JENN

Online Marketing Consulting
Search Marketing - Website Optimization - Acquisitions - Analytics
Why are all of these important?
A website doesn't have a large flashing sign that attracts people off of the road to see what your business has to offer, and your website can't call people to convince them to buy - so how do you attract people to your website the most cost effective way?

Search Marketing
Search Engine Marketing is becoming a fast growing industry all its own. Through paid search programs such as Google Adwords, and Microsoft's Adcenter all providing the ability to bid on words that relate to your website so that when a user searches that word they see your ad (either at the top or to the left of the normal results). The overall cost of these ads can be relatively low since you only pay when a user clicks on the ad itself. Some ads show up on other websites with Google's Adwords, other websites can setup advertising on the site and earn money as users click on those ads. Your ad is then placed on the website that is most relevant to the word that you are bidding on. It's somewhat like paying for a newspaper ad and only paying when a person calls the number on the ad to inquire about the service or product, rather than paying the thousands of dollars it costs to run the ad in hopes that someone actually calls. The overall costs of these search marketing ads are very low if managed properly. Because you bid on the word itself some words can be more expensive than others you could end up spending $5.00 on one click, rather than $0.20 a single click. The key is to set the bid and watch to see how many users buy a product or sign up for a service (we call these conversions) and calculate your cost per acquisition (CPA). That is where search marketing services come in handy. By choosing the words that your website will benefit from and managing the ads to see how many people click them, and out of those people how many are converting. The end goal is to spend the least amount of money on the ads that are converting the most. While paid search marketing is a great way for your website to gain exposure quickly (campaigns generally take 3-7 days to setup and start running) studies have shown that only 20% of all users that search a word on these search engines will click the advertisings.

Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) can also be referred to as natural search engine optimization or organic results in the search engine results page (SERP). The benefit of natural search engine optimization is that you don't have to pay to show up in the results (unlike the paid search marketing). Search engines send out what they call a bot that pulls the information from your website in order to show the user that types in the word your website. Unfortunately, there are billions of websites on the internet that all relate to what your website has to offer. Try searching a word that you think a user would type in and see how many results come up - the goal is to beat out all of those websites so that you show up in the top 10. An online marketing consultant can help your website show up for the right terms. By analyzing what key words are getting searched the most in your industry, and tweaking the website so that it is search engine compliant so that your site shows up on the search engine results page (SERP) in the first position. While studies show that the majority of all users will click the first 3 results on the search engine more and more businesses are optimizing their website so that they will appear in those results. Search engine optimization is getting more and more difficult as search engines change the way they bring the results to the user in order to filter out those that "trick" them, and as other websites target specific terms that get searched more than others. It's a never ending battle, and only those that have a clear understanding of marketing, analysis, and search technology are truly capable of being successful in getting your website to show up.

Acquisitions
Acquisitions can play a key role when considering online marketing for your website. Getting your user to your website and converting them into a purchase is a job all in itself. Most companies flood the website with traffic from banner advertising and search marketing and hope that the users will convert into buyers. While this may work for some companies that have the cash flow to do so, the smaller businesses can't afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to get a small amount of sales. That is where acquisitions come into effect; the acquisitions manager will generally watch over the advertising and focus on what is working and what isn't working in order to maximize the conversions so that the company spends less on the advertising that brings the user to the website and increase the percentage of those that convert which in the end increases the return on investment (ROI). Most consulting companies that help you with your search marketing will generally stop once they have gotten your website to show up on the search engine results page (SERP). It is generally up to the website or the business owner to convert those users. Larger companies have people with acquisitions as their sole responsibility; some even have entire teams that manage specific parts of the business or website. An online marketing consultant can help you with your customer acquisitions in order to streamline your advertising costs so that you get the most out of your ROI.

Analysis
Once you have your search marketing, your search engine optimization, and your customer acquisitions all being managed properly it is always good to keep track and analyze where your users are coming from and what they are doing once they land on the website. Is a user coming from Google with a specific term landing on a certain page and instantly converting, or are they coming from Yahoo with a different term and going to 3 pages and spending 10 minutes before finally converting? What is the difference between the two users? Is it that they came from different search engines? Is it the words they used to find the website? What about the page that they landed on, is one page more informative than the other? All of these questions can be presented and answered through deep level analysis of the users that come to your website. Not only can analysis be beneficial in marketing your website, but it can also be beneficial once your user has converted. What products are the users buying? Are they coming back, and purchasing more? Are they using the site more, or are they arriving once and never coming back? What do they do when they come back if they do? A social networking site, for example, relies on the users for its product. The content that a user generates is what the website is selling to the other users, so encouraging users to add content is critical to the website's success. By analyzing the user's behavior the website can then be tweaked and changed in order to increase the amount of content a user adds. This will increase the popularity of the site, which will then increase the amount of conversions when a new user arrives. Just as most companies hire individuals to manage the acquisitions of a website, they will also hire someone to analyze the users. Most consulting companies may analyze the search marketing in order to maximize the spend, but don't' really dig into the behavior of the user. An online marketing consultant can come in and help you analyze your users, and steer you in a path that will be most effective to your website.