Archive for the ‘Ashley Hart’ Category

For Customer Retention, Email Marketing Will Do

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

You’re getting tons of customers to your site, but you’re losing them just as fast as you are getting them, so what do you do?  Don’t expect that just because you built it, they should stay.  Building a good customer retention program is as important as creating a good customer acquisition program.  Email marketing is a good and simple way to keep your customers informed with new items at your site, community happenings, announcements and making sure that your user base returns to the site.  Here are some tips on what you can do to build a good email campaign:

1. Segment the Database – Do not send a mass email to all of  the database. This will surely have a lot of opt-outs or low click through rate back to the site.  Separate the database mailings by how you want to market to the user base, such as creating emails tarrgeted to either region, gender, age, or work title. Learn and understand what your customers want and mail to them accordingly.

2. Test Email Campaigns – Test different headlines, subject lines, graphics and body text to see what performs better.  Test, test, test!

3. Email Blasts & Newsletters – Try sending weekly email blasts with specific product or service offerings to your segmented database. Send  monthly newsletters that contain content that is more general and can appeal to a larger audience than the segmented email blasts. Monthly newsletters can contain content, such as news, third-party offerings, community happenings, and Refer-a-Friend programs. Make sure to be consistent about the newsletters delivery schedule to keep consistency.  This will help build brand-equity of the company site.

4. Do Not Send Too Many Emails In A Short Period – This is a big no-no.  The more emails that are sent in a short period will surely tire the customer base and ensure that your campaigns will be opt-out with more frequency.  Think about how many emails do you get…what are the ones that you opt-out of?

For more information or help on your email marketing campaigns, please contact Ashley Hart on the ‘Contact Us’ tab of the homepage of www.AshleyHartMarketing.com

SEO and How to Get Higher Traffic Rankings

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the top buzz word on every online marketer’s mind right now, but what does it mean for your website and driving traffic to it?  SEO in short, is how you optimize your site to have higher rankings in Google’s Organic Search results, which appear to the left of the screen.  There are many techniques that you will have to consider to optimize your site, but if you don’t have a lot of money to hire an agency to help you with this process, one simple way that you can help your rankings, is to have as many links as possible from other sites pointed to your site; this is a guaranteed way to help boost your rankings. But how do you get your url placed on other sites? Try going to the top ComScore sites that accept urls from other websites, such as YouTube.

For example,  if you are trying to market a product to a consumer audience, consider creating a short video about how to use the product and place that video on MySpace, YouTube, and Veoh.   Make sure the video you create is fun and exciting to watch, otherwise, you won’t have anyone watching.  Don’t make the mistake that many others do, that assume just because you built it, people will watch it. Make sure to include your url in the video as a tagline at the bottom of the screen, so viewers can go to your site, once they are done watching the video.

By doing simple guerrilla marketing techniques as the video example, will help increase your traffic and boost your rankings in Google’s Search.

B2B Marketing Secrets on Google

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

If you are a B2B marketer, you know the rising costs on Google Search is making it tougher on your bottom-line ROI numbers.  To reduce your costs and to stay within your marketing budget, check out Google Base.  Google Base is currently in beta, but it’s a great product to test out, since it’s free to list your products and services and you can link it to a store easily for processing purchases.  Google Base makes it easier for consumers to find products and services from B2B marketers that are more relevant to their searches.

Also, check out HowStuffWorks.com, if you are a marketer with products that need demonstrations. HowStuffWorks.com can create customized pages for marketers that want to brand their products and services in a non-traditional way to their target markets.  The How Stuff team will maintain the page for you with their own editorial content, which is relevant to the products and services that you are marketing.

How the Economy affects your Online Marketing Stategy

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Online marketing has been a cheap and effective solution comparatively to traditional media for advertisers with small budgets. The baseline for online marketing choices for advertisers have been search marketing through Google and Yahoo, display advertising through Advertising.com, and affiliate marketing through LinkShare and Commission Junction. Now, these cheap solutions are being affected by the economy, due to advertisers of all sizes looking for economical ways to maximize their ROIs because of softer sales, which causes high biddng wars in Search and increases in CPM and CPA costs for prime display advertising space.

As the U.S.  economy worsens, big budget advertisers that have used multi-channels for their marketing strategies will be forced to cut their budgets and limit their marketing channels, which makes online marketing a more attractive solution to traditional outlets. So, what can you do as a Marketer with a limited budget competing with the Big Boys?  Try alternative advertising services to the baselines.  For example, advertising networks, such as AdOnNetwork represent some of the Top ComScore sites and offer cheap remnant ad spaces for a 1/3 of the price.

What is the difference between marketing to Generation X and Y?

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Many marketers think that there are no differences to marketing to the Generation X and Y demographics online, but there are tremendous differences that you must consider, if you attempt to market to either one of these groups. Keep in mind that these generations were born at different times of the web explosion, which has affected the way that they look at how advertising messages pertain to them.

Generation X refers to the generation that was born between 1965 and 1984; Generation Y refers to the generation that was born between 1985 to present. Generation X grew up during the time of Atari to the launch of the Web, unlike Generation Y, which never knew what it was like not to have the Internet as being a part of their life. Immediate access to news, entertainment, speaking to friends through social networks are second nature to Generation Y, unlike Generation X, which is a much more fragmented group, and still relies on print, as well as, online when it comes to social interaction and information access.

When trying to decide on marketing to Generation X, not only should you consider marketing narrowly, consider marketing broadly to this generation, since it is hard to pinpoint where most of this generation can be found. In terms of finding Generation Y, consider targeting your online campaigns narrowly to where this generation spends most of their time… on Social Networking, Gaming, and Environmental sites. Why Environmental? Generation Y has grown up being much more environmentally aware than the previous generations and are big activists, when it comes to participating in causes. If you need proof of it, check out Facebook’s Groups – ‘Causes’ section. The Causes section are some of the largest groups on the web. The participation is outstanding for such an young generation.

Make sure, when you do start putting together your marketing strategy, that you ‘not market’ to Generation Y…they can smell an unsympathetic campaign a mile away and will cause your brand-identity to suffer; unlike Generation X, which is more tolerant of marketing efforts to them. Generation X will gladly accept marketing messaging, as long as it pertains to them.

Horizontal or Vertical Ad Networks – Should I bother?

Friday, May 30th, 2008

There’s a lot of hype over ad networks recently, due to the explosion of the online advertising business growth.  There are now over 300 ad networks online, so how do you choose as an advertiser, which one to go with?

When Ad Networks first began, most networks were built to become a one stop shopping source for advertisers.  These ad networks would fight to get the top 100 trafficked sites that were listed on ComScore to join their networks.   These networks are called Horizontal Ad Networks;  an example of a Horizontal Ad Network is Advertising.com. These networks are good if an advertiser needs to market broadly online and is more concerned with a brand marketing campaign, rather than a direct marketing campaign.

As advertisers started needing more niche advertising solutions to reach specific narrow target markets, Vertical Ad Networks started to appear. These networks are much more recent to the online marketing industry, than the Horizontal Networks, but work just as effective as a one stop solution for advertisers.  Vertical Ad Networks, such as ESPN.com or Adify.com are a much better choice for an advertiser that needs to reach a specific audience.

When choosing an ad network, choose the one that is best for reaching your audience.  If you have a broad campaign consider Horizontal Networks, if you have a specific niche market that you must reach, consider a Vertical Ad Network.

Google is Darth Vader. So, where is Luke?

Monday, May 5th, 2008

 

Once upon a time, a long time ago, Google offered an advertising service to all types of advertisers that could advertise cheaply and effectively to reach their target markets. Advertisers could spend less than $100 per day and find quality traffic reaching their sites.

Well, as I mentioned, that was a long time ago. Now, the “Little Advertiser”, the guy that I consider to have advertising budgets that are below $5,000 per month, are having a hard time competing with advertisers with larger advertising budgets, due to Google’s attempts to “bring better quality traffic by raising the minimum cpcs to as high as $1, $5, $15, and $20 per click.” Well, how does that bring better quality traffic you ask?

The idea is, if an advertiser really values a specific keyword, they will pay anything for that keyword and thus drive out advertisers that are not willing or “can afford” that premium keyword, which gives the advertiser who bought the keyword an advantage to getting better traffic and better placement in Sponsored Advertising positions. But, the advertiser that has most likely bought this keyword has to have a larger budget than everyone else, which discourages the Little Advertiser from bidding on the keyword, thus knocking them out of the bid and creating a service that is meant only for advertisers with big budgets.

Google has forgotten that their ‘idea’ does not work for a new advertiser with a low or tight budget, since the new advertiser hasn’t had a chance to test and optimize their keywords to know which works best for them in driving quality traffic. For example, If I only have a starting budget of $500 and the cpc for my keyword is $10, then I will only get 50 clicks to my site and as you will learn, not all clicks reach our homepages and only a small percentage will convert, before being optimized correctly, hopefully. 50 clicks is not enough data to figure out which keywords worked the best. The Little Advertiser will not last long in spending money with Google or not even attempt to spend money at all, due to the high costs and little return. In essence, the Google that had created the fair, “ever good” online ad service for everyone that had created them, no longer exists. Google in its attempts to bring more money to itself, which let’s admit we are Americans so there is nothing wrong about that, but has destroyed what was so great about them…the democratization of buying online ad media.

So, what happened to that not evil Google that we all loved? They joined the dark forces of the high-price spending advertising world in order to get their marketing capitalization up. Let’s face it, the days of cheap advertising on Google is over and the ever good Google has become Darth Vader.

So, is there a Luke Skywalker out there that will save the Little Advertiser? I think so, like everything else in the Internet world, you just have to wait for the next ‘big thing’ and I believe it will be a new advertising network that will be cost-effective and driving quality traffic for an affordable price…and hopefully, without the click fraud. So hey Luke Skywalker, hurry up and launch!

What is SEO and Why Should I Do It?

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

So, what is SEO and why should I do it? Simply, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the technique on how well you optimize your site to appear in the Natural/Organic search listings on Google, which in case you didn’t know, it’s the listings that appear on the left-side of the page.

It is important to learn how and to optimize your site for SEO for a few reasons:

1. SEO helps to reduce your costs for paying for advertising in Google or in other search engines. If you are coming up for free in the natural search listings for the keywords that best describe your business or service, why would you pay for advertising?

2. SEO helps you to understand how to position your site to your intended audience. You are forced to think about what keywords are significant and to apply it to your business description.

3. If you have a low budget and you are getting positioned well in certain keyword phrases, but not others, then you can concentrate your paid online advertising on the keywords that you are not doing well in for appearing in the organic search.

A simple way to optimize your site, is pay attention to the page title. When Google or other search engines crawl your site to list it, the search engines refer to the page title to help place it in the listings. So make sure, that whatever you think are the most important keyword phrases appears in your page title.

Good luck!