| Annual
Budget upto $1,000 |
- Make sure your web hosting service is reliable, and change the company if
they're not. I sometimes talk to marketers whose web sites have been down for
days at a time, and for whom this happens several times a year. Often the reason
they chose the web hosting company was because it was local, or cheap or run by
a friend of the owner. They assume that downtime is part of running a web site.
It's not. Downtimes of more than an hour or so a year are unacceptable if you're
doing business via the web. It's a pain changing the hosting company, but the
results are worthwhile. Webhostdir.com
is a directory of hosting companies. We switched to VERIO in 1998 from another
company, and we're still with them
- Ask you business partners, such as customers, VARs and other collaborative
companies if they will add a link to your web site. You may only get 10
referrals a year from each source, but if there are hundreds or thousands of
such sites, the volume will soon mount up. The number of sites linking to you is
also a weighting factor used by many search-engines, and that has led to some
companies setting up multiple sites which link just to their own sites, in an
effort to spam the weightings. That in turn has led to anti spamming strategies
to counter such moves.
- Never leave your web marketing strategy entirely in the hands of a
marketing agency. While I respect and highly value the contributions which
marketing agencies can make to
PR, editorial,
market research and designing collaterals such as logos and banner ads... I've
rarely come across any which understand web advertising. That situation may
change, of course over time.
- Pay to get listed on Yahoo. It only
costs about $300 and is better than waiting years to get listed by the free
process.
- Use a service such as SubmitIt! to
add your site to multple search-engines once only. Resist the offers from many
web promoters to resubmit your site monthly. Such techniques irritate
search-engine owners and may even get you delisted as spammers.
- Google offers a key word promotion
service. If your market is focused and can be summarised in one or two words,
then it may be worth investing a few hundred dollars to test this concept. It
will take about half an hour of your time to do the research and set it up.
- Overture, the new name for GoTo,
pioneered the concept of paid placement in search-engines. Their top two or
three results appear on a network of syndicated sites. For this to work properly
you'll need from about ten upto several hundred search terms and related target
pages. It will typically take about a day to research and set up and an hour or
so each month to monitor. Invest a minimum of $500, otherwise it's a waste of
time. Since the success of GoTo, hundreds of other sites have set up to imitate
the process, and will contact you when they see your listings. Ignore them all,
because in my experience the kind of people whom you want as customers don't
visit their sites in sufficient quantity, and cost per click is irrelevant if
you get almost zero clicks.
| |
| Annual
Budget $1,000 to $5,000 |
- Have you checked out everything in the table on the left?
- Classified advertising, which started on the web in 1995 is still the most
cost effective form of advertising at the end of 2001. Classified advertising is
where you pay for your company and or products to be listed on a targeted web
site in your industry usually a flat fee for a year. Examples of sites which are
suitable include the obvious portals, and the less obvious
industry trade associations.
(You don't have to go along to their meetings or even read their technical
standards, just pay the annual dues to be listed on their web sites.)
Using
this method on ACSL's sites typically delivers pageviews from around 10 to 15
cents, but the volume of interest in your pages is not guaranteed. There's also
a branding benefit because readers see your company listed or associated with
products even if they don't click on those pages at the time. Another effect,
was reported to me in Q4 2001 by a long standing advertiser whose company name
is same as the url of their web site. They tracked 600 visitors to their web
site in a single week from one of our portals. That didn't show up on our side
of the statistics because readers bypassed the normal navigation route. They
were pleased, because that was on a package which cost $1,000 for 1 year. | |
| Annual
Budget $5,000 to $40,000 |
- Have you checked out everything in the table on the left?
- Banner advertising has a poor reputation which is largely based on running
banners on unfocused sites like general search-engines. We've been selling
banner ads since 1998 and some of our current advertisers who started running
banners back then are now running nearly as many banners each month, as they
used to each year. Newer advertisers often report that they've tried running the
same banner on maybe as many as 6 other sites but never got good results before
they tried our portals. The key factors to success are:-
1 - do the
right kind of people (who could become your customers) using the site to find
closely related suppliers and products? - If they're not, you're wasting your
time.
2 - is the lifetime value of a typical new customer high
relative to the cost of acquiring them? - If a typical customer spends $10,000
to $100,000 a year on your type of products, then banner ads are sustainable and
economic. If the value of a typical customer slides down below $1,000 then
you've got serious problems which will be apparent in EVERY aspect of your
direct marketing strategy, not just banner ads. You should refocus your
marketing to a channel strategy because your VAR can bundle your low cost $300
product with a bunch of others over time and achieve economies which may be
impossible for you on your own.
3 - benchmark your banners at low
volumes. When you are confident that the process is working after a month or so
at low volume, scale up to whatever your portal will let you have. (A good
portal will always have more demand for its banner ad capacity than supply, and
will typically ration allocation based on a variety of business factors.)
How
much to spend? Running less than 5,000 to 10,000 impressions a month should be
regarded as the mimimum worthwhile quantity on any site. Ideally you should be
aiming to run significantly more than this on each portal you advertise on. I
encourage advertisers to start with our minimum order size (10,000 impressions)
and work their way up to 100,000 and above as they gain confidence. If it works
well your annual budget should reach into the millions or tens of millions of
impressions. The real problem is identifying enough quality sites.
- Press release distribution is often regarded as PR, but when it's targeted
at electronic media, I think it's more accurate to include it as part of your
advertising strategy. Depending how large your company is, you should aim to
create and distribute press releases every week or month. The more you invest in
this process on the creative and distribution side, the more results you'll get
(upto a saturation limit which depends on the breadth of your product line.)
See also:- Press
Release FAQ's - How to write them, where to distribute them etc | |
