Get More Out of PPC with Targeted Landing Pages & Lead Nurturing

November 9, 2010

Get More Out of PPC with Targeted Landing Pages Lead Nurturing

If getting more ‘clicks’ out of your PPC campaign is the primary goal of your online ads, now is the time to re-evaluate not only your metrics but some of the tactics you can implement to get a better return on that investment. While inbound marketing emphasizes organic traffic, there are reasons to use PPC as a complement to your inbound efforts.

HubSpot customer, Huthwaite, an international sales training company, decreased their cost per PPC lead from $400 to $10 by focusing on quality conversions instead of click volume.

Here are some of the most important things they did that you should consider today:

Bidding on a small number of keywords limits your ability to rank on them – so go broad and target 1000 keywords not 100

Using a sole Ad Group limits you to just one phrase for your Ad Copy – different searches and preferences will lead people to click on one versus another. Consider using multiple Ad Groups with similar ad copy to increase your chances for a click through and to test which ads have the best conversion.

Send PPC Visitors to Simple, Targeted Landing Pages

The number one mistake businesses make with PPC is sending all that expensive traffic to their home page. This visitor clicked on a very short and specific phrase based on their search and mindset at the time. Once she arrives on your site, she wants to immediately understand how your product, service or download will meet her need. If she doesn’t, she might click around with no idea what you can offer or she’ll bounce. More likely than not, she’ll bounce and click on the next result who may have a tailored offer she’ll convert on.
Each PPC campaign should have a very specific landing page that reflects your ad copy and speaks to what that searcher was seeking. Keep your form short and limit any unnecessary navigation options so that your visitor has only two choices: complete the form or leave.

Follow up with Targeted Nurturing Campaigns

Now that you’ve gotten this visitor to convert into a lead, hopefully lots of visitors and leads, you have a short window to make an impression. She may be ready to buy now or may need more information and time to think about her next steps. Instead of trying to frantically call or personally email every lead, let technology help you out. Send her a few follow up emails over the course of the next 24 hours all the way out to several weeks with information that corresponds to her initial search and conversion.
Most lead nurturing tools will let you set up multiple campaigns so that each PPC campaign you run for a unique offer can have a corresponding series of emails with relevant content, promotions or offers that will prompt a second conversion and let your sales team know that this is a really hot potential lead

Build Campaigns with 1000s of Keywords Multiple Ad Groups

HubSpot’s own lead nurturing campaigns also correspond to the type of offer that a lead has converted on – if they got an eBook on Facebook, then they get nurtured with the Social Media campaign.

I wish I could say that you’d all reduce your cost per lead by a HUGE amount like Huthwaite did, but I can’t. If you are doing none or only some of the best practices above, I am pretty confident that you’ll see some improvement in conversions making every dollar that you do decide to spend on PPC that much more rewarding. Then maybe you can spend some more money or time on creating remarkable content to improve your organic rankings that’ll last forever.

What are you doing to improve the ROI on your PPC?

Double Your PPC Leads at Half the Cost

Join HubSpot’s Mark Roberge to learn how to generate more leads and lower your cost per lead from your PPC.

View this on-demand webinar to learn about low-cost lead generation!

Comments

Posted by Kirsten Knipp on Tue, Nov 09, 2010 @ 09:00 AM

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Measuring the ROI of Your LinkedIn Efforts [Plus a Free Ebook]

November 9, 2010

Measuring the ROI of Your LinkedIn Efforts [Plus a Free Ebook]

The following is part of a new ebook from HubSpot: Learning LinkedIn From The Experts. Please download your free copy.

LinkedIn is the largest professional social network online today with an astounding 80 million users! These affluent, ambitious, and influential professionals have an average household income of $107,000, and over 50% of them represent some level of senior management. If you are a business professional and you do not have a powerful presence on LinkedIn, you are undoubtedly missing valuable opportunities to connect and grow your business.

After youve taken the time to grow your LinkedIn presence, market your business and market yourself, its important to track your progress so you know your hard work is paying off. The following are some of the ways you can measure your progress.

Measure Your LinkedIn Reach: As youre interacting on LinkedIn, youre also using it as a tool to build your contact database and community. How is that community growing over time? Be sure to track the growth of your personal LinkedIn network and perhaps the networks of your employees.

Monitor the Interaction in Your LinkedIn Groups: Did you start a LinkedIn Group? How is that growing over time? Are people discussing different topics and responding on their own? Creating a self-sustaining group that grows with a natural momentum would be a great feat!

Track Your Developing Thought Leadership: Be able to report on your developing thought leadership on LinkedIn. Are you giving and receiving multiple recommendations? How many questions have you answered? How many of your responses were voted Best Answer?

Compare Results Before and After Significant LinkedIn Activity or Events: If you plan to develop and execute a specific LinkedIn campaign, be sure to take a snapshot of your progress before and after your campaign so you can report on its effectiveness.

Measure Your Website Referral Traffic From LinkedIn: As you are growing your LinkedIn presence, are you also driving profile visitors or group members back to your personal or company website? Is that traffic growing over time?

Analyze Your Leads and Sales: Bottom line is bottom line! The best way to understand if LinkedIn is working as a marketing tool is to measure its effectiveness at driving leads and sales. Have you used LinkedIn to interact with a lead and close a deal? How much business are you earning from LinkedIn?

What are other methods you use for measuring your LinkedIn efforts?

Free Ebook Written by Five LinkedIn Experts

Comments

Posted by Kipp Bodnar on Tue, Nov 09, 2010 @ 02:45 PM

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HubSpot/~3/ZcyIcCeKIso/Measuring-the-ROI-of-Your-LinkedIn-Efforts-Plus-a-Free-Ebook.aspx

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Hasbro Plans 3D Goggles For Your iPhone

November 9, 2010

Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/6jdX5NOPBso/

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Kanye West’s New Album Leaks to Rave Reviews

November 9, 2010

Album leaks are not exactly uncommon nowadays, but the Internet is humming this afternoon with talk of Kanye Wests upcoming disc, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which oozed online today weeks before its November 22 drop date.

According to All Hip Hop, the album is now available on the web (were not going to tell you where, just Google it) but in an edited, clean version. So even if fans are able to snag the tunes today, theyre most likely going to have to wait for the full effect (or another leak).

Kanye is no stranger to leaks. According to MTV, he suspended his G.O.O.D. Fridays series (in which he will give away a free, new song every Friday on his blog) for a week after the Bon Iver-sampling Lost in the World from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy leaked.

Due to blogs leaking unfinished songs from my actual album Ive decided to pass of Good Fridays this week, West said in a tweet. Its messed up that one hacker can mess everything up for everyone I love to take a year to finish my songs and deliver them to you guys in there most completed form It would have seemed like since I give free music every week even the lowest form of human being would respect that enough not to leak unfinished songs from my real album

Now, Ive spoken to a few labels in my time about the effect of leaks on album sales, and the consensus seems to be the same: They only hurt a bad album.

After indie band The Nationals album, High Violet, leaked about six months ago, the band got creative, premiering a high-quality, advance stream of the disc on The New York Timess website. Add to that a Vevo livestream, and the band nabbed the number three spot on the Billboard Top 200 chart after one week of sales. Were not saying the leak helped sales in the case of The National, but it didnt kill the band members careers either.

In terms of the reaction around the web at present, fans seem to be raving. (The five-star review on Rolling Stone didnt hurt, either.) Twitter is abuzz with folks commending the rapper on his new disc and feverishly looking for downloads, and some bloggers are even writing glowing live blogs of the leak. The Village Voice, for its part, has written a rather amusing piece depicting how Kanye could possibly react to the thievery of his new jams (all CAPs rant, or Imma let you finish real talk).

West, however, has so far failed to say anything outright about the album going wide early, save to retweeting some of his fans glowing reviews, which, to us, reflects something Trent Reznor once said: I felt furious when the record Id worked on for a year, that my heart and souls gone into, [leaked]. Im pissed off at people that are listening to it. Im mad that theyre snubbing me by what? By being excited about hearing my music? And thats wrong. I shouldnt be mad at these people. I should be glad that people are interested.

Well see what his reaction is in coming days, however, and what effect this leak (if any) has on sales. In the meantime, share your thoughts in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, MTV Music

Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/8pBaiQNLjus/

Posted by Charlie | Filed Under Uncategorized | Comments Off

Six Ways to Sex Up Your Blog Posts

November 9, 2010

Candy Evans is one of the nations leading real estate reporters, bloggers and consultants. She writes for AOLs Housing Watch, Joel Kotkins The New Geography, and is now a guest blogger for Future of Real Estate Marketing (FOREM). Shell soon be writing for Move.com. Candy holds a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has been a published writer for more than 25 years. She was a longtime contributing editor to Dallas D Magazine and sister pubs, and in 2007 founded the wildly successful Dallas real estate blog, DallasDirt, where she broke the news on where former president George W. Bush bought his Dallas home in 2008. She is the founder and creator of SecondShelters.com.

Whoa there, bet you read that headline twice.

My point exactly.

As a journalist and real estate editor, I created a blog for our local city magazines web site with ZERO MARKETING DOLLARS. No ads, no billboards, just an occasional link from one of the other blogs, IF I was lucky. Thus I had to learn how to write salaciously, weave in the real estate information with zippy headlines and topics, even some scandal, if possible.

In other words, I had to sell a blog like a newspaper or magazine: great content, catchy heads.

And yet, we have to pay homage to the Search Engine Gods and load SEO into as many graphs as possible, which can sometimes make for boring writing.

Thats where being an old-fashioned wordsmith comes in handy, handier, perhaps, than all the high tech gadgets in the world.

How do you do it?

Dont pontificate. Your readers want facts and information, not what happened to you at the last NAR convention when you almost lost your cell phone. Give them information rich facts in an earnest, honest form.
Think of unique ways to say what it is you are going to say. For example, a recent post on how Plano, Texas, was recently listed as one of the safest cities in the nation is worthy of a post. Its also big news because many of us in North Texas remember all too well a different perspective on Plano, from about fifteen years ago when Plano teens were dying from overdosing on heroin. Would you write: Plano, Texas Makes Safest City List? Heres what I said: Plano is So Boring. No One Ever Gets Killed Up There.
Good blogging has an element of drama to it. A tease. One of my most successful guest posts was from an agent we called Secret Agent complete with logo. Up next: Real Estates Witness Protection Program.
If you have a lot to say, dont hesitate to keep the convo going, much like a to be continued series in several different posts. This will keep your readers coming back.
Good writing is like music, it has a flow. Look at your sentences carefully when you proof and feel the music of the words. Dont repeat words; use a thesaurus. Alternate longer and shorter sentences. Use more verbs for action.
Be human. Admit your errors even as you engage your readers. Maybe your first thoughts were not entirely clear on that topic, maybe youve changed your mind as a result of the interactive communication youve just had! Go and grow with it, and treat readers like they are having coffee with you at Starbucks. Laugh, tease, inform, exchange. Thats what successful blogging is all about.

How do you keep your blog posts exciting?

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheFutureOfRealEstateMarketing/~3/48359B5puI8/

Posted by Charlie | Filed Under Uncategorized | Comments Off

3 Ways eCommerce Can Leverage Social Media Monitoring

November 9, 2010

3 Ways eCommerce Can Leverage Social Media Monitoring

Wouldnt you love more up to date and continuous insight as to what makes people buy your products? How can you make your product much more appealing and make them proceed through checkout from your product page? Fortunately for you, this insight from consumers is available all over the place your selling your products the web.

So, how can eCommerce business discover how to do better marketing and positioning of their products? One way is by closely monitoring the conversations happening in social media. With millions of people tweeting, posting, and updating their thoughts or actions a lot can be discovered just by listening. Considering the number of conversations and free access to this information, it would be irresponsible not to monitor conversations in the socialmediasphere.

Here are 3 ways eCommerce businesses can listen through social media to better position and market their products.

1. Twitter Advanced Search

Within Twitters advanced search you can sift through conversations based on keywords. By creatively coming up with different keyword combinations you can narrow your search to conversations related to shopping online and your target market or product. For example if your eCommerce website sells cameras you might try online shopping camera.

In this instance you may see that positioning some of your cameras based on durability will appeal to parents who want something long lasting for their kids.

You may even consider adding negative keywords to the “None of these words” columns to reduce the noise in your search.

2. Google Alerts

Using Google Alerts, you can similarly monitor conversations in the blogosphere around your product types or target market. Try multiple variations at first and then refine your alerts once you start seeing and can analyze the results. Most importantly, view the comments under each blog article to see what multiple people are saying for even more insight.

Make sure to select blogs under the Type to get on blog article results.

3. YouTube Reviews

No, there isnt a specific section on YouTube for reviews, but people sure love filming themselves while critiquing the products theyve bought. Even if there arent reviews for the specific product you offer you can still gather information on product categories and the features or use they like and dislike. Find out what is it about certain products they love and hate and what they would buy for. You might even find reviews for your products, that you could embed on your product pages.

These are just 3 ways you can use social media to help position your eCommerce products, do you have any more to add? Have you tried any of these three methods and what success have you had in any changes you’ve made to your product positioning strategy.