and a specific call to action you get the visitor to focus on your offer without other distractions on the page.
CONVERSIONS & MEASURING EFFECTIVENESS
Granted, you can conduct PPC campaigns on other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing, and in some cases the PPC costs are actually lower, but for huge traffic and great tools for measuring the effectiveness of your campaign, Google and Google Analytics can’t be beat.
Using Google Analytics, you will paste tracking and conversion codes on the landing page itself and the more important thank you page.
The only way for the conversion code on the thank you page to be triggered and counted as a “conversion” is if someone reaches that page after they fill out the data capture form. Remember, the only way to reach that thank you page is via a successful email inbox confirmation.
So if it cost you $1 per click for a particular keyword phrase and 100 people click on your link after conducting a search and arrive at your landing page, if 20 of them fill out the form, confirm their requests by clicking a confirmation link in their email inboxes and arrive at the thank you page with the confirmation code, that would be a 20% conversion rate. The cost for each lead would be figured by taking the $100 in clicks and divide by 20 conversions for a total cost of $5 per lead. Tracking how many leads you can close and turn into sales is the ultimate goal, so if 2 out of the 20 leads converted to a sale it would have cost you $50 per sale. So depending on how much your product or service costs you would need to evaluate whether the campaign is successful enough to continue.
WHO SHOULD USE LANDING PAGES
As you can see from the above example, PPC advertising can get expensive, not to mention the costs of creating the landing page itself, which can use video, audio or just persuasive sales copy. So because your clicks can add up fast, we would not recommend using a landing page driven by PPC for a $10 item. Or even a $50 item. Again, part of the science of successful landing page campaigns is to conduct your homework in advance so you know what your most-effective keywords are and how much they cost. Estimating a less than 1% click-through rate (click here for PPC campaign averages) but a healthy conversion rate of just under 7%, spending $50 to sell a $1,000 item is something that most people would do all day long.
Bottom line: The beauty of landing pages is that they can be tested and tweaked and constantly adjusted. Creating A/B split tests is another way to hone their effectiveness. Following the PPC budgets is completely transparent and you’ll only pay when someone looks for, finds and clicks on your ad so you know it’s a warm lead. And if the conversion costs make sense relative to the price of your product, like it says on the back of your shampoo bottle — rinse and repeat!
Gene R. Sower is the president of SamsonMedia.net, a New Jersey-based professional internet marketing company based in Montclair.