Yeah, we agree, makes no sense.
The recipe for success, no matter how simple; butter, cheese and pasta, take out the cheese and it fails.
Now that we are working with clients with budgets not based on fantasy or variable based on Vegas odds, we find high expectations; more for less. Now we all know that is not abnormal, the part that is interesting is that our clients think they want to spend money only in one place. We advise them against this. Do they have money for branding only? no, we get that. But you have to spend marketing dollars on the entire process.
Spend money on traffic only, you’ll lose lead conversion and sales conversion; take one out and it will taste bad. Sure, you’ll get your clients all excited about the traffic, wow huh? look at those graphs. In the end, if there is no sale, two things are true; (1) you’ll pay the price at the end of the month and (2) as a marketer, you are making a bad meal.
I guess that might be overusing this silly analogy; maybe. We just see it so much.
Online marketing, in it’s most basic form is simple to understand; bring traffic, convert traffic, create customers. Take out any of these pieces, and you fail.
If you are a online marketing specialist, or a business looking to get started in 2011, here are some questions to think about and answer.
What are my measurable goals?
8ONE8 Tips
– Impressions turn into clicks, clicks turn into leads, leads turn into sales.
– Measure your visitors; please do this.
– Calculate conversion at each step of the process and between the beginning and end. e.g. How many impressions (x) to create sales (y).
How am I going to maximize conversion?
8ONE8 Tips
– Landing Pages – Don’t drop people to your home page..ugh. please do this
– Analyze your past conversion. Any marketer who drives traffic without fixing conversion is wasting your money. Not kidding.
– Use Testing to know, don’t guess. Start with A/B…then quickly move to multivariate. Improvements can be in the 100+% range.
How do I avoid failure?
8ONE8 tips
– Measure
– Test
– Evolve