Online marketing Startegy-That WORKS

HI All,
In my previous posts I gave you an Introduction to most of the important Internet marketing tools, like search engine optimization (SEO), Affiliate Marketing, pay per click (PPC) campaigns, broader view of SEM.

In my future post I will give more focus on inside of all these internet marketing tools but before that I would like to draw your attention towards one of the mot important issue or concern faced by most of the advertisers that is low conversions.

There can be ‘n’ number of reasons of low conversion rate like irrelevant keywords targeting, bad creation of ad copies, poor message on landing page etc. etc.

But in my view all the online marketing consultants or service providing companies already have knowledge about all these issues so they work good on that but the place where they miss is something related to marketing and online activities.

Generally people take marketing and online marketing as two different domains but in fact no online marketing strategy can work until it is well merged with all the marketing and sales activities of the company or say business objectives of the company.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising, Email Marketing, and Social Media Marketing are all critical components of online marketing, but they produce tangible results only when used within a well-designed framework of sound online marketing Strategy with clear business objectives.

Do you know why a large number of PPC initiatives fail today? Because of the disconnect between Online Marketing and Marketing: the online marketing team and the marketing team works separately.

Marketing > Business Strategy > Marketing Activities

Online Marketing > Promotion > SEO > SEM

But in real sense Online Marketing as an integral part of our customer’s core marketing strategy.

Business Strategy > Marketing > Promotion > SEO > SEM

So for having a great online marketing campaign any online marketer should align all his/her marketing activities with online marketing, and then look out your self how your online marketing changes his face.

Some Tips To Optimize Landing Page

1. Have a Clear and Direct Headline
Your landing pages should designed so the headline is first thing a user sees upon landing. First impressions on landing pages are as important as the offline world. Make sure the headline is a direct and simple statement of what the user is trying to accomplish. The goal of the headline is to bridge the moment of recognition so the user understands that the rest of the page content is aligned with completing their goal.

2. Place High Value on Whitespace
Users do not read all the text on a web page. Users scan the text and take away only certain elements that they use to make a decision if the page is relevant to their goal or not. Clean use of space allows users to scan and absorb key messages.

3. Deliver Your Value Proposition with Short Direct Messaging
Your value props should all be the answers to “why?” Keep them limited to three or four bullet points and don’t mince words. This is no time to get cute either. If users can’t quickly and easily understand the benefits of you product or service they will not hesitate to click the back button.

4. Have a Persuasive Message Directly Above the Call to Action
Every great salesman has a message they use to persuade prospects on the fence. Think of your landing page as your online salesman. Make sure you have one final strong persuasive message above the call to action. I find that bandwagon messages can increase user confidence and usually perform very well. An example: “Join the thousands of people that use…”

5. Large Red Buttons Rule
Tell your brand team to go to hell and throw your styleguide out the window. Red buttons can by themselves raise your conversion rate. Green can be good as well but most times in our testing if color matters it is red that wins. Also, don’t skimp on button size. Make users notice where the button is upon landing. Location matters as well but that’s something that needs to be tested on each page.

6. Call to Action Copy Matters
While direct messages can be very effective in the body of the copy direct messages in the call to action can be a turnoff. Words like “Buy,” “Add to Cart” or “Subscribe” that message commitment and a process can lower conversion rates. Softer calls to action like "Try it Now" that message immediacy (Now), but in a risk free way (Try it) can end up improving conversion by getting more users into the funnel.

7. Trust and Security are Still Incredibly Persuasive
Brand, trust and security icons as well as testimonials deliver confidence messages that can have a tremendous impact on conversion. Despite the fact that we are about 10 years into the commercial web, users on even the largest sites and brands in the world are influenced by these messages and images. You can see in this case study the impact that the Verisign and eTrust logo had on revenue per visitor for Audible.com.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization : is a term used to describe a process to increase the value of a particular website and its respective recognition by the search engines. The end objective is to generate more qualified traffic through natural search results.Web pages especially created with SEO in mind have a strong focus on content as well as a structure that is favorable to search engine algorithms. To the human visitors, the website should look be easy to read and address their needs, ideally particular to their search inquiry. Effective SEO efforts focus on terminology being used by targetsegments to describe needs, problems or solutions. However, the website must be structured on making it convenient for search engine programs to index the site’s content. This involves changes such as optimizing a site’s presentation or structure, which are not noticeable to human visitors.

Evolution of SEO

With the evolution of Internet, the earliest search engines started to appear around early 1990s. The searchalgorithms used during these early days were primitive and thus did little or no link analysis to rate the relevancy ofthe pages retrieved. Examples of these engines were JumpStation, the World Wide Web Worm, and the Repository-Based Software Engineering (RBSE) spider. The problem with these was that they listed results in the order that theywere found and provided no discrimination based on the quality and relevancy of the results.

By the year 1996, site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites ranked higher in search engine results. This paved the platform for the advent of keyword based search engine optimization.

Initially, search engines were supplied with information about the pages by the webmasters themselves. Initial versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information, such as keyword meta-tags, which providedan indication about the contents of each page. But indexing pages based upon meta-tag data were found to be lessreliable, because sometimes meta-tags included irrelevant keywords to artificially increase page impressions for thewebsites. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent meta-data in meta-tags caused pages to show up for irrelevantsearches, and failed to appear for relevant searches. Search engines responded by developing more complex algorithms, taking into account various additional factors as well. Examples of these included the PageRank algorithm developed by Google, which ranked web pages based on the number and quality of links found2. Thesearch results now retrieved are better than the earlier search results as the new results are ranked in order of relevancy and frequency of the appearances of the searched keywords.