1. Attention – Make your presence known.
2. Interest – Create stimulating messages.
3. Desire – Offer the right product at the right price.
4. Action – Your message and your offering and any reviews should prompt engagement.
5. Use – The customer will use your product or service.
6. Opinion – An opinion will then be formed, so make certain your messaging is accurate, and that no false expectations are set.
7. Talk – Encourage customers to talk about you and your product. This could be as simple as a “like” button or star rating, or a request for leaving a comment on your product or service page. Go deeper with a feedback form and request for sharing reviews via social media.

• 42% of social media users had conversation with a brand via social media.
• 36% of social media users post brand related information on social media.
• 2 in 3 social media users say Twitter influences their purchases.
• 50% of people follow brands on social media
• 75% of companies now use Twitter as a marketing channel.

• Speed. Visitors expect your site to load in 2-3 seconds. After that, some 40% of them abandon the page.

• Error free. cmswire.com says A Stanford University “Web Credibility Study” from a few years ago found that “typographical errors have roughly the same negative impact on a website’s credibility as a company’s legal or financial trouble.”

• Simple registration or contact fields. Registration form length that’s far too long – as many as 8 or more fields discourages readers, as does a contact form that requires too much personal information.

• Quality over quantity. While there is a point to generating new content on a regular basis, remember what you put out is going to be as important, or more so, than how much, and the level of professionalism factors in greatly. The quality of posting can also impact your SEO. It also matters when it comes to the impression you’re making on visitors.

• Being in tune. You need to poll visitors – assess their behaviors and what leads to gaining attention, and to getting conversion.

• A website is not a stand alone tool. Nielsen Wire says there are 113 million mobile web users, Having a mobile friendly web design will mean that the growing numbers of consumers on those devices will have something they can sink their teeth into as well.

• Put yourself in their shoes. Build a site that offers consumers what they want, not what executives in your company want. Get to know your prospects and customers and determine their preferences and what motivates them.

1. Targeting: Align your products or services to a specific audience. Creating and sending messages to a generic audience may yield a few ‘takers’. But carefully and methodically discerning your target customers, and to which sort of messages they respond, is going to generate the leads and behaviors you’re looking for.

• Be aware that segmenting and targeting your prospects may be a challenge, as most mobile sites and apps deal with anonymous behavior. Take current data on past behaviors, and create a profile of your core customer, then develop laser-focused messaging to those people.

1. Optimization: Optimize your efforts by making your messages, and your online presence mobile friendly. Digital marketing experts know that a mobile device needs to be treated differently than a desktop device. Craft your website and your messaging to be mobile friendly. A smaller screen, and less patience for long downloads and messages set mobile users apart.

• It’s not simply a matter of thinking small. Simple, uncluttered visuals and brief and to- the- point messages are key.

1. Measurement: Frequent evaluation of your efforts is required. Knowing which information being pushed is also being acted upon is vital to your campaign. Don’t waste time on consumers, or messages that aren’t yielding results.

• Establishing measurable goals before you begin is necessary for tracking success. Know what sort of behaviors you’re encouraging, quantify an acceptable level of results, and be prepared to make changes to your messaging along the way if your current strategy isn’t producing.

It’s reported that 57% of B2B marketing professionals surveyed, said that SEO makes the biggest impact on their lead generation goals. And, like football… it continues to be a game of statistics.

Get in the Game

Search has long been established as a key player… just look at the numbers from this seomoz.com report: and when you consider that as many as 15.5 billion searches can take place in just one month, the possibilities seem endless.

Webvisible and Nielsen gathered the following – 74% of respondents have been using search engines to find local business information… more than the number turning to traditional methods. And the report gets even more encouraging when it comes to conversion, with 80% who said they researched a product or service on-line, made their purchase offline from a local business.

Positioning is everything

Most teams find it hard to score from deep in their opponents territory – good field position increases the odds for putting points on the board. Search engine consultants will tell you the same thing. The first ranking position in search results receive just over 42% of all click through traffic, with the first ten search results garnering nearly 90% of all click-through traffic. So… you have to get there.

Starting out requires evaluation and some background work. Then take that information and use it to market your site, getting it high in search results and in front of a large audience.

• First start with a keyword analysis… a good SEO consultant can do this for you.
• Determine which content works to convert the best, and which landing page content works to do the same.
• Promote your website via numerous online channels using articles, blogs, and press releases.
• Tie your website to social media, and watch your information spread on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The more people who see your content, the more likely you’ll get someone to engage.

Update your playbook

Continue testing and evaluate whether your strategy is meeting your goals. Be prepared to make changes. Don’t be afraid to try new things, and consider getting help from an SEO consultant!

Drawing attention:
According to marketshare.hitslink.com, 75% of users never scroll past the first page in a search. So there’s no denying that getting your site to the top is crucial. A search engine optimization program, when done well, can position your site high on the list.

But remember, when it comes to determining your ranking, search engines look not only for key words, but also for fresh content in your web design. So, update your site with reviews, blogs, and new postings. Those blogs should contain keywords related to your services, and should be selected based on researched competition, as well as the number of searches performed monthly.

Blogging can help drive your site to the top of the search page, but there are certain violations that could cause your blog to be flagged, down-ranked, and even pulled by the search engine. There are other SEO violations that could cause you trouble… they involve over-optimization of your site. Read here for more.

Be patient:
Statistics show that SEO success is much like any relationship – things really take off initially, success continues at a lower level for a few months, then, with continued effort, will climb again. According to recent data, SEO programs can yield as much as a 300% growth over 6 months.

Take this information with a grain of salt. It requires a continued, joint effort to possibly land those kind of increases. Companies that only engage in on-site SEO saw a large initial increase in traffic, which then dropped off dramatically after 2 months.

Those with only off-site SEO company programs may start off with slightly lower rate of success, but will see a sharper increase as results climb steadily between the 3- 5 month mark. The take-away… marrying efforts of on-site and off-site SEO could provide you with promising results in a more consistent pattern.

Make the effort:
While you may have success initially, be certain to work on the relationship between your SEO and your website to keep it going.

* Conduct a regular audit of how your efforts are working.
* Evaluate, and determine if your website design still offers what people want.
* Assess whether you need to make any changes, and then implement them.

Making a vow to put forth the effort should bring the relationship between SEO and your website to the next level… and to ‘happily ever after.’

Display ads or Banner ads as they are also called, are a natural next step. Display ads are the internet marketing equivalent of a TV commercial, but are more highly targeted. True it is push marketing, just like TV, but with the internet you can avoid broadcasting to thousands, just to try and reach one person.  Display ads can be targeted in several ways so that your ads show up onto websites that make sense to the person that is surfing. Example: Running a display ad for diapers on a baby focused website or a network of sites that appeal to 18-35 year old females. It is the same principle that advertisers have tried for years. Target your ads to specific demographics. The internet however, also lets you use psychographics. Psychographics, you ask? Simply put, it is user behavior. Display ads can be targeted based on the behavior of the computer user. If they have been visiting Kelly Blue Book’s website or Edmunds, they are probably in the car market. We can now start sending a car dealer’s display ads to make impressions onto that user’s computer, based on those behaviors.  What if someone keeps reading blog articles on pregnancy?  That’s right, start sending out ads for baby shower event planners, Fit Mother On-Line Magazine, etc.

There are actually six ways that display ads can be targeted. Behavioral, Endemic, Contextual, Engagement Based, Geo-Targeted, and the best, Remarketing. Why is remarketing the best? Because the user has already visited your website. This helps your business stay top of mind while they make a purchasing decision.  This is especially important for businesses that have a long sales cycle. If your customer is likely to research several sites prior to purchase, then re-marketing is invaluable. You can constantly keep them aware of your business after they have left your site and browse around the internet. Yes, this requires a cookie or pixel to be placed onto their computer and yes, it won’t work if they don’t allow cookies, but let’s be honest, most folks think cookies come in chocolate chip or mint fudge. Remarketing really helps bring people back to your site.

That’s a high level view of Display Advertising, but if I got into a lot of technical details, your eyes would glaze over. Suffice it to say that internet marketing, through the use of Display, is highly targeted, is cost effective, (usually around $9-$10 cost per thousand (CPM) impressions), and can help a user make a decision to buy your products or services because they saw your business all over the internet.

Internet marketing strategy number one is to be very focused with your budget. The internet allows you to hunt with a rifle rather than a shotgun. Internet marketing allows you to advertise to leads that are pre-qualified, have already visited your website, have visited sites related to your industry, or even have been reading articles or blogs about your industry’s products or services. There is no question about it, internet marketing done properly, can be the most efficient use of your marketing budget.

Let’s start with pay-per-click advertising. It is pull marketing at its finest. Regular TV ads or direct mail pieces are pushed to people, most of who have no interest and/or trust in the message. With pay-per-click marketing, computer users pull the ad to themselves, by searching for something in Google, Yahoo or Bing.  Pay-per-click advertising allows you to advertise specifically to people that are searching the internet for terms that you choose to advertise for.  If, for example, you are a small HVAC company, you can advertise specifically for someone searching for air conditioning repairmen in your service area. No wasted ad dollars there! Even better, you don’t pay a penny for the ad to appear on their computer screen when they search, you only pay if they click on your ad and visit your website. Now your marketing budget is going only to pay for people who chose to make contact with your website and no one else. Pay-per-click advertising gets you the most targeted lead you will ever get.

Alright, now we have people coming to your website. So why are the phones not ringing and the contact forms not piling up? Internet marketing strategy number two is conversion architecture. That is just a fancy name for a website that makes the phones ring. There is actually a lot of technical discussion that could be made about conversion architecture, but we will save that for another day. Today, we will boil it down to a few items. Does your website provide the information a web surfer requires, in a quick and visual manner? Does your site navigate easily, load quickly, and lead the user to make contact with your business? Does your website have your phone number prominently displayed in the top right corner of each page? Is your contact form asking for too many required fields to be filled in? Does your website immediately notify you that someone filled out the contact form, so you can reach out to them before they move on to the next business? A properly constructed website keeps your business from wasting your internet marketing budget. Otherwise, you are fishing with no bait.

How do we know the answers to the questions I just posed? Internet marketing strategy number three is Google analytics. As we all know, nothing ever leaves the internet. What happens in Vegas, stays on Facebook, stays on You Tube, and stays on Twitter. With all the information available to everyone, someone needs to dissect it all and analyze the data for you. It’s not about how many hits you had. It’s about the user interaction with your website. Would you like to know how often people return to your site? How many pages of your site get seen the most? From what page do most people leave your site? These and many more questions are answered by Google analytics. Let’s look at that last question as an example. If most people leave your site from the contact form page, that could be a good or bad thing. If the forms are piling up and match up somewhat with the page views, then great, people are finishing the form and they leave because they are done. But, what if the page views and form totals don’t match up much at all? Perhaps your form does not load properly or it asks too many questions. Again, without the data, you will never know.  This is why hiring a good internet marketing consultant can be very valuable to your business. He or she understands this data and can review it for you so you can run your business.

Now, what about display or banner ads, Facebook advertising, remarketing to prior website viewers, social media management, brand reputation management, mobile marketing etc.? Those topics will be covered in upcoming posts, so click the RSS to follow this feed or come back often for more on internet marketing strategies for small businesses. (Especially if you don’t know what an RSS is…).

When it comes to Pay per Click advertising, I advise clients strickly based on the following:

1. How many leads do you need to convert 1 customer?

2. How much revenue is the average conversion worth?

3. What is your net profit per conversion?

After that information is gathered, we can walk backwards to a budget. What increase in profit do you want = how many conversions you need = how many leads you require = budget based on cost per click.

Easy Math if you look at it backwards, not so much if you look at it forward.

Again, Pay per click is not for everyone, but it sure pays off for the ones that work it properly.