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Title: Exploding Your Online Sales - Your 5 Step Plan to an Effective, Affordable Online Marketing Campaign (long version)
Article Summary: Are you planning for explosive sales this year through an effective, organized marketing campaign or are you maintaining your status quo and hoping for the best? How are you going to boost your profile online to get those money-in-hand buyers firing their orders to your store? Discover this 5 Step Plan created by in the trenches experience of online marketing for small business. You will quickly and effectively create a plan that can be implemented immediately and begin reaping your sales successes.
Word Count: 1675
First Published: 2004

Contact Info:
Paula Polman
paula@TheLearningCenterForEntrepreneurs.com
780-270-8146 MST
Edmonton AB Canada


Are you planning for explosive sales this year through an effective, organized marketing campaign or are you maintaining your status quo and hoping for the best? How are you going to boost your profile online to get those money-in-hand buyers firing their orders to your store?

A planned, organized campaign with rotation through a variety of targeted sites, directories and venues is not hard to coordinate, does not need to cost a great deal of money and can generate traffic and sales faster than search engine submissions alone. It takes a bit of research and a solid knowledge base of your target customer, however, you can plan and implement a simple campaign in the space of a dedicated day.

A 5 Step Plan follows, created by in the trenches experience of online marketing for small business. Each step is detailed and has an action activity for you to do. By doing each of the actions, you'll end up with an effective plan for your marketing campaign. You will quickly and effectively create a plan that can be implemented immediately and begin reaping your sales successes.

Step 1 - Defining Your Customer

Defining your customer is a important as defining your products or naming your business. If you don't know who you are selling to and what your product is doing for them you might as well close up shop now.

If you have not yet done a marketing plan within your business plan, then you need to do this exercise. If you already have this in your business plan, you can skip ahead to Step 2 or review these questions as a re-enforcement of what you know.

Action:
Answer these questions as honestly as you can, in other words don't project your expectations or hopes on them (ie all my customers have net incomes over $1M), what is your perfect, solid customer really like?
Once you have this written out in front of you, you should have a good picture of where to start looking to place your message and how to write your message copy.

Step 2 - Choosing Your Targets

Now, where are to post your ads? A coordinated effort across several sites and venues commonly frequented by your customers is the most effective. If you are seen in different several places your visibility and retained message is much stronger. Complimentary sites that you can help cross-promote to your visitors, who will then see you there too, will provide an excellent re-enforcement of your message. Holiday specific sites that are well promoted are excellent areas to consider.

When considering a site or newsletter for your ad, look at factors like traffic, search engine placement, external linking (how many places link to it), quality of current ads, types of messages being presented in the current ads. Are there many competitors of yours already or is the advertising of a complimentary nature to your business or are the ads completely unrelated to your business and to the intended traffic of the site. These are all clues to measure a best fit of your message to the traffic of the site.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is another consideration but can be daunting for someone new to this form. If you're new to PPC, stick to places that allow you to set limits on daily expenditures. Google is a good example of this. This will also help you to experiment and determine the most effective keywords by paying close attention to the statistics of the PPC campaign.

Conversion rates are an important measuring tool. What you need to do is determine what exactly you want to measure. Is it sales orders? Newsletter subscribers? Downloads of your free e-book? What a conversion rate is the number of click-throughs it takes to achieve your target measurement. In other words, your page may have 1000 hits, 14 clicks and 1 sale in a day. Your conversion rate is 1:14 or 7.1%. In other words, 7.1% of the clicks are generating a sale during this period.

Close monitoring of your conversion rates will quickly tell you what is working and what is not. Don't hesitate to change, tweak or modify your ads if needed. This is a process in constant motion until you find the best fit. Remember too, an ad may work superb in one place but not in another.

Action:
Create a spreadsheet or document that you will enter in all the sites and venues that are a consideration. You can find a free version of a spreadsheet file called the "Ad Planning Guide" to help you get started at: http://www.undertheawning.net/ - look under "Gifts & Specials".

Step 3 - Budget

While some folks think this should be the first step, realistically you can better create your budget plan when you have a good idea of the costs involved. That can only be done once you've figured out some of your targets. You probably already have a figure in mind of how much you can really spend, so back to your campaign sheet and total up the costs of all the ad spots you'd like to do. Chances are that total will exceed your overall spending limit.

Action:
Now go through that list and prioritize the ads to where you think you'll get most exposure and results that fit within your budget. Move the others into a holding list. Remember, as the ads start to pull in results you can always go back and expand your campaign from that holding list.

If you are engaged in pay-per-click advertising, check in daily for the first week or so and monitor your results and ensure you are paying for results.

Don't forget to consider ad swaps and bartering as part of your payment and marketing budget. Many sites will swap newsletter ads or banner ads for similar placement in your site. It never hurts to ask.

Step 4 - Creating Your Ad Content

Online marketing works best when you focus only on one or two things. You may have a variety of products but pick one or two items that are good sellers and have a solid appeal to your target market.

Next ask yourself, "what am I selling"? It's rarely the product or service. You are selling a benefit something that registers at the emotional level. If you are selling fishing rods for example, you're selling the excitement of successfully landing that monster in the lake. If you selling cosmetics you're selling beauty, if you sell web hosting you're selling ease & speed of getting a site launched.

The most successful ads use words that relate to the customer - You, Yours and never put the focus on Me, Mine, Our, My, We. Create several emotional words associated with the product - fun, comforting, relaxing, stimulating, addictive - and use at least one of them in the ad.

Coupons are an effective marketing tool to also consider. They can be easily tracked either manually or by an automated shopping cart system. Use different codes for different advertising locations and you'll quickly see which ones get the best attention.

Action:
Create a text ad for each item, making sure to hit at least 1-3 prime keywords in the text. Text ads typically run 60 characters wide by 3, 5, 7 or 10 lines long.

Once you have your text ads, go through your banner inventory. Do you need to update them with a holiday specific message? Does every image have an appropriate ALT tag? Is the graphic properly optimized for size (under 20-50kb) and resolution (72dpi)?

Step 5 - Tracking & Monitoring Your Ads

Tracking and reacting to your campaign's successes are critical in maintaining an effective marketing campaign. From your website stats to PPC stats, there are many ways to determine what is working and what isn't. By paying attention you'll learn volumes about your ads and how to hone them for best results.

Tracking tricks include using specific coupon or sales codes for each ad placement, setting up separate entry pages on your site for each ad, utilizing a service that helps track activity - for example a mall directory like Under the Awning ( http://www.UnderTheAwning.com ) that gives you performance stats on your product listings. There are advertising management services that help you to track ad performance, such as phpAdsNew ( http://www.phpAdsNew.com ), a free service that is relatively easy to implement and gives powerful ad tracking management and support.

Action:
On a daily basis for the first two weeks review the results of your various ads. Write them up in your tracking sheet and see if you can find any trends or patterns. Which ones are performing, where and why? If some aren't working, replace them with others that are or try another from your hold list. The internet provides you with the means to see results fast so utilize those tools. Once you settle into a pattern of review and ad management you'll know better how often you need to monitor your campaigns.

* * *

Successful online marketing campaigns are within the reach of any business, no matter what your budget. By following these basic steps and committing to the follow-through, you can create a cost effective campaign with a substantial return on investment.

Good sales to you!

Paula Polman, B.Sc. has been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, in areas including teaching, IT, natural cosmetics & toiletries, travel and event & conference planning. She is now involved in offering online instructional courses for small business at The Learning Center for Entrepreneurs, supporting the growth of small business thorugh extended learning. Email her at paula [at] TheLearningCenterForEntrepreneurs [dot] com or visit http://www.TheLearningCenterForEntrepreneurs.com

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