Tracking Your Marketing Spend

Marketing is deemed to be an essential activity by most businesses, at least to some extent. Bigger businesses have bigger marketing budgets, so can carry out more marketing activities – but are they necessarily effective? Often they’re not. This is why businesses need to track their marketing spend, to make sure that it is delivering results for them and they have something to show for their money.

Marketing spend can be tracked in many ways. If you are running ads, then you can track the results of these easily by looking at what you are spending and the traffic that these ads are generating. You can then see if this traffic converts.

It’s harder to see if marketing activities like raising brand awareness are effective. However, you should still try to track them wherever possible to try and understand your audience and how well your marketing campaigns and activities are working.

Choosing Between Ads and SEO

Ads and SEO are both designed to achieve similar results: to drive traffic to your website, and to get you more leads for your business. So how do the two differ? They use very different methodologies, for starters. Ads are designed to be more of a hard sell, whereas SEO should build over time, helping people to find your website organically.

If you choose to use Ads, then you will pay for them on a pay per click basis. This can be beneficial, as you will only pay if you have got a good result. However, SEO can be more beneficial in the long term. This is because you will pay a set amount for it, so as you start to get more traffic and more conversions, it can become very profitable indeed. You do need to make sure that the rest of your website is set up for success though, which could cost you money.

Do you Really Need a Web Marketing Agency?

Businesses might question whether or not a web marketing agency is really integral to their strategy and their sales. The answer? It can be incredibly helpful if you need to spread the word about your business and make sure people know you are there. If you want to achieve more sales for your business, then the answer is that it is going to be very important.

People nowadays shop on the internet and find businesses that they are going to use online. This is the commonplace way of doing things, so if you don’t have a digital strategy, you are missing out on a lot of the custom you could have. By broadening your horizons and making sure you are online, you can eliminate these problems and make sure people know you are there. Find a good web marketing agency who you trust, and measure the results they achieve for you.

Running a Successful PPC Campaign

If you are committed to managing it properly, a PPC campaign can be one of the most effective ways to generate results by bringing in more traffic and customers. It requires a number of elements to succeed though, which include:

  • Effective ads. Your ads will need to be targeted and using the right kinds of keywords for your business. Google, or any other PPC platform, will select ads in an auction and if you want your to compete successfully, they need to be clear and relevant.
  • Good copy. The copy needs to be compelling to encourage people to click on your ads. Make sure you write content for your ads that is straight to the point, but also highly appealing so customers know what your services are and want to know more.
  • PPC landing pages. People who click on PPC adverts are more likely to be ready to buy. Design landing pages for them to arrive at, selling to them quickly.

Completing your Keyword Research – And Using It

When you embark upon an SEO project, the keyword research you carry out is essential. It will inform everything that you do on your website to boost your rankings, as you will know which keywords to target.

Look at the keyword volumes, but don’t just use the keywords with the highest search volumes. Remember that these are going to be very competitive, so it is perhaps better to have some more local keywords in the mix, along with others that have search volume, but aren’t already saturated with big brands targeting them.

Once you know your numbers, you can build up an SEO strategy that uses them. Decide which keywords you are going to target, and why. Then work out which pages you want to use to target them. This should always be the page most relevant to your keyword, not your homepage. Aim to give people the information they need, so that when they arrive at your website, the bounce rate isn’t high.