Website Marketing Campaign Tips

Website Marketing Campaign Tip #1: Find Out What Your Visitors Want
As business owners, it's very easy to convince ourselves we know what the customer wants. Before you decide to create a new product or service, make sure you've done the requisite research to ensure there actually is a need within your target market.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to simply ask your customers. If you already have a periodic newsletter, then send out a link to an external survey in your next issue. Ask questions that will help uncover the need for your product or service idea, and be sure to offer an incentive for your customers and prospects to complete the survey. If you don't currently have a way to conduct electronic surveys, I recommend SurveyMonkey.

Another way to uncover potential demand for a product is to use a keyword research tool and research keyword phrases related to your product or service. If you find a lot of people searching for this type of information, chances are good you have a viable product. Try the Google Keyword Research Tool or a professional service like WordTracker. If you don't have a lot of experience working with keywords, then I recommend reading the article Determining Keywords for Your Web Pages.

There's nothing worse than to have a brilliant product with no market. Taking the time to research the needs of your current target market is not option. Without this knowledge, you will have to rely on luck to carry the day. And as you may have heard, luck has a peculiar habit of favoring those who don't depend on it!

Website Marketing Campaign Tip #2: Create a Compelling Landing Page
Your product can be a hard good, a service or a downloadable report. Whatever it is, you need to find a way to convey the benefits of this item in a direct and simple way. I recommend you create a focused landing page for each of your products or services.

An effective landing page:

• Concentrates on a single compelling message and quickly communicates the number one benefit of the product or service.
• Has a clear call-to-action. What is it you ultimately want the customer to do?
• Captures contact information such as name and email for future marketing efforts.
• Avoids distractions like links to outside websites or images and photos that do not have relevance to the product.
• Contains bonus offers and incentives for following through on the call-to-action.
• Contains testimonials in order to build trust and confidence

As you build your website content using keyword-focused pages, you will naturally start driving larger amounts of organic traffic. I highly recommend you make your landing page an overall part of your website. Today, it is quite common to see landing pages existing by themselves with no real content-based website wrapped around them. This forces you to rely solely on pay-per-click to drive traffic to the landing page. I recommend you leverage your own free organic traffic and only use pay-per-click as a supplement if at all.

Audio and video can help increase conversion rates for any website marketing campaign. Just be sure to keep and multimedia short and to the point. For landing pages, try and keep you audio/video under 90 seconds. Attention spans are short and you can't expect many people to listen to your 10-minute audio presentation (no matter how compelling you think it might be.)

How long should your landing page be? As long as it takes. Get to your most important benefit right away but take the time to provide all the information required to help build trust and confidence among your visitors.

Website Marketing Campaign Tip #3: Add a Bonus Offer
The use of bonus offers was mentioned in the previous strategy, but deserves to stand on its own. Everyone wants to feel they are getting a good deal, and adding attractive bonus offers to your product is a great way to add value for the customer.

It's important to create bonus offers that have some relation to the primary product or service you are selling. If you are a financial planner and are selling an ebook, offer a free 30-minute phone or personal consultation along with the sale. If your selling a hard good, offer a free accessory item. If you have any partnerships with other business owners, offer one of their products as a free bonus (and have them do the same for you!)

Website Marketing Campaign Tip #4: Test Your Landing Page
How do you determine the best price for your product? How do you decide the best photos and images to use in order to increase conversion rates? What's the best headline to grab your visitor's attention?

The answer is - I have no idea. But there's one way to find out - test, test and test again!

Back in the old days of marketing, testing was really a pain. It could be fairly expensive and generally took a long time to get statistically valid results. With the use of online testing tools, testing your landing page is a breeze.

The secret to small business testing is the Google Website Optimizer. This free service allows you to perform A/B split testing. An A/B split test allows you to test one page parameter against another in order to determine which yields a higher conversion rate.

For example, suppose you're unsure about how to price your product. One way to zero in on a price that yields the greatest profits is to test. To test three different pricing levels, you would simply upload three versions of your landing page. Each page would contain a price you wish to test. The Google Website Optimizer would then randomly serve up one of the three landing pages to each unique visitor on your site. These pages would be served evenly and conversion measurements calculated for each one. At the end of the testing session, you would get a summary of conversion results to determine which pricing structure brought in the highest profits. You would then roll out that price to everyone.

The Website Optimizer can also be used to test headlines, pictures, captions, bonus offers and anything else that affects conversions. It's a wonderful tool and will allow you to double and even triple your conversions rates. The program also allows for Multivariate testing, whereby several parameters are tested at once and the results of all testing permutations are summarized with final conversion rates. This can save time since you can test which particular combination of elements draws the highest conversion rate.

I've written an introductory article on using this program. Click here to read The Google Website Optimizer.

Taken together, these tips will help ensure your website marketing campaign is a successful one.