Have a Purpose

Whether it is selling more products or encouraging visitors to fill out your contact form, defining a purpose for your online ad campaign is arguably the most crucial step in starting your campaign off on the right foot. If you don’t have a specific goal in mind, you’re throwing your money away.

Relevancy is the Name of the Game

Just like with any advertising, determining the demographic is a key part of the success of your campaign. Choose a website who’s users match your demographic or, if you use a service like Google Adwords, select keywords that are relevant to your campaign and Google will handle the rest.

Have a Clear Message

Setting a clear message in your ad encourages users to click on your ad. Let them know why they should click on your ad and what’s in it for them if they do.

Make Users Want to Click

If you are creating a banner ad campaign, using graphics and photos that help to support the overall message of the ad will not only put a more professional touch on your ad, but gives the user more confidence in your business. Using keywords relevant to the website / web page you are advertising on gives the user a feeling of relevance to what you’re offering.

A Little Motion is Great, A Lot is Not Better

It is always a good idea to include some motion in your banner ad, but be careful, having too much motion in an ad can actually be seen as annoying and decrease the effectiveness of your ad.

Avoid Auto-Playing Sound

Sound that starts as soon as the ad loads is the quickest way to kill your ad. Don’t get me wrong, sound can be a great way to help get your message across; but let the user decide if they want to hear the sound or not. Adding a button to enable or disable sound increases the interaction with your ad while letting the user make the decision to hear your message or not.

Your Landing Page is More Important Than Your Ad

The overall idea behind your banner ad is to get the user to visit your website, but just dropping your potential customer off at the front door (your home page) and making them find the relevant information themselves is a bad idea. Link your ad to a page that is specifically designed to extend the message that your ad is providing.

Test Everything

And I mean everything! Try two different ads that convey the same message. Try one ad with a photo of a girl and one with a photo of a guy. Try two different landing pages. The great thing about online advertising is all of these differences are trackable (more on this in a moment).

Monitor Your Results

The days of judging an ad’s effectiveness by how many clicks it got are long gone. The more important measure is how many of those clicks actually turned into customers. Did they buy something? Did they fill out your contact form? Did they sign up for your newsletter? Remember your ad campaign’s purpose from above. Clicks don’t mean squat if you can’t either count the dollars or continue the conversation with your new potential customer. Using a stat tracking service like Google Analytics will help you realize how well (or poor) your campaign is doing so you can make adjustments.

Conclusion

Advertising online is an extremely effective and can be relatively inexpensive if done properly. As always, feel free to take advantage of my Free Website Consulting Offer and I’d be glad to look over your current campaign or give some insight on a campaign your considering.

The numbers don’t lie!
Did you know over one third of customers looking to purchase a product or service start look online first? 60% of those customers buy from the website they visit, whether online or in-store. That’s huge! That means one third of new business starts online….and you’re website hasn’t been updated since 2005?

Let’s talk about this!
Take advantage of my free consulting offer and I’ll show you how you can watch those website visitors come walking through your front door.

No, this is not a sales tactic. I just want to share my knowledge with those that need it. What do you do when your car starts making a funny noise? You ask your friend who’s mechanically inclined for his opinion right? Then based on his opinion, you make a decision to either take it to a mechanic or attempt to fix it yourself. I’m your mechanically inclined friend! Well, more like internetly inclined friend.

Let’s talk! Use the contact form, leave a comment, call me or whatever! Just get a hold of me (Jeff Purcell) and be sure to mention this blog post and we’ll set up a time for you to ask me questions!

Here’s the bullet points from the article:

• To Build Trust
• To Become Familiar
• To Get Repeat Business
• To Make More Sales
• To Build Your Authority
• To Save Money
• To Create an Opt-In Market
• To Save Time
• To Expand Your Reach
• To Create Multiple Buying Opportunities

A well planned out email marketing campaign has an average ROI of $45 for every $1 spent! That’s why I get so excited!

If you haven’t done so yet, be sure to sign up for our email newsletter (we promise not to spam you) or leave a comment below and let’s discuss this!

First Things First
We need to set up a twitter account. You can do that here. You’ll need to pick a username. This will be the name that all your new potential customers will see and associate with your company, so pick something close to your company’s name. For example, my Twitter username is inlandsolutions.

On the next page, Twitter is going to give you suggestions on people you might enjoy following based on a list of categories. We’re going to skip this step for now as there are much better ways to find interesting people to follow and we’ll touch on those later.

Step two gives you a chance to import your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail. I suggest doing this. The list of people in your address book is a great place to gain loyal followers as you already have had contact with these people and therefore they are less likely to block you. Note: Importing your contacts from your email provider does not send them a message or alert them in anyway, unless you want them to be notified.

The final step gives you a chance to search for people already using Twitter. Feel free to do this if you like. The idea behind Twitter is communication, so the more people you have to communicate with, the better.

So now your account is setup. You’ll need to activate your account via the email you used to register, but that can be done at a later time. Now we need to get the word out that your company is now on Twitter. The first and most important thing to do is have a Twitter widget placed on your companies website. Be sure to check out Twitter’s widget page for a few different widget types. We’re interested in the “Profile widget”.

Now that your website has the profile widget installed and running, we need to spread the word through more traditional means. That means, email signatures, business cards, print advertisements, television, radio. Whatever your traditional means of advertising, be sure to include the address of your Twitter account. Note: Your Twitter address is Twitter.com/username. For example, my username is inlandsolutions, so my Twitter address is http://twitter.com/inlandsolutions.

I know, this seems like a lot of stuff to do before we even get to start using the service. Just trust me, we’re almost there. But before we dive in and start telling people all about your next big thing we need to set a few ground rules.

The Trick
There really isn’t a trick to posting on twitter, but if there was one, it would be to not sound like a radio advertisement. Don’t use twitter to push advertisements to anyone who will listen. That’s counter productive. No one will want to listen. Instead, use the service to let your customers know “What’s going on in your world”, or better yet “What has your attention right now”.

Tips on What to Tweet

• Don’t tweet about your product or business more than 50% of the time. No one likes a spammer.
• Do post about the people inside your business. This makes the customer become just that much more a part of what’s going on.
• Do tweet about other people’s stuff. The “retweet” function is perfect for this. Anything that makes you look less like a business and more like a handful of people that work together, the better.
• Don’t be afraid to reply to people. That’s the whole point of twitter, conversation. The quicker you figure out that Twitter is a way to connect with people, the more success you will have using it.
• Do keep your tweets short. You only get 147 characters!

Final Thoughts
A great way to kick off your time on twitter is to start using search.twitter.com. Search on a few terms that deal with your industry and see what people are saying about it. Also, search on your own business name. This is a great chance to not only protect your brand, but connect with customers already talking about you and your services.

Inland Solutions Support Center

Here’s a screenshot of their new website: