Internet and Businesses Articles

Did you know you could probably improve the return on your search engine marketing spend by as much as 50% by focusing your efforts on communicating more effectively with customers that arrive on your site via the major search engines.

Not only would this improve the effectiveness of your pay per click advertising but would also reduce your cost per acquisition fees and increase the profitability of each customer acquired through search engine marketing.

How? Read on.

Running a search engine marketing campaign without clear communication goals in mind is a foolish strategy to adopt in today’s highly competitive search marketplace. Without a clear online communication strategy in place profits and potential customer relationships are in danger of slipping through your sales funnel. Under pressure to continue moving and growing, you keep flooding your funnel with more traffic. But traffic, is about quality not quantity and the search engines just keep on drinking your marketing spend. They’re the ones that end up making a lot of cash from your frequent fill-ups. Did you know that Google charges you each time a user clicks on your PPC advert during the same search session? This often happens when users bounce back and forward from the search engine results page to the advertiser’s websites desperately trying to find the information and help they crave. So that single visitor could be costing you more than you think.

It takes a little time and money to fix the problem. You need to think about how you handle customers who find your products and services via a search engine. You also need to think about where they are in the purchase decision making process and if they are just researching products or are actually ready to buy. The complexity of the decision making process is often down to how many people are involved, is it a high cost / high risk purchase and so on. By taking a closer look at the key phrases you are bidding for in your search engine marketing campaign, you can identify how far down that decision making cycle visitors are.

To help move visitors through the different stages of the buying cycle, you could perhaps create a specific landing page for a keyword and publish some content that reads something like:

“Welcome to our company – We're glad you found us. Here's the product you've been searching for. We have a wide range of products to fit your unique needs. If you'd like to learn more about these products or are unsure what product might best suit your own specific needs, please do not hesitate to complete our short enquiry form and we will be happy to help you.”

Maybe they don’t want to sleep with you on their first date?
You need to understand that when a visitor comes on to your site that they may not be ready to buy. Therefore, your goal is not to ‘sell’ to the visitor but to begin an online dialogue. No-one likes being ‘sold-to’, but prospects do like helpful staff that are interested in helping them make the best decision on what to buy and want not to buy. You need to build trust and prove that you want to genuinely help them fulfil their online goal and so one of your main objectives is to get more information on your targeted customer. What do you have to lose? If you really want to go to get the sale you need to demonstrate to your visitors all the value-added services and support they'll receive from you as customers.

Maybe they don’t want to sleep with you on their first date?

Once you have an email, you have the basis to build a relationship. You've convinced the searcher to interact and trust you with their email address. Now, you need to use the information you extracted from them during this first contact to thank them and probe them for more information that will help you recommend suitable products, service or solutions.

Understand the various stages of the purchase decision process.

Getting leads from search engines is just one part of the game, not the entire game. It provides an opportunity to fix the customer communication problem. Done properly, search engine marketing can deliver new customers to your doorstep, cost effectively and efficiently. Otherwise, you'll keep returning to the fill up the leaky sales funnel with more traffic. Like I said earlier, search engine marketing is not about increasing the quantity of visitors to your site it’s about improving the quality of communication you have with those targeted prospects so that you can turn them into repeat and profitable customers.

Damon Lightley is a search engine marketing consultant at Site Visibility Ltd. Site Visibility is a UK based search engine marketing company that helps clients increase online customer acquisition and retention using search engine optimisation, pay per click and online marketing campaign measurement techniques.

http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk