Marketing Strategy

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The other day I was speaking on the phone with Mark Pocock — who’s a leading copywriter based in the UK…

As the phone line was crackling with the exchange of tips and ideas, Mark hit me out of the blue. He asked:

“Why do so many businesses advertise the WRONG way?”

Immediately, and on what I can only describe as a subconscious level, I responded:

“Business Incest!”

Find out exactly what Business Incest is, and whether you’re committing it.

Check out Mark’s Blog Post Here

My Colleuage Doug McIsaac and fellow marketer Walt Goshert of TheMarketingCaddy.com discuss The 5 Deadly Marketing Sins of Small Businesses here.

These are:

1. Not having a marketing mindset.
2. Failure to fully leverage assets.
3. Marketing to Everyone.
4. Same and Lame.
5. No Lead Generation Systems.

Bonus: Fear and Lack of Understanding of the Internet as a Marketing Tool.

This is essential information for any small business owner. So put the kettle on, grab a pen and paper and listen to this 60 minutes of pure marketing gold.

Make sure you let me know what you think of it!

For more marketing information specifically for small business, go to www.Online4Offline.com

To listen to the call click here >>

Speak to you soon,

George

Back in the day, everybody had an advertising budget.

Even if you were a sole trader, you had a rough idea of what you would spend on marketing/advertising/promoting your business in a year - even if it was just a made up figure to keep the local Yellow Pages rep happy!

For the majority of business (especially in the UK) this was - and still is - the norm.

But what I’m going to suggest to you today could change how you think about spending on advertising and marketing forever.

I’m going to suggest you disregard the concept of ‘budget’ in the old sense of the word.

Why am I saying this? Well, the way the internet is moving – and has been moving since around 2002 – the concept of an annual marketing budget is getting harder and harder to apply.

Never before has a business of any size been able to test and track their marketing efforts to the penny so accurately. And never before has competition been so fierce in all markets. Businesses and consumers are rapidly turning away from traditional media and focusing on the internet.

People are favoring news websites over newspapers – Youtube over TV – blogs over magazines…Of course; businesses are catching on and want to get in front of these ‘eye balls’ – but beware. The old advertising model won’t work here. Neither will the old ‘advertising budget’ concept.

Rather than paying for these ‘eye balls’ by the thousand and hoping for the best, we need to adopt a whole new approach. Not an entirely new approach – in fact the basis of this thinking is almost 100 years old, but rings so true today it’s scary.

This new advertising space is being sold in a totally different way and I believe this new way could filter down into more traditional media as time passes.

So what is this model?

If you’ve ever advertised on Google, you’ve already experienced it. Some call it pay per click, but the more generic term for the whole concept is Cost Per Action. That is, you only pay the advertiser when a prospective customer does something. That ‘something’ is generally clicking on your ad, but in some instances, it’s filling out a form or completing a sale.

Is this a bad thing?

Not at all! It’s bloody marvelous!

Think about it – you only pay for your advertising when someone actually DOES SOMETHING.

Cost per action advertising, along with proper testing and tracking of your ads, puts an end to shooting in the dark forever. As a business owner, you are now able to fairly easily work out how much it costs you to get a lead, and get a sale. With time and testing, you can reduce the cost of an action, and therefore increase your profits at the same time.

So if you know exactly how much it costs to get a customer, why on earth would you need an advertising budget?

Surely once you’ve established your cost of acquiring a customer is lower than your profit, the last thing you want is an advertising budget!

Think of it like this – if it costs you £20 in advertising to get a customer that makes you £50, why would you limit it with a budget? You’d simply scale up the advertising as fast as infrastructure and cash-flow allows – right?

Here’s the rough method behind the cost per action advertising process:

1. Test your ad & sales process on a small scale,
2. Measure the results,
3. Modify the ad,
4. Test it again,
5. Compare it to the previous one(s),
6. Repeat steps 3-5 until you’ve found the cheapest possible cost per action,
7. Scale up the successful ad as quick as you can,
8. Count your money.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to it than that (this is when people like me come in handy!), but overall process is pretty simple.

Hopefully next time you hear someone talking about advertising budget, you’ll think about this post and begin to change your thinking around to cost per action instead!

I posted on here a little while ago about the new advertising system Facebook have launched.

Never being one to shy away from new marketing channels and “first mover” advantage, I decided to do a small test.

Here’s what happened:

Just incase the Facebook ads didn’t work, I decided not to promote my website or any of my clients on Facebook, as it could prove embarrassing. So I decided on promoting a pretty standard ebook that was available on the affiliate website, Clickbank.

(For those that aren’t in the know, affiliate marketing is where you get paid commission if you sell someone else’s product for them)

Now, promoting affiliate products using Google Adwords in my experience, is either very difficult or bloody impossible to break even! Also to make matters worse, I’ve always had the reverse Midas touch with affiliate marketing and have stuck to promoting “real” businesses instead.

So all in all, I wasn’t expecting much from Facebook and didn’t fancy my chances…

However, in the name of research for you, the dedicated blog reader, I soldiered on and created my Facebook ad campaign with my affiliate link in it and let it run…

I needn’t have worried.

In the first week, because I set my bid price a little too high, I broke even.

This week so far, I’ve spent $12.10, and received $17.72 in commission from sales of the ebook I’ve been promoting. That’s a $5.62 profit if I’m not mistaken!

Clearing 5 bucks (or about £2.50 here in the UK) doesn’t really sound like a lot does it? It certainly won’t make you rich, but that’s not the point.

The point is:

• I’ve taken a product where the market in the search engines is ferociously competitive (and margins are pretty tight!),
• Demographically targeted Facebook users who would be interested in the product,
• Paid far, far less for a click than I would do on any decent pay per click search engine,
• And turned a profit!

The last point is the most important one

This means if I can turn a $5 profit on a low value affiliate ebook, I’m sure you could gain some extra leads or sales for your business using this method, especially if your average transaction is reasonably high (£100 or more).

Now, remember to track the number of visitors you had from Facebook ads and if you can, track how many conversions (goals) the Facebook ads generated. Google Analytics can do this for you. When you have this data, you can work out how much a lead/sale cost you, and calculate your visitor value from there. (You can use my visitor value tool by downloading it here)

I think this could be big and I highly recommend you look into Facebook ads while it’s fresh and people are still catching on. Opportunity knocks, people…

Speak to you soon,

George.

PS: A couple of things you should know:

I haven’t revealed the product or market I’m promoting on Facebook because I want to keep the experiment as fair as possible and not artificially influence the results. However when there is sufficient data, I’ll publish it as a case study.

I’m not affiliated to, and have no connections - financial or otherwise with Facebook.

Remember I sent an email out a couple of weeks ago asking you for your
questions?

Well, the response has been fantastic - and if you did send in your
questions, thanks very much for your contribution.

I’ve just finished recording the audio and it’s now available to download here. (Right click and choose “save as”)

In the seminar I cover:

• How to make your business stand out from the competition,
• Viral and interactive elements on your website,
• Getting ranked highly on the natural search engine listings,
• How to approach joint venture partners and set up deals,
• How to position yourself if you’re in a service business,
• Top Google Adwords tips and a free tool,
• How to improve visitor conversions,
• How to find your customers needs and create good website content quickly,
• My opinion on internet marketing “get rich” schemes,
• How to find out if your new product or service has the makings of success with very little risk,
• How to set up an email marketing campaign, why the 80/20 principle is important when sending emails.

The file’s pretty big at about 66MB and runs at about 1hr 10mins.

It’s available as an mp3 so you can stick it on your Ipod or burn
it to disc.

You can download it here for free:

http://www.laneconsultancy.com/audio/1207audio.mp3

(Right click and choose “save as”)

Update: You can also stream the audio online if you don’t want to download it. Just click the play button below.

Let me know what you think by posting your comments here, on the blog.

And if you like it, please feel free to share this with your friends!

I hope you have a great Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

I’ve got some really cool stuff coming out in the new year that I
think you’ll love if you want to get more business using the
internet.

Thanks very much for taking an interest in my work, and I’ll speak
to you soon!

Cheers,

George