This article identifies the possible online promotional methods and techniques every online business should consider to improve traffic and brand awareness. Typical online promotional plans always show increase in traffic but not in conversion which requires thorough understanding of your potential customers, market segmentation and knowledge of your product or service.
Let’s not jump on to the promotional methods before considering these important factors.
- Do you simply need traffic or aiming for targeted traffic?
- What products/services are you promoting?
- How knowledgeable are you on your product or service?
- What is your advertising budget, profit margins and time scales?
- Would you carry out these activities yourself or by third parties?
Before we proceed further it would be useful to give you an overview of the four basic payment model (CPA, CPC, CPM and Hybrid Model).
CPA stands for Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Action typically charged when any action takes place such as in affiliate marketing campaign paying for conducting a required action which could be filling in an application form for credit card request. The benefit of CPA model is that the merchants don’t have to pay anything until a specified action is conducted but the disadvantage is slow response and lower traffic.
CPC stands for Cost per Click, highly recognisable model over the internet such as Google Ads or Kelkoo charges fixed or variable cost for each click they refer to your website. The benefits are higher traffic and better conversion (if necessary measures are taken) and the potential disadvantage is irrelevant traffic and higher cost. I know it’s confusing but would make sense later in the article.
CPM stands for Cost Per Thousand (Cost Per Million which I never get my head around). Display advertising on forums, Yahoo and MSN portals charge for per thousands impressions for the creative. The benefit is higher brand awareness and the disadvantage could be higher cost of conversion.
Hybrid model combines the above models to give greater flexibility to the advertiser such as a credit card company may offer 10 pence per click and additional £5 on successful application.
All these models are not necessarily applicable and could be proved successful for you business. You need to identify and segment your customers, market and target channels to build your strategy around these payment models to achieve higher return on investment.
Search Engines Marketing
Google, Yahoo, MSN are the major players in the market. Google has the biggest share of the search users on the internet and also considered to be the most cost effective and offers higher conversion as compared to others. I have worked on several campaigns and each search engine needs to be understood based on their market share, customer segmentation and reach to your potential audience. Yahoo may offer higher conversion in finance sector and Google in retail. I always carry out a test campaign for a month to analyse the competition, potential traffic, conversion ratio and cost of the campaign. Quality and delivery of adverts and with the scope and time span you have allocated are also critical so large businesses.
Most search engines operate on CPC model which an advertiser could set it up as fixed or variable such the search engine systems would determine the placement on the quality and maximum cost an advertiser is willing to pay.
Price Comparison Engines
Price comparison engines are one of the biggest drivers of potential and targeted traffic to internet retailers. Kelkoo, Dealtime, Shopzilla, Nextag, Price Runner, Price Grabber and several others have grown significantly in the last couple of years. They offer ease of searching for a product and simply compare the prices from the leading retailers. A typical price comparison engine charges range from 10p to £1 per click. Several other search engines such as Money Super Market and Fool are the biggest aggregators in the finance sector.
Large price comparison website may only work on CPC model with the exception of Amazon (it’s a different story J) but hybrid models are offered to test drive the campaign for a month. Don’t forget to compare the scope, CPC and list of competitors on these channels before signing up the contracts.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest growing online advertising medium typically generates 20% of the total sales to large retailers. The affiliate industry has grown mainly due to the increase of affiliate networks, affiliates working full time from home and several platforms such as A4U Forum are available to communicate. These are the possible factors you need to identify before setting up an affiliate campaign.
- Which affiliate network and why? Do some research to find out similar successful merchant on the networks?
- Total cost of the campaign for at least one year? You would not see quick results on affiliate marketing. The cost may include campaign setup cost, monthly management fees, recruitment and promoting the campaign on forums, communicating and organising events for affiliates, creative design cost etc.
- What are your targets for one year? You can obtain several projections from the affiliate networks which are normally provided on similar merchant and niche.
- As the industry is still shaping towards good practices therefore view the forums and read the industry news to understand new trends, latest technologies, top affiliates and build long term loyalty and strong relationships with them.
- Segment your affiliate base into voucher sites, content base, PPC affiliates, comparison engines, blogs etc
The affiliate campaign could be setup on any payment model mentioned above. What you need to understand is how would you obtain higher conversion and also keep your affiliates loyal. Trade Doubler, Buy.at, Webgains, Affiliate Future, Affiliate Window, Commission Junction and Paid on Results are the major networks in the UK.
eMail Marketing
eMail marketing has been around for several years and potentially ignored due to the poor data capture techniques. Large retailers effectively utilise the opportunity with higher return. Most retailers add random products which may be reduced and expect the users to buy from them. Well, email marketing is highly demanding and also shows highest conversion if understood and conducted successfully.
Clever data intelligence is required to analyse consumer behaviour for email marketing such as a registered customer who has purchased a Plasma TV from you would not be interested in another TV deal for one year or a customer who has purchased a printer would be interested in ink cartridges than random deals from your database. Other scenario is if a max order value of a particular customer is £100 and it seems useless to convince him to make a purchase over £1000. There are so many intelligent decisions which need to be made regarding eMail promotions to existing or new customers.
Other factors which also involve are the cost of each email delivery, design contents, creative, deals, segmentation of customers, click through and conversion ratio. eMail data can be bought or borrowed from several eMail brokers or companies but what you need to understand is cost and conversion on delivery.
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) are rolling in to cover the cost or it may not remain sustainable even in short term.
