Archive for the ‘B2B Marketing’ Category

PPC Advertising for Maximum Web Promotion November 14th, 2008

ying

Engaging in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has its own benefits and drawbacks. But what exactly is PPC advertising and what it can do to your business?

Business nowadays is doing different kinds of austerity measures when it comes to advertising their products and services. This is because of high rates of placing ads on print and on television. But there is a fast growing approach that businessmen can utilize to bring their services closer to the people and that is through Internet Marketing.

One tool that is causing internet marketing popularity is PPC advertising. This is a technique used in search engine marketing that requires one to pay a fee every time someone clicks an ad on your website. Usually this placement is done through a bidding process. If you are a top bidder for your keywords/phrases, you are sure to be on the number one spot on all search engines. Just be sure of the effectiveness of your ad copy to get the most number of clicks you need for your business.

Here are the benefits of PPC advertising are:

1. You need not be a genius in computer and technology to be able to run this ad campaign.
2. Immediate results are seen after a few days.
3. No need to make a website conform to the SEO rules.
4. Nothing to lose even if you do not top the pages of different search engines. You can still always choose PPC advertising.
5. You can make use any search engine available.
6. You can type in any keyword you like.

Drawbacks of PPC advertising includes:

1. Fixed payments every month to the search engine you choose.
2. Pay for each click received by your website. At times, visitors are just competitors or people playing pranks on search engines. This hassle wastes money you put in to this advertising.
3. Inability to pay for the fees next month would mean removal of your website on the paid listings.
4. This advertising can only be used temporarily because it is difficult to handle in the long run.
5. Pay-per-click pricing can be costly for long periods of time, therefore, this should be stopped after an ad campaign.

But how exactly PPC advertising can increase traffic, leads and sales?

PRE-QUALIFIED TRAFFIC. All visitors of your website are already considered as a qualified consumer or buyer of your product. PPC advertising leads your customers to you for a lesser cost.

INSTANT EXPOSURE, IMMEDIATE PROFITS. PPC search engines enable you to get your desired results fast. They will have your website live within just a few hours which means immediate increase in sale.

CONSISTENT TOP LISTINGS. This is to get your website on top of the sponsored search results for free. You just have to choose the keywords related to your site and business and place them within your web pages. After this, you are done.

PPC advertising enables advertisers to control their advertising campaigns. Advertisers have effectively targeted their audience and set their own price per click. PPC advertising networks provide the platform to identify the desired audience by geographic setting, topic and industry.  These networks have a list of websites of the publishers where the ads will be placed.

Tools are provided by the networks to check how the pay per click limit is working for a certain advertiser. If its still competitive, would it be even listed among the paid search lists or does it generate sales? Of course, if the advertiser made the highest bid, the better chances the ad will be seen in the search engine. These networks too provide protection for the advertisers against click fraud. This advertising set-up allows advertisers to set a daily budget for his ads, thus, less spending for unnecessary clicks. Advertiser will never go over his budget.

In PPC advertising, what are important are the keywords and phrases. You have to select at least ten “very specific” keywords that would give you the best traffic in the search. Then, write the ad creatively but straightforward. Tell the truth about your product or service and do not lie. Good thing if your product or service will not disappoint those that are relying on your ad’s promise – but what if it did otherwise? Important too is the clarity of the ad. Do not use very vague languages. Include important details like the price.

You should also remember to budget your bids. Do not go overbidding because you will only lose your money and do not go so low that your ads will never get the chance to show up. Check your profit against your spending. If you see no progress then most likely you have to drop your ad campaign.

More and more advertisers have been using PPC advertising and it will continue to grow faster than any online advertising techniques. From revenues of $2.6 billion in 2004 to $5.5 billion in 2009, cost per click will dramatically go up as well from $0.29 to $0.36.

PPC advertising is new in online marketing and it is going to continue in the years to come. For advertisers, this means increase revenues with fewer advertising expenses, savings, more sales, good return of investment (ROI) and effective ad campaigns in the days to come.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

No Comments »

Continue reading...


 

Increasing Sales Through Strategic Internet Marketing November 7th, 2008

ying

The Internet has now become an important medium for product and service advertisements.  Almost every company that can afford print, radio and TV advertisements have also ventured into placing ads on the Internet.

millions of website

But with millions of websites out there being visited by millions of computer users, how can you make sure that your ad can be seen by your target customers and that your leads will be followed by these users?  Here are a few tips.

1.  Place an ad on the websites frequented by your target customers.  Before doing this, you need to define who will be your target customers.  Placing an ad on sites that they usually visit will increase the possibility that your ad will gain the attention and will be followed your target customers.

Also, consider the website’s search engine placement, traffic, external linking and the other ads placed on it.  External linking will determine if there are other sites that link to this site.  This will mean that people can get to the site where your ad is placed, even if they are browsing a different site.  Check if many of your competitors have ads on this site.

2.  Placing ads on some sites cost some money.  However, there are also sites that can place a link to your site, product or service in exchange of having their link being displayed on your site.  This is also true about the newsletters sent by site owners to its mailing list members regularly.

Also, having helpful links placed on your site and having sites link to your pages help in boosting search engine ranking.  This is similar to making a statement that your site’s content is important that other sites have links to your web pages.

3.  Pay-per-click (PPC) is also a good method in Internet marketing.  You will only need to pay for the ad if the link is clicked.  If you prefer this method of advertisement, make sure that you are using services that set limits on daily expenses.  There are also services that help you determine effective keywords and monitor the PPC results.

4.  Choose your domain name wisely.  It is still being debated if domain names matter when it comes to search engine placement.  Whether it does or not, having product related domain names help consumers remember your domain, that they can go back to your site even without the links.

5.  Make sure you have useful content on your sites.  While keyword density is important in search engine placement, having useless information or annoying repetition of keywords will not increase your customer’s confidence in your site.  It may even affect your sites traffic and can get your site removed from search engines.  So make sure that keywords are used strategically.

6.  When thinking of keywords, think like your target customers.  What do you think are they going to search so they can get to your site?  Also, use specific keywords or key phrases.  Submitting a single word or a very general phrase to a search engine will not get you to the top of the search results compared to submitting specific keywords that describe your product and services perfectly.

7.  Track your ads.  Always check how much you have spent on placing links on frequently visited sites and on PPC.  There are services that allow you to monitor PPC transactions and how many of these end in sales.  You always need to consider if the ads that you have placed on these websites are getting you to your target consumers and if these ads can lead to revenue.

One final tip on marketing products and services, sell the benefits.  It will help your marketing strategies a lot if you highlight the benefits of choosing your products and services instead of merely discussing the product specifications.  Product specifications may not mean much to customers, unless they know what these stand for (how these specifications affect the quality of the product or service).

Many people say getting to the top of search engine results is difficult since millions of websites exist, which can be using the same keywords.  While this is true, this doesn’t mean that your website has to stacked under your competitors’ websites when presenting search engine results.  Strategic advertising and linking, together with useful content, can also get you to the top of the search results.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

3 Comments »

Continue reading...


 

Wanna Ride the B2B Business Trend? August 3rd, 2008

AC

If you are marketing your service business to corporates or in the B2B (Business-to-Business) sector then the following post is very important for you.

“This essay is a joint effort by IMD’s Business Marketing team to offer ideas about how firms can effectively manage these pressing issues – ways to make these trends work for you, rather than against you. Below, we relate the trends to the real-world approaches managers are using to succeed in the complex B2B marketplace, looking at four different areas: innovation, distribution, customer data, and strategy.

1) Innovation: From products to services

Nimble challengers, particularly from emerging countries, are showing manufacturers how easy it is to commoditise even sophisticated products. However, services, with the expertise of the team as the differentiator, are often harder to copy, and easier to innovate. Which explains why many product producers have been able to do well augmenting their business with a service component. Service revenue might consist of replacement or spare parts, service contracts to regularly maintain equipment or products, or consulting on how to best use products.

The experience of three global Finnish companies in similar types of industries shows the importance of services to total corporate sales.

Kone Elevator has been able to ramp up its services business, so that it they now comprise 60 percent of revenue. Equally interestingly, Wartsila, a global leader in diesel engines for ships and power stations, has increased its service business to 50 percent over an 8-year period. A third company, Metso, which is active in the paper and mining industry, has been able to maintain profitability by lifting its sales of services to 40 percent of the total.

Although none of these firms publicly divulge the profitability of their service units, services are generally thought to produce better margins than new product businesses, and thus are an important factor in sales revenue, growth, and overall profitability. Each firm managed to remain competitive in industries that have seen fierce competition develop recently.

Building a service mindset

Are there any particular managerial lessons to be learned from those companies?

Comparing the efforts of the leaders with the laggards indicates that leaders engage in a much more deliberate effort to build their service business. They have a senior executive in charge of the service business, who has equal stature with the rest of the product business units. These firms combine the service activities of many business units to build genuine service platforms for maximum impact. They take a broad view of “service”, moving from aftermarket spare parts, to full lifecycle management of the customer’s equipment. They offer many types of service and develop separate service brands. They create service technologies and processes, and even service competitive equipment. And, last but not least, they have aggressive M&A track records, integrating smaller service-only businesses into their overall effort. Many B2B companies will need to emulate the service leaders’ concepts and strategies if they want to keep up with the best in their industries.”

You may read the article here or download the pdf file here.

You can see that the trend of product producer changing to provide more value added service provider. So, if you are already a service provider, what does this means to you? Is this trend going to be a threat or opportunities for your service business?

From what I see, it will have more opportunities for us, the service business owner, because we are the expert in providing our niche service and this will give us the opportunities to work with the big product companies to provide service for their clients. You must start looking at our target market and what kind of product do they buy so that you can know which product companies that you can tied up with and then think innovatively to create a service that you can help the product company promote their product to their clients and at the same time provide value to their clients too.

Even though, this is not an online marketing strategies but I strongly believe that this new trend will give us the service business owner a great opportunities to market our service to more people. Tell me what do you think about this new trend. By the way, I highly recommend you to read the whole articles because there are more about the B2B business trends in the article.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

2 Comments »

Continue reading...