Impact Media's SEO Blog

With the UK officially out of recession, online retailers will be hoping for a bumper sales year. But what are the online shopping trends likely to be for the year ahead and what can the past teach us about what to expect?

The dark clouds of the credit crunch seem to have passed (or at the very least, parted), so with consumers having more money and better access to the Internet, 2010 promises to be yet another good year for etailers.

Last year alone, the online retail industry grew by 14%. So despite the apparent gloom of recession, the online market has continued to thrive. But whilst all arrows are currently pointing upwards, there are some notes of caution to temper any buoyant optimism, the most obvious of which is the VAT rise.

To help you to optimise sales and capitalise in a bullish market, we’ve put together a quick guide to the trends to look out for this year.
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10 years on from the cataclysmic collapse of the dotcom boom, we look at what it takes to make an online business successful today.

A mere decade ago the Internet was in tatters, with start-ups everywhere imploding due to the sudden crash of stock value and a sudden realisation of the worthlessness of online property. In the heady days of teenage millionaires and geeks galore owning thousands of stocks in a multitude of websites they’d had a hand in, the Internet was a very different beast. Opportunity was abound and investors were clamouring for the opportunity to throw their money at something, today things have moved on.

In the year 2000, almost every idea was a new one. People were still only just coming around to the idea of using the Internet as a marketing platform and as such getting a foothold was relatively easy. The trouble was that not every idea was a good one, but they still continued to invest right up until the moment the administrators knocked down the front door and stripped their assets. Now there is competition, and plenty of it too, so you have to be clever as a fledgling business with how you market yourself.
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It may sound unconventional, it may even sound unlikely, but article marketing really can work wonders for your SEO. Having built a ground swell of popularity over the past few years, the benefits are now finally being seen by a far wider cross-section of online marketers.

At its very core, article marketing provides two major benefits; firstly it creates wider exposure for the author and their website and secondly it provides valuable inbound links, providing SEO strength and valuable traffic.
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Despite going to great lengths to critique the Internet throughout my Friday post, aptly entitled ‘Is the Internet too noisy?’ I acknowledge my own part in the dispersal of noise, as well as the benefits it can bring. However, elsewhere the baton appears to have been taken on even further; a little too far in fact, which explains this impromptu follow up.

Management Today published an editorial piece this morning on why ‘the Internet ain’t all that great’. The more than slightly wry comparison of the Internet and the traditional media that it is slowly replacing, takes a far more acerbic and negative approach to the online world.  It should be said that this isn’t a lone voice, it’s an argument that crops up time and time again; however, it’s one that ought to be tackled.

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In the never ending quest to gain more visitors to your website, a successful Internet marketing campaign is what you really need to attract more traffic.

It’s worth putting a lot of time and effort into creating a website that is user friendly and easy to find, in this day and age where people generally go to the internet as the first port of call if they are searching for a service/product or information, having a website that will keep the visitor engaged and on your site for longer is vital.

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Businesses across the world are still feeling the effects of the recession pulling at their purse strings, which means turning to new ways to market their products.

Jumping on the social media band wagon is high street retailer, GAP. They have chosen to avoid traditional television advertising for its new line and are marketing their ‘Born to Fit’ range on the global networking site, Facebook.

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One of the most effective ways to ensure that a company is being successful in its online marketing efforts is to get traffic from the right audience, which means knowing who the target audience is in the first place. The target audiences are those people who will visit the company website/blog for advice and help with problems, this is the online community.

There are many tools available to help a business find their online communities here are some of them;

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The world of football has learnt two important lessons about the Internet in as many days. After yesterday’s announcement that Tranmere Rovers were available to buy on eBay, Tottenham Hotspur striker Darren Bent made the kind of Twitter faux pas that would shame Habitat.

First up Tranmere Rovers though. The small Wirral based club with a big reputation for giant killing may be League 1 also-rans, but they came into focus when their owner reacted furiously to their attempted sale on eBay. At $10m for an opening bid you wouldn’t have thought it would be much of an issue, but Chairman Peter Johnson thinks differently suggesting it’s “not a second hand bike we’re selling.”

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In times of an economic slowdown we all have to find ways to economise. In business, advertising and marketing budgets are often one of the first things to be reduced; but is this a false economy?

In order to continue generating business we all need to constantly reach out to our target audience. Therefore, simply streamlining your advertising funds can ultimately restrict who uses, or is at least aware of, the products or services your company offers. For small businesses, finding a balance between advertising costs and potential customer income can be particularly difficult. Do you stick with convention and target an expensive magazine, newspaper, radio or even television campaign without visible results? Or are there alternatives that can get the same potential exposure, but without the upfront costs?

Visible Online Marketing Results

The Internet has revolutionised many areas of modern communication; however, rarely is this more evident than in marketing. With a strong online presence, any company, in any part of the world can achieve fantastic results, drawing on a diverse global audience. The traditional face of advertising has been changed forever, thanks primarily to search engine driven pay per click (PPC) platforms such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Without having to risk any capital initially, your website can target keywords and phrases in adverts that you’ll only pay for when someone clicks on them. Therefore your site will suddenly gain universal exposure at a minimal cost, helping to drive in extra traffic and hopefully keep business flowing. With PPC advertising you set the parameters too. So you can create a strict daily budget and ensure that advertising costs never exceed your limitations.

Pay per click services can play an important role for small businesses on many levels. Not only are they a cost-effective way to advertise, but they’re also easy to monitor too. Google AdWords, as well as its MSN and Yahoo alternatives, offer tracking devices that clearly indicate how successful your PPC campaigns are performing. For example, if swathes of people are clicking on one advert but are not being converted into direct sales, then you can adjust the keywords or landing page to better suit customer requirements, or simply cancel that advert altogether.

Small Business Pay Per Click Services

It’s a very fluid process and can be adjusted as and when required without a long-term tie-in. The ability to change budgets, replace and edit key campaigns whilst also being able to chart successes, makes this one of the most versatile options available to businesses of all sizes; hence why PPC marketing is rapidly becoming a leading force in modern advertising strategies.

As with most aspects of business, proper management of PPC accounts is integral to their ultimate success. Researching your keywords and ensuring that you are targeting the best possible searches can ultimately determine whether a campaign is a glorious triumph or dismal failure. This can be time-consuming and confusing, particularly if you’re not altogether savvy with online marketing techniques.

At Impact Media we offer affordable pay per click management services to suit budgets and businesses of all sizes. So if you’re on the lookout for someone to handle your PPC campaign, get a no-strings quote from us and start turning hits into sales.

No Marketing Manager can expect their company to survive these days without a comprehensive knowledge of Online Marketing. Whilst marketing on the Internet involves very similar principles, the means and methods are different and so we’ve produced this simple guide to introduce you to the basics of online marketing:

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a way of promoting your business online by optimizing your website and its content for the Search Engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. The companies that rank highest for certain search terms or ‘keywords’ get the greatest number of visitors. Clearly, there is immense competition for certain keywords but legitimate SEO techniques can help you outreach your competitors. Part of the SEO process is developing a great number of inbound links, these are like tiny testimonials from other relevant websites and the Search Engines see this as a sign of your credibility and boost your rankings.

Paid Search (PPC)

Using Pay Per Click (PPC) ads, you can immediately begin advertising your products. But the important benefit of online advertising is that you are only marketing your goods or services to people that are looking for them! This vastly cuts your advertising budget immediately. What’s more, the response time from ad to sale is dramatically shortened, allowing you to see faster results.

Article Marketing/Press Releases

Article Marketing is a very cost effective way of getting people to visit your website. It means placing high quality, relevant, well written articles on your website or submitting them to the best article sites. Articles are keyword rich, which means they attract people searching for your product/services. Articles serve two further purposes. First, they build your credibility online by demonstrating your expertise. Second, they provide lots of the inbound links we wrote about above.

Press Releases are similar, they are keyword rich, they provide inbound links but they also raise online profile. Just like offline PRs, don’t release unless you think it’s newsworthy.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is often wrongly called ’spam’. A well-written and thoughtful email marketing campaign should be aimed only at people that want to receive your messages. Like articles, fill them with informative and relevant content and keep the sales pitch gentle. Build credibility and rapport by offering something of value. Sending thousands of these messages costs nothing, which means that you can afford to pay for a good copywriter to create your emails for you.

Social Media

It’s not a phase or a fad; Social Media Optimisation is the latest place to begin developing your online marketing. Facebook and BEBO allow ads, but better than this, you can give a face to your brand. Loyal customers can interact with you and offer direct feedback without the need for focus groups.

Blogging is a less formal way of article marketing and a great way to build a following. YouTube is a very popular way for people to communicate to thousands of people with a simple video. Releasing your ads on YouTube can cause them to spread across the world, so whilst you still pay production costs, your distribution costs rapidly shrink. Video Marketing is one of the latest and fastest growing sectors of the online marketing industry.

Blended Approach

As with any good marketing campaign, your approach must be a blend of off and online marketing strategies. Combining all of these different parts of the online marketing picture will allow you to develop a dominant position in this new marketplace.

If you’re a Finance Director, you probably don’t think you have much to do with the online marketing of your company. However, online marketing is the answer to many Finance Director’s prayers during this time of economic trouble. Online marketing is a straightforward and effective way to immediately begin reducing costs and dramatically increasing profits.

Advertising
How much does it cost to put a 30 second advert on commercial television? In the UK, the average cost is £140,000. That’s for one advert that airs once. For that cost, you get blanket coverage of a particular broadcast region. But how many of those people seeing the ad would actually want to buy your product? And what if the people who would respond positively to that ad were at work or making a cup of tea during your commercial? With Online marketing, you can target your market directly.

Pay per Click
Using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, you pay only for those potential customers that actually click on your adverts. It’s competitive, so you bid to compete with other companies for the keywords in your ad. But with £140,000 and a professionally managed PPC campaign you could receive many more leads or sales due to the highly effective targeting of PPC. What’s more, the ads appear any time of the day or night and for whatever period you set. And there’s a certain commitment involved in clicking an ad that isn’t achieved through simply viewing a television commercial.

In the next two years, Internet advertising will take over from all other forms of traditional marketing. Why pay more and receive less?

SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is another way to ensure that people looking for your product find it and spend their money with you and not the competition. The Internet is a competitive marketplace and with billions of pounds of consumer’s money at stake each year, getting a high placement on Google really matters. SEO is a specialist craft and requires an expert but again the cost is very little compared to other forms of traditional marketing.

People go to the Internet to find the things they want to buy. When your website comes up top on Google, you get most of the attention and most of the business. This is a very cheap alternative to traditional advertising and could save you tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pounds.

Website
Your website is the new place to do business. The website is now your marketing pitch, your point of sale and your customer service centre. It’s your public face and it comes at the fraction of the cost of maintaining buildings, paying the wages and travel costs of a sales force, investing in tradeshows, printing expensive glossy brochures, engaging in costly direct marketing or cold calling campaigns. Your website is the greatest tool in reducing your costs and increasing your business.

Britain’s recession is causing many Finance Directors to force more and more cut backs. Businesses need to tighten their belts, even those that are currently in a growth period. As the Head of Finance, you have two choices, continue with these devastating cut backs, redundancies and wage freezes or make real savings by transforming your costly offline marketing into a cheaper, streamlined and dynamic revenue source.

One of the benefits of online marketing when compared to offline alternatives is the huge reduction in costs. There are many financial benefits to Internet marketing, here are just a few explained:

Cheap but Effective
Kicking off, one of the major benefits of marketing online is that it is very cost effective. In fact it’s not only much cheaper than traditional advertising, but it’s also many times more efficient because it only targets the people that you want to target, rather than blanketing whole groups of people by location or broadcasting region.

With online marketing, you only pay for what you use. Take a look at Pay Per Click or PPC, you only pay for when interested people from your target market click on your ads, that saves money, time, and only attracts the already interested to your website. With lower costs and more precise targeting, online marketing seems like a no-brainer!

Cutting Expenditure
One of the top financial benefits of online marketing is that you can reduce your annual expenditure by making most of the process from advertising through to purchase automated. You will need someone to direct your online marketing, but you can reduce your sales and marketing salary costs.

If most of your sales process now takes place online, you can move to smaller premises, because you won’t need the physical space and that means a reduction in rent, utilities and insurance. What’s more if you use a catalogue for your products, you can avoid costly printing and distribution costs.

Global Marketing Power
Online marketing means that you can sell to anyone at any time. You don’t need a physical store because you have an online store that is open 24/7. This means you can sell your products to anyone, anywhere around the clock. You’re no longer restricted by time and location considerations. Your revenue potential just increased while your costs have diminished!

Staying Power
When you use article marketing as a tool, you may pay once for someone to write that article, but it will stay on the Internet for many years to come. Where else can you place a marketing proposition and have it stay around pointing at your products and services indefinitely for no added cost?

Emails Cost Nothing
Compared to direct marketing or telemarketing, email marketing costs relatively nothing, yet you get to deliver your proposition directly to your target market. You can send thousands of targeted messages directly into the homes and offices of your potential or existing customers with immediate responses.

Measure your Return on Investment
Unlike traditional methods of advertising, you can immediately measure you ROI with online marketing. This is particularly the case with PPC advertising where analytical tools help you to track sales from specific ads through to conversion. This helps you to reduce costs even further by discontinuing ads that aren’t working. With a television advert or billboard, it would be impossible to test the success as accurately.

Online marketing has revolutionised marketing, advertising and sales, it offers great financial benefits and if you’re not using it to its full potential then you’re wasting a great opportunity!

Google have just announced that their Google Ad Planner is now available to users within the UK.

This is ideal for anyone wishing to expand their online marketing activities and will be a useful addition for media planners and buyers.

Like most of the Google family of free tools, it is still marked as a Beta but if you have a Google account, you can now log in and use it to identify sites that your target audience may visit and fit with your overall marketing plan.

It will show websites that accept advertising by default but you can refine this further by just selecting sites that are in the Google Content Network (Adsense). With this option, media planners can refine their criteria further by selecting different ad formats, e.g. text, image or video and by ad size.

Google Ad Planner doesn’t show every site but will certainly be a useful asset for anyone involved in advertising planning and online marketing.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave (on holiday, of course), you’ll be well aware of the downturn in the global economy and the fact that even our politicians are now confirming the UK is entering a period of recession.

Is this the end of online shopping as we know it? Not at all. Web based businesses should see this as an opportunity to forge ahead and gain a competitive advantage. If consumers are looking to cut back, where will they start searching for bargains? Of course, it’s not always about being cheapest but whatever online business you operate, you should be looking to position your site infront of your prospects.

Perhaps now would be a good time to review your site (design, copy) and your online marketing activities (SEO, PPC)? You may need to get creative with your offers and offer more incentives? One thing is certain. Now is not the time to be cutting back on your online marketing budget!