Performance Marketing - When the price of doing business is rising for everything from coffee for the break room to gas for the company vehicles, it affects the bottom line. There are only three things to do – raise your prices, cut back on spending or increase sales. We all know that prices are increasing and if you’re a business owner that has had to raise your prices; we know that you’ve done so only as a last resort. The real challenge is to be able to overcome this slow economy. We have a few suggestions.

Cutting back on spending means that you have to pick and choose expenses that are absolutely necessary for keeping your business going, and more importantly, moving forward, even in this economic climate. Marketing budgets are usually the first to get cut, even though it seems counter productive to cut funding to the means of getting new customers. Because of this, business owners and managers need to be choosy about where every marketing dollar goes. What will bring in the best return on investment?

The internet is getting the bulk of the scarce advertising dollar, but even there, some people are making the wrong choices, or the right choices but the wrong application of internet tools. If you are spending money on pay-per-click advertising and not tracking its true performance, you could be wasting your money. If you have a beautiful website that really shows off your business but it cannot be found on the web in a search, you could be wasting your money.

Here’s the goal with internet advertising: measurable return on investment. It takes planning to design an effective online marketing campaign. The proper priority of internet marketing is:

1. Create a website that is optimized for search engine performance with tracking
2. Include customer capture options
3. coordinate traditional marketing efforts to drive traffic to your site to track their performance

When you create a website that can be found on search engines, you have the ability to reach customers when they are looking for you. You potential customers are looking for the products and services that you offer on the internet and you are literally loosing business by not appearing to them when they need you. Isn’t it every business owner’s wish that when a new potential customer decides to look for your product or service, your name or storefront just appears right in front of them? This is exactly what can happen with a website that has great search placement. The customer asks and you appear. Don’t you want a piece of that magic?

Customer capture is critical. Most businesses on the internet are not selling on the internet. Most businesses have an informational site that gives people in depths look at their products or services. What is missing from most informational websites is active customer capture options. Since you cannot legally track the email address of website visitors, in order to turn that visitor into a sale, you have to get their information. There are many creative and unique options for capturing a visitor’s information off of your website that translates into a qualified lead for your sales people. Think of it this way, if you’ve enticed someone to give you their information to be contacted about your product or service, they’ve given you permission to be sold to! Permission! What mailing list company sells you that kind of lead?

Tracking the performance of your marketing efforts is priceless. Having an accurate picture of what works and what doesn’t can help you make the most out of your advertising efforts. Web traffic analysis is way more than having one of those annoying visitor counters on the bottom of your home page. Actually, here’s a little secret about those trackers. They’re usually free to anyone who wants to use them on their site because they include a link back to the programmer who created it. What good is that? The more links you have back to your website, the more importance search engines place on your website. So if a million websites use your free tracker, that’s a million more links back to your site than your competition, but it does nothing for the website it is placed on. The number of visitors to your site tells you nothing.

Proper tracking can tell you detailed information like the keywords visitors typed in a search to find you, how long visitors stayed on your site, whether they found you by typing in your web address or in a search, how many hits you’re getting each day, how many of those hits are unique (first time) visitors and how many are return visitors and much, much more. A magazine can’t give you that kind of information!

Creating effective online marketing gives you a chance to increase your business, decrease your advertising costs, and ride out this economy smelling like a rose. To learn more, call Suite 171 at 701-478-5955. We want to meet with you or talk with you over the phone to help you discover ways to increase your business, even in this economy.