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Internet Marketing: A Two Way Street for Success
With less and less time on their hands, business owners are partnering with outside teams to help manage their various marketing efforts. As a business owner, you want to make sure your annual investment in your outside marketing teams and their respective channels of marketing is providing you with the results you want. Here are a few ways that LSM recommends you measure the success of your Internet marketing team, and how to work with your team to keep costs low and margins high.
Your Internet marketing team should be focused on two goals – making you more money and creating a positive ROI for their retainer each month – but they can’t do this alone. If done correctly Internet marketing should be a team effort and a two way street for success. Let’s breakdown some examples:
Let’s use Google marketing as our case study. You can either pay to have your Ads shown on Google for potentially valuable keyword phrases, or you can invest in a company to have your website show up organically on search engine results on searches determined to most likely be performed by your target audience. Your Internet marketing team can get in you right in front of your potential customer and track things like phone calls coming in from their work, the amount of traffic your website receives and where the traffic came from. The two things they can’t do are close leads they bring in for you (except in the case of an e commerce based business) or calculate exactly how much revenue they bring you annually.
Your Internet marketing team will look at the numbers they can control. They may report to you things like an increase in organic search result rankings, the flow of traffic on your website, AdWords traffic, lead form submissions and phone calls. What really matters though? The same thing that matters to all business owners - RESULTS. It is up to you as the business owner to set up clear metrics for measuring your incoming leads.
Start by categorizing your leads and placing them into a CRM system like Salesforce. Be sure that all of your incoming leads are tracked and labeled; what you can measure you can manage. However you receive leads, be sure to have a clearly defined process for categorizing where they came from. Each month you should audit your lead flow and determine which marketing avenues are successful. Knowing this will help you determine ROI and where you can best invest your marketing dollars.
Again – please, don’t keep this information to yourself! Be sure to communicate to your Internet marketing team each month what the exact revenue numbers are from your website and from their other work. If the numbers don’t look exactly as you’d like your team can change their strategy to help make the work more efficient. If it’s a good source of revenue you can expand your investment – if it doesn’t work out then at least you have a better understanding as to what does and doesn’t work for your business.
All marketing should be focused on finding a return. Measure and communicate your level of return with your Internet marketing team and your Internet Marketing efforts will have a far greater chance for success.
Trevor Emerson
President/CEO Local Search Masters
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The Social Whirl: Facebook Personal Profiles vs. Facebook Fan Pages
Many folks these days have a personal page that they use for business purposes. I’ve seen multiple clients do this, all seeming to not understand the difference between having a personal profile and a business page. Well, the fact of the matter is that a personal profile just can’t do what you need it to in terms of promotion and branding.
Below are a few reasons why you should think about swapping over your account if you are currently employing your personal Facebook account to promote your business…
- It’s actually against Facebook’s terms of use to use a personal page in this fashion.
- Fan Pages are set up for business use so they have much better usability.
- You can easily convert your page to a fan page without losing any of your “friends.”
- Personal pages are not searchable in search engines while fan pages are.
- Personal pages can only have up to 5,000 friends, while a fan page can have unlimited fans.
- Fan pages have analytics and statistical information for who sees your posts and also how they interact with you.
You may say, “But I’ve already put all of the time and effort into it, I don’t want to start from scratch!”
That’s fine, Facebook actually has a very easy way for you to convert your personal page into a fan page and NOT lose any of your previous work. It’s super-easy… check out the steps below for more information.
Step One:
First you need to save your current information just in case something goes wrong. Login to Facebook and go to Account Settings. You can download your information from here (it literally says “Download A Copy of Your Facebook Information,” in shaded letters on the bottom.)
Step Two:
Here is the link to begin the migration: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate *Please note that you’ll be asked to choose the type of page you want to create (examples include: Local Business or Place, Company Organization or Institution, Brand or Product… you get the idea.) It’s best to just pick the one that you feel identifies your brand the best way. It’s very easy to get confused, I mean if you have a company it can still be a local business and vice versa. Just try to pick the best one and move on in the process (I would suggest “Company” for a more B2B based set-up and “Local Business,” for a storefront type business.)
Step Three:
By migrating your page you have moved over your contacts and profile photo, however you will still have a profile page as your fan page will need this for an anchor. From here however, you can add folks to your business page as admins. This is reserved for people that you wish to have posting privileges (as the business) and to monitor fan activity on the page, so choose wisely.
For more information on this topic just Google “Facebook Business Page,” for countless slideshare uploads, articles and blog posts that detail out more of the finer points. For now, happy Facebooking!