Do you have an Internet marketing strategy? You should. Internet advertising, when done properly, can drive traffic to your website and double your sales overnight.There are many different forms of Internet marketing strategy that you can employ, but one of the classic forms is results tracking. By tracking the results of your Internet advertising campaigns, you can quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. Direct marketers have been using this strategy for years, and it can easily be adapted for the Internet. However, you must come up with a way to measure the results of Internet advertising accurately.

The direct marketers use a trick known as “split testing”. Split testing uses a specific key or tracking device to associate a sale with the advertisement that produced the sale. For example, in a print ad, the key or tracking advice that may be used could be a specific phone number or extension. When a customer utilizes the number or extension, the marketer knows exactly which ad drove the customer to seek out the advertised product or service. Split testing can easily be adapted and incorporated into your Internet marketing strategy. To track the success and failure of Internet advertising, most Internet marketers typically use some sort of tracking software to associate the “key” with sales. A simple way to do this is to develop two web pages that feature two different ads. You can then track the sales results of each ad to see which worked best, and if necessary, adjust your Internet marketing strategy accordingly.

For example, let’s say that on one of the pages, you received 2,000 page views and 20 sales. This means that you have a success rate of 1%. Not bad. This is the average for both direct mail advertising and Internet advertising. Now that you have this information, you have statistics you can rely on. You can test other pages to see if they perform better or worse. You can also adapt the original pages to see if your changes have any effect on the sales outcome. Try adjusting headlines, graphics, text, and anything else you can think of. Then, compare the results of these changes to the original results.

After you have tested different variations of your Internet advertising, you can quickly determine what works and what doesn’t. Your Internet market strategy can then be adjusted accordingly. If you succeed, you may be able to double your sales without spending extra money on other forms of advertising.

SMS is good for:

• Short lead times and immediacy
• Cost effective personalised communication
• Ongoing 1 to 1 relationships
• Automated data capture and compliance
• Direct revenue and uplift opportunities

Basic Rules for SMS

In addition to permission, there are five key elements that differentiate SMS marketing from traditional marketing. These are also the key success factors for its use. A minimum of 2 factors is necessary for a successful campaign.

You need Permission plus:

1: Relevance
2: Location
3: Time
4: Adding Value
5: Interactive

Step 1: Planning the campaign

Objectives:

• Why are you communicating via mobile?
• What do you want to achieve?

Offer plan:

• What’s the definition of your offer?
• How are you going to say it?
• When should it be sent?
• Who are you targeting?
• Is viral marketing a possibility?

Limitations:

• Do you need to cap the responses?
• Message receipt -have you systems in place to handle the volume?

Step 2: Creating the campaign

Some SMS Service Providers enable you to create, test and track your basic campaign yourself via your web browser. This can be very useful for simple push campaigns such as; event notifications, requested information (i.e results, account info), “show this message for a free..” style campaigns, staff memos etc. However, the more complex the campaign, the more likely you will require professional help in both the planning and fulfilment of the campaign.

Step 3: Copywriting

• You only have 160 characters-use them wisely
• Be aware of limitations of different screens
• Be personal (it can be an intrusive medium)
• Be targeted
• Talk in the same language as your customers
• Lrn txt spk-especially for youth markets
• Use an SMS copywriter

Step 4: Test , test and test again..

• Test the campaign on different screens
• Test different networks (i.e. Vodaphone, Orange)
• Check to see if the appropriate replies are sent etc
• If it is a competition, plan for unusual/wrong answers and have suitable replies in place.
• Test language, typos and technical (not all symbols will come out as you expect).

Step 5: Measurement and tracking

Some indicators that you may use to measure success of the campaign are:

• Open rates
• Foot traffic (to website etc)
• Offer acceptance
• Replies
• Redemption rate
• Brand awareness…

Do

• Use it as an automated data capture
• Consider timing
• Trial different approaches
• Exploit “landgrab” opportunities by using SMS before your competitors do.
• Use only opt in and give opt out route (the more automated the better)
• Identify yourself

Common Mistakes:

• Poor targeting and relevance
• Not identifying the sender
• Poor copywriting
• Targeting wrong audience with wrong offer/message
• Messages sent out at wrong time
• Not allowing recipient to unsubscribe
• Typos
• No personalisation
• Inability for systems/customer service, to handle responses

Conclusion

• It’s an important marketing medium and it’s here to stay
• It’s about the experience not the technology
• Plan ahead so you get it right
• Be creative with your campaign
• Keep IT Simple Stupid (KISS) applies

Kath Pay is Marketing Director of Ezemail, a web-based e-communications tool, which enables you to create, send and track your email marketing and SMS messaging campaigns.

For more information please go to http://www.ezemail.com or contact Kath at: kath@ezemail.com.

Do you ever feel like you know just enough about SEO to be dangerous? Let’s see if we can fill in some of the gaps with the latest info from SEO experts.

When you analyze a competitors website, you need to make sure you’re prepared to do the job correctly. Competitors’ websites, if analyzed properly, can give you all sorts of information that you can use to increase the traffic and the popularity of your site. You can use these sites to analyze your own market. If a site gets a lot of hits it has to be doing something right. Check out where it is ranked, what key words it uses, how it is formatted, and what you can do to exemplify the good and filter out the bad. Also be sure to keep copyright laws in mind as a copyright infringement suit is never good for you, your site, or your blood pressure.

Identifying the Leaders.

You need to start off by identifying the major players - a good place to do this is Yahoo’s directory. It’s not as comprehensive as it once was, but it’s good if you’re looking for the major players. You may want to print out the directory to take a closer look. Look for large companies, as well as innovative approaches and new products. Also use this examination as an attempt to identify the niche markets that the major players have not identified and exploited. If you can find new niches you’re basically set as far as traffic goes.

Also consider that since Yahoo!’s directory is the place that you look to find the big players, it may be a good place to get listed in order to become a big player. These little associations are important if you want to start to attain more and more traffic and conquer a niche or category. Try to identify all places that the big dogs hang out and start hanging out there. It’s all about who you know in this business so bigger is better. You might not be ready to play with the big dogs, but the only way to get there is to sit down and give it a shot.

Sites like Media Metrix 500 can tell you which companies get the most traffic, and you can learn about the relative traffic by using Alexa. Alexa is a free add-on to your browser that ranks the traffic to each sire you visit, telling you whether it’s in the top 100, the top 1000, the top 10,000, and so on. This gives you a rough idea of where your competitors are in the pecking order.

Scrutinize the Leaders.

The next step is to study the top 5 or 10 competitors very closely. There is a lot that can be learned by looking at competitors website and analyzing them. These are the things that you should look for.

1. Make sure you check to see what products or services they offer, and note anything that’s different from your own offerings. Look for gaps that you could fill.

So far, we’ve uncovered some interesting facts about SEO. You may decide that the following information is even more interesting.

2. Think about the look, feel and functionality of their website.

3. See what advertising campaigns and offers they’re running.

4. Look at their strengths and weaknesses, from the customer’s point of view.

5. See if you can figure out their strategy.

When you’re dealing with publicly traded companies, you can often get detailed information from their SEC filings. Write down the names of their key players and then look for any interviews and speeches they might have made about their website.

Look for Strengths, Vulnerabilities, and Gaps.

Now, summarize the information you’ve found into a few sentences for each competitor, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Note strategies that are going to be necessary to counter their offering - these will depend on your own website’s strengths. If you’re small, then you’ll need to be resourceful to exploit their weaknesses.

With this research, you can create a marketing plan. Be sure to include how you intend to deal with competition, and what steps you think you’ll need to take for you site to come out on top. Once you’ve finished analyzing your competitors, you need to consider whether it would be better not to compete at all, and find a less-saturated market.

Don’t get frightened away prematurely, though - make sure you know what you’re getting into before you start, and don’t let big companies intimidate you. Remember that you can move faster than they can! All you have to do is offer your customers things they can’t find anywhere else. That’s how things stand right now. Keep in mind that any subject can change over time, so be sure you keep up with the latest news.