Advertising - How to get more customers

Den Lennie

Author: Den Lennie

Published 1st August 2015

by Den Lennie Issue 103 - July 2015

Its a popular myth that if you design your website with the correct keywords and optimise your page for search engine optimisation, you will get onto the first page of Google.
The trouble is, Google are continually changing the algorithms that dictate what aspects of a page is most relevant and therefore the websites that then get displayed. Google is an advertiser and its number one priority is to attract advertisers to pay for the service. This is why in recent years, the emphasis on SEO has been diminishing in favour of paid advertising. I know many businesses which have had great success with Googles pay per click advertising.
Pay per click (PPC) works very simply. You create an advert using keywords or phrases that someone may type in when searching on Google, and when Google thinks your advert is relevant to that search phrase, they will then display your advert to that person. The really clever part about PPC is that you only pay if someone clicks on your advert.
Many businesses use pay per click to advertise their business, but 80% of them make a fundamental mistake with this strategy. This mistake is caused when the prospect has to browse the site or hunt for the answer for which they clicked the advert to solve (or ultimately clicks away because the answer isnt obvious). This can become a very expensive way of advertising because if you are paying for each click and losing the customer as soon as they get to your website, then youre throwing money down the drain.
A far more intelligent method is to advertise and drive people to your landing page, where the only option available to them is to fill out their details and download your free report. (Starting your auto responder sequence and beginning the relationship.)

Using this method of paid advertising - leading your prospect to a landing page and then engaging the follow up process - allows you to track the effectiveness of your advertising spend. By measuring and testing different aspects of your campaign, you can optimise it so that it works at its most efficient.
Once you have over 100 visitors signing up for your report, you can use analytics software (get it free from Google - www.google.com/analytics/) to track how effective your advertising is.
Its not uncommon for less than one person out of every hundred to take any action, but by using the landing page approach with a free report, you can easily increase that to between five and 20 people out of every hundred who visit your website. The real value of pay per click advertising with Google is the quality of leads you acquire through this method.
If someone is actively searching for corporate video production then they are very motivated. If they then click on your advert and download your report, the chances are they are a very hot prospect. Compare that to someone who has just stumbled across your website (perhaps theyve clicked a link on another persons site thats taken them to yours). Its much less likely they are as motivated as someone who is actively searching to solve a problem.

This style of advertising is not limited to Google. Yahoo, Bing, Linkedin and Facebook all offer similar types of advertising opportunities. (YouTube is owned by Google, and it also offers advertising like PPC.)
Facebook
Facebook advertising is quickly becoming the new gold rush of cheap marketing. What makes Facebook advertising so powerful is the amount of data that Facebook has about all of its members. If you work in the wedding business, for example, then you need to be advertising on Facebook because the first thing a bride does when she gets engaged is change her status on Facebook, and its quite likely she will begin posting all of the details of her impending nuptials. As an advertiser, you can directly target women who are getting married within a six-month, 12 month or 18 month time frame, and you can produce adverts exclusively to that market.
You could create a free report called, 10 things every bride needs to know about choosing a wedding filmmaker and how to avoid the wedding video cowboys, and then run these on Facebook, targeting newly engaged women.
Customers who youve had to pay for generally result in a higher quality prospects than relying on SEO or other free traffic sources. Im not saying you dont want people opting in organically, but higher quality prospects tend to come from paid traffic. The other really interesting aspect of paid traffic is that once you test and measure, its not uncommon to see a 300% or 400% return on investment. Once you get the system working it becomes a licence to print money because if you spend £10 on acquiring a customer and that customer spends £40 then youre making a £30 profit for every £10 spent.

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