Marketing Warriors

admin 19 May 2008 Industry News, Internet Marketing Tools, Marketing Tips, Web 2.0 1,304 views 14 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

Old school marketing step aside for the new world order in Internet Marketing – Web 2.0.

Thanks to Mike Volpe at Hubspot.com for putting together this great video of piecing together the puzzle of today’s online Internet Marketing tactics that are producing higher conversion rates.

 There is an evolution of authority sites that are standing out in the crowd because the Internet Marketing gap is closing as laser targeted prospects or leads are becoming far more sophisticated in their evaluation stages about your product or service. This self discovery movement is genuinely orchestrated as they look for solutions to their needs within the social communities of the Web 2.0 platforms.

So, let us look at the old school marketing tactics vs. the Web 2.0 Internet Marketing tactics of today.

Old school advertising or marketing deals with the ‘needle in a hay stack’ approach where massive exposure drummed up leads for a sale. This exposure consisted of:

• Print Advertising
• Telemarketing
• Direct mail/email campaigns
• Tradeshows
• Inside Sales
• Seminars

The average for this type of approach usually ran about 2-3% of your overall volume of people reached, IF done properly, are considered a ‘quality’ lead.

The New Internet Marketing experience – Organic Traffic Building, is built around laser targeted traffic that have picked you out of the crowd as an authority in your niche.

What was it that drove this traffic to you?

It is the power of social communities and word of mouth advertising (kinda sounds like Network Marketing, hmmmm). The contributing factors that brought these qualified leads to you are:

• SEO
• PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising (consists of about 25% of organic searches)
• Buzz Marketing
• Blogging
• Smart Content Management
• Landing or Squeeze Pages
• Conversion Tools
• Sophisticated Analytics

Take it from me, that attracting your leads to you is far more rewarding and brings a higher conversion rate than if you just spent countless dollars on advertising for a mere pittance of a qualified lead. According to Marketing Sherpa’s “Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008″ about 98% of B2B buyers start in Google when performing their self discovery quest.

Organic traffic has longer lasting residual results as compared to PPC because the exposure you get from PPC is directly dependent upon the size of your wallet.

Note the 5 tips to Internet Marketing Success in Mike’s video above.

1. On Page SEOVisible SEO   -Page title   -URL has title keywords in it.   -Heading tags have same keywords   -Page text has bolding of keywords  Invisible SEO   -Description (not used in ranking, but more so for listing summary relevance that shows your customers what they want)   -keywords (5 to 7 max)
2. Off Page SEO   -Page rank = Links (the more links from high quality sites the better your page rank)   -Quality linking   -Leverage partners   -Be wary of linking directories as you may get penalized.
3. Start a Blog   -Fresh content   -Link likelihood is better than to a static page   -Conversational (engages customer interaction)   -Social Bookmarks (Digg, Stumbleupon, Technorati, etc.)   -Blogger.com or other exterior site platforms vs. localized site blog (www.xyz.com/blog)
4. Optimize Forms   -Raise your conversion rates (shorten forms, add cookies to get more info, experiment with this)   -Have a very clear call to action (and only one!)   -Remove navigation for lead capture/squeeze page   -Add short testimonial quotes and photos   -Have a strong offer   -Link to your privacy policy to give your customer assurance that their info is safe with you.
5. Measure Everything   -Web visitors   -Website conversion rate (# leads / # visitors)   -Lead conversion rate (# sales from leads / # leads)   -Cost per lead   -All of the above sorted by source/program

Thanks again to Hubspot.com for their indepth marketing analysis and for more Internet Marketing Tips use their FREE Internet Marketing Resource – WebsiteGrader.com, for more comprehensive analysis and subscribe to their blog by email or RSS by going to SmallBusinessHub.com.