Online Marketing has developed into a very powerful tool for driving visitor traffic to your site, with several facets that need to be considered when defining or evaluating a program for your eCommerce site.
The start of any program is the keyword list. This is a collection of words or phrases that your potential customers are likely to use when they are looking for products that you want to sell. In-depth research should be conducted to identify the best keywords for your business, products and target market. Once you have your list of keywords, you can begin to implement components of your strategy. The comprehensive program will address the following:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. E-mail Marketing
3. Pay-per-Click Campaigns (PPC)
4. Comparison Shopping Engines
5. Online Media Buy
SEO is the component that has the most potential to improve your business. It is also the most time consuming to implement and has the longest period of time between implementing changes and seeing results. The idea is that you modify your site content (and maybe its structure) so that search engines rank you highly for the keywords most important to your business. It takes time to move up in the rankings, so getting this done early gets time working for you. The relative advantages of SEO are that you are not charged by the search engines for traffic that comes from this organic evaluation, and for a large portion of the Internet community the organic content evaluation is the most trusted indicator that your site is the one they are looking for.
E-mail marketing campaigns put relevant information in the hands of people already interested in you. The messages must be relevant and timely and the highest performing campaigns include an offer. The most important dimensions of relevancy are: timeliness (usually of purchase), frequency, lifetime value of customer (either number of orders or total value of sales), and category of interest. It is critical that you keep a clean list of people who want to receive your messages.
Pay-per-click campaigns have the most immediate and measurable impact on your top line. It is the online marketing equivalent of day trading. You can specify for each keyword what you are willing to pay for a visitor and adjust your “bids” on a minute-by-minute basis. The advantage is that you do not need to make any changes to your site; you can get immediate access to search engine visitors, and you only pay when someone navigates to your site by clicking your link in their search results.
Comparison shopping engines allow a visitor to select a specific product and compare price, availability, payment terms, etc. from competing vendors. This is similar to PPC in that you only pay when someone clicks your link after comparing you to other providers. The expectation is that visitors who come from this type of site are ready to buy and will convert to purchases at a high rate.
Online media buying puts your message in front of visitors to other sites that you believe will be likely customers. For example, if you sell auto parts you may be interested in sponsoring a banner ad at a site for car enthusiasts. There are many ways that providers charge for this type of service (usually based on either impressions or click-through).
Critical to the success of any online marketing campaign is being able to manage and measure the results. Rosetta has a comprehensive team with the tools, methodologies and discipline to ensure that your campaigns cost-effectively drive visitors to your site that are likely to convert to purchasers.
