Search makes it better
59The real power of search engine marketing does not necessarily lie in the getting of traffic. The real power lies in what you can do with the medium to help you business in many other ways.
Let's explore together what search can do besides generate sales, which it does better than any other medium in history. In this the facts can not be denied, the cost to acquire a customer on Search is less than any other medium (no exceptions). The average cost per lead on the Search is twenty nine cents (.29). COmpare that to what you are spending now.
Anyway lets stay focused for this topic
Search offers you the ability to track, monitor and react to behavior, attitude and market conditions instantly.
Everything You Should Know about Search and How it Make’s Almost Everything You do in Business Better. Search is more than getting traffic to your website, it is the solution you need to:
· Improve your existing ad content across all your advertising
· Target your specific customer base
· Indentify what products will sell best
· Determine how to close more sales
· Improve your customer retention
· Monitor behavior of your customers and adapt to their needs
· Market your most profitable items
· Identify new geographic areas that may be profitable without having to add a brick and mortar presence
· Capture the best advertising position over even your biggest competitor at rates you can afford, national or local you can gain the advantage
· Explore new ways to reach clients from like services without having to spend thousands to see if it works
· Do specific market research on products, areas, ad copy, sales offers, timely events and inventory.
· React to real time conditions to take advantage of weather, seasons, holiday events, over stocked items, downturns in sales performance, bad press of a competitor, sales curves and anything that affects your business right now in real time, not when the next press run or production slot opens up
· The cost to acquire a customer is lower than any other medium in history (twenty nine cents national average)
Facts that you need to know about the quality, volume and value of search marketing
· Three hundred million people a day use a search engine in the USA
· Six billion of them monthly are consumers locally looking to buy a product or service
· 43% of searches are local people looking for local information
· Eight out of every ten local consumers using search end up as a sale either online or offline, they already decided they need the product or service; they are looking for whom to buy it from
· Search is the highest volume medium in history
· Three search engines capture 90% of all this traffic; you don’t have to guess what they are reading, listening to or watching.
· Every action is tracked, analyzed and reported to you so you know exactly what the results and return on investment is
· Searches crosses all gender, racial, income and age groups
How to use search to grow your business
First and foremost you must gain position on the first page of the search engines through
· Pay per Click
· Organic Page Ranking
· Social Network Marketing
Next, and this is important, once you have the position you must be prepared to convert the click into a customer
1. Your site has to be set up to ask for the order right now (conversion formatting)
2. The searcher must land on a relevant page to the search
3. After this you need to constantly stay in touch with the searcher through permission based offers, emails and newsletters
4. You need to pay attention to who is buying and what they are searching for to constantly adapt to the habits of the search volume.
Examples of how to use search
Improve your existing ad content across all your advertising
By testing key phrases, sales and events you can determine instantly what drives the most traffic and adapt these terms and offers into your traditional media mix
A fashion store in Beverly Hills added the words celebrity fashion to the search words and it drove 50% more traffic than other terms. They quickly changed all other print and broadcast ad content to include this term and business spiked up 50% in 60 days
Target your specific customer base
By monitoring the information mined from the reporting you can learn what they are buying more and tailor your search to those items. Also determine more specifically who your customer is and again target them more specifically.
Once you know this you can target publications, broadcast and programming aimed at your specific target customer
Indentify what products will sell best
Test new products, identify which are the best sellers, add product line all through simple and inexpensive search words. Identify what sparks interest and how to write the best ad copy instantly, compare samples and determine what works best for your company.
Picture the AutoRepairCenter that discovers brakes are the largest draw for his business then tailoring their ad copy to capture more brake repair customers, or the eye doctor who learns that bifocal contact lenses are more popular than single vision lens, or the plastic surgeon who learns that advertising Botox increases his patient volume by 50%.
Determine how to close more sales
By monitoring what searches are actually converting to sales you can adjust your business to handle more of this. Or, looking at the volume of searches that are contacting you but not selling you can determine what weaknesses in the sales process are preventing them from becoming customers. All instantly!
You have 100 people search for golden widgets and they actually call or contact you and you only sell 2 of them, why, are you priced to high, did your people chase them away, is something wrong with how you sell them the brand the service or the product.
On the other hand what if you had a hundred searches for platinum widgets and you sold 70 of them, what would you learn and how could you compare this success to the failure above.
Identify new geographic areas that may be profitable without having to add a brick and mortar presence
You are thinking about expanding to a new area. You can target searches for your products in that area to insure there is a market share for you before spending any money on staff, equipment and office or retail space.
Capture the best advertising position over even your biggest competitor at rates you can afford, national or local you can gain the advantage
In Pay per Click to gain position you don’t have to pay the most, you have to have the most relevant page to the search and an optimized landing page. It is not as much about what you are willing to spend as how well you relate to what they are looking for. It gives you the number one or two spot on the page over even fortune 500 companies
In page ranking (Organic) Search engines rank by page not website, so making each page more relevant increases your position. Your page determines the position and if done correctly can beat all the competition for the best position, thereby getting the traffic and the sales even over the biggest companies
You need a company that understands these tools to insure you get the position.
Explore new ways to reach clients from like services without having to spend thousands to see if it works
What if there was a way to reach customers who don’t normally think of you. Suppose you could educate someone that what you offer fits their need and they weren’t looking for you.
Say you sell balloons and your current base of business is people who buy a small arrangement for a special occasion. You want to sell larger deals so you add
Party planners and event planners to your search keywords and come up in the best position and tell people balloons are a great way to decorate for your event, they agree and contact you. You only pay if they actually click.
We have a client that did this exact strategy and sold 15K in balloons in the first week to one customer, all because he expanded his audience and tested a new avenue to generate business on search.
Explore new ways to reach clients from like services without having to spend thousands to see if it works
Experiment with events, sales, new products, services and strategies for pennies. Search allows you to learn without a major expense for the education. Does your current media mix allow this? No way, pay for the ad in full and hope it works or never find out, that is what the current option is.
React to real time conditions to take advantage of weather, seasons, holiday events, over stocked items, downturns in sales performance, bad press of a competitor, sales curves and anything that affects your business right now in real time, not when the next press run or production slot opens up
This is one of the biggest advantages of search.
Imagine you are a roofer and a tornado runs through your area at midnight, in the morning you change your search copy to highlight tornado repair service, fit this to your business, and what can you take advantage of in real time to instantly spike sales right now.
Having the right website with the right content and the correct search strategy can overnight change the dynamics of your business. By partnering with the correct partner all of this can happen while you just run your business and handle the increase in revenue and sales.
Search is so much more than you imagined all you have to do is use it properly and best of all it is fully transparent, you know every contact, sale and dollar generated from search.
Best regards
Anthony Wunsh
http://www.thinkbigsites.com/awunsh.html
