Archive for July, 2010

Developing a great website internet marketing plan can help you with growing your business online.   But to be effective, it is important to know the options and to know the order to follow to create a successful marketing plan.  Below are general parts to consider in creating your marketing plan.

1.  Gather your ideas:

• Understand your keywords
• Research your competitors
• Developing your marketing message
• Understanding your market
• What are your marketing challenges

2.  State your objectives

Your objectives declare what your end goals will be.  And your strategies and tactics will be based on these objectives.  Some ideas for objectives might include:

• Increase brand awareness
• Be above a certain competitor in the search engines
• Overcome marketing challenges
• Enhance client service in a particular way
• Increase traffic to your website by a certain percent
• Grow sales through website by a certain percent

3. Marketing Strategies
The Marketing Strategies set the general approaches that will be taken in order to achieve your objectives.  If you are new to the internet, you will focus on Business Launch strategies.  If you are already on the internet, you will focus on Business Expansion internet strategies.  Example strategies could include:

• Increase website visibility through website promotion
• Position myself as an authority in my field
• Develop relationships throughout the internet
• Attract more customers through special offers

4. Marketing Tactics
Marketing Tactics are the way you will implement your strategies.  These are the action steps of your marketing plan to be implemented.

• Advertise my website with Google Adwords
• Increase Search Engine Placement by optimizing my website for specific keywords
• Develop a Facebook site and build followers
• Create articles or a newsletter
• Offer customers a discount for ordering through your website

Need help creating a website marketing plan?  Global Business Builders, located in the Houston Metro area, offers expert service in all phases of your marketing plans.

Social Media Marketing on Facebook is about online engagement, and developing loyalty. It is a tool to help you leverage your networking skills. Success on Facebook involves some of the age old relationship building techniques, as well as some new and creative approaches using this new social media platform.  Here are 6 strategies for succeeding with Facebook marketing.

1. Facebook marketing requires communicating, not hard sell advertising.  Make yourself an authority to your followers, and they will stay with you and recommend you to others.
2. Your office staff can help market your business from their desks.  Your office staff members can use your Facebook business page to stay in touch and to promote your business to others. Train the office staff to provide great original content, or to republish useful content that is relevant to your target audience.
3. Ask your personal Facebook friends to fan/like your business page.  The warmer the connection to your business, the better the chance for success.
4. Advertise on Facebook.  Advertising on Facebook can be a great boost to your marketing effort.  You can select your ad to show up for particular locations, age groups, education levels, and even hobbies or interests.  You can link the ad to go out to your website, or to go right to your Facebook business page.  Also, you can set your daily budget and control how much you want to spend in a day for advertising.
5. Create an event.  Conduct a webinar, host a business network meeting in your office, create a contest, survey, quiz or other event for your target audience.  These strategies can put you in the middle of activities with people who need your product or service.
6. Create a custom business page which encourages people to take action.  Action to call you, to get a quote, to download your company brochure, or other specific actions.

Just as in relationship building and in-person marketing, Facebook marketing is not a once and done effort.  A Facebook business page is a lasting online asset, and the ongoing engagement you create is what will bring success to your business.

What are the reasons PPC advertising is so popular?  Here are just 5 reasons:

1. Low Startup Costs.  Compared with other forms of advertising, PPC adverting can be done for a fraction of the costs.
2. Fast results.  Ad campaigns on Google are pre-approved and can start appearing almost from the moment they are launched.
3. Targeting.  Ability to advertise to a specific geography, local or global.  Also, the ability to appear for specific search keywords, choose as many or as few as you like.
4. Minimal risks.  Set your daily budget as large or small as you want to set.  Ads stop appearing once the budget limit has been reached.
5. Trackable.  Able to track results and determine which keywords are getting clicks, and which are getting the actions you wish (sign ups, purchases, leads, etc).  Based on the results that are seen, adjustments can be made to fine tune a campaign’s performance.

These are just a few reasons why Pay Per Click advertising is so popular. Whether you are trying to generate sales, leads, traffic or branding; pay per click advertising is definitely a form of advertising that you may want to consider.  For expert help setting up and managing your Houston, National or International Adwords Pay Pay Per Click campaigns, we have the expertise to help you build your business at Global Business Builders.

Global Business Builders

Here are some basics and specifics for helping Google Adwords Pay Per Click campaigns:

1. Give the adgroup a name relevant to the keywords in that adgroup.
2. Create targeted adgroups that have tightly themed keywords. Around 5 to 40 keywords that are tightly themed.
3. Use keyword or keyword phrase in the Headline,  either by specifically coding it there or by using Dynamic Keyword Insertion.  This will cause the Headline to be Bolded for the keyword used in the search.  Do the same in the ad copy where possible.
4. Split Test ads.  Use at least 2 ad creatives for each adgroup, and after some time, use Splittester.com to see which ad has a statistically significant lead over the other.  Then, pause the ad which is not performing, and write a new one to test against the better ad.
5. Test with different matching options.  Broad, Phrase and Exact.  After a good test period, choose the keyword with the best click through rate (CTR) and lower CPC.
6. Send ads to a landing page “optimized” for the ad keywords.  For highest quality score, it is critical that the keywords of the ads and the keywords of the landing page have agreement.  Be sure and add the Quality Score column in the Adwords interface, it is not part of the keyword columns by default.  Quality score starts at 7/10 and goes up or down with the ad’s history.
7. Mulit variant landing page testing.  This is a pretty advanced effort, but changing different elements on a landing page can have a significant impact on conversions. Learn more here:  Google discusses Quality Score
8. After some testing,  update the meta tags on each landing page with the best performing keywords.  Also, use the best performing and highest converting keywords in the Title tags of the landing pages.  And last, use the exact ad text from the best performing creative in the meta description tag.
9. Google strongly favors sites that seem legitimate and credible.  To add credibility to your site, these types of pages will help: About Us page, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Contact Us.  Google ads are pre-approved and then manually reviewed later.  If your site looks like a doorway site, an affiliate site, or a spam site, Google will “slap” the quality score of the site and bid prices can go up 5 to 10 times or more.  For example, from $1.00 to $5.00 keyword bid price.
10. Negative match.  The more impressions your ad gets without a click means the lower the CTR, eventually creating a lower Quality Score and then a higher CPC.  Use negative keywords, typically at the campaign level, to get a razor focus for when your ads appear.
11. Install Conversion Tracking code to see which keywords are getting results.

I hope this has helped those running PPC campaigns or anyone looking to improve their ROI by increasing their Quality Score. If you would like more information or would like our Houston-based Google Adwords Management service, please get in touch.

Although internet trends are hard to keep up with, it would be impossible to miss the Facebook trend sweeping the internet.  When originally launched in early 2004, it was only available to college students.  First Harvard, then Yale, etc..

When Facebook was opened to the general public, over 100 Million users joined within the first 9 months.  Today, there are over 300 Million users worldwide.

So, aside from the history lesson, what makes Facebook such an amazing platform?  It provides customization and network capability that is outstanding to use in business marketing.  The most used term nowadays is “Social Media Marketing.”

How?  Not everyone in an office likes to go out in the streets and network, or hit the phones and cold call.  But, most everyone likes to chat and interact in the comfort of their business or personal lives.

What are the steps?  At a high level, you start with these activities:

1. Create a Facebook Business page
2. Create a Custom Facebook Sales page
3. Request your contacts to “Like” or “Fan” your business site
4. Set a specific URL on Facebook, such as:  www.facebook.com/GBizBuilders
5. Begin growing your following, and start getting connected…and staying connected

Remember, that in getting people to connected, it’s important to be seen as someone that can be liked, trusted, and knowledgeable.  Information that shows you as an authority builds you as the “go to” person for your services.

Learn more by visiting Facebook Social Media Marketing and see how you can start using Social Media Marketing to generate leads for your business.