Internet Marketing Optimization: Squeeze More Leads from Your Website

In the continuously evolving landscape of internet marketing not just in Toronto but the world over, landing pages have been consistently used to generate leads and increase conversion.

Internet marketing best practices on conversion optimization and landing pages have changed over the years, but today, more than ever, landing pages are valuable tools in anyone’s internet marketing repertoire — if they know what they’re doing. [Read more…]

Performance Pricing and Building True Client Partnerships

I recently came across a post on DigiDay.com, which is fast becoming one of my new favourite blogs, called Agencies Must Embrace Performance Pricing.

The gist? Old-school agencies, be warned: your clients want you to put your money where your mouth is.

The article argued that the shift to performance pricing is inevitable.

Business leaders and their marketing heads expect more from their marketing dollars. They want partners who truly understand marketing’s responsibility beyond just impressions. Those who can build a brand by directly building revenue and market-share are the agencies that will endure in the 21st century. [Read more…]

Why Traffic Is Not That Important

What some companies do on a monthly basis with their online advertising budget.

Despite the fact this headline will likely infuriate some industry folk, it must be said.

When people think about online marketing, some still see traffic as the all important success metric. In fact, some still call it “hits.” (As in they want to get more hits to their site, which is not the same as unique visits or traffic).  The logic seemed simple - as long as we get plenty of traffic, we’ll get business.

Yes, traffic is great, but more importantly, your website must have an effective mechanism (or strategy) for capturing and tracking leads and/or sales.  Otherwise, traffic is useless.

For example…

[Read more…]

5 Common Misconceptions and Assumptions New Clients Have About Google Adwords

This blog post is long overdue.

Let me explain.

Recently, we’ve had a few situations with new clients who are working with us to get better results from Google AdWords.  Specifically, after a month or so, they’ve voiced similar concerns about how their campaigns were performing.

This is a common occurrence with new clients unfamiliar with Google AdWords a.k.a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engine marketing.  In fact, many of our Toronto-based clients who are familiar with AdWords often have the same concerns (or misconceptions) when they first start working with us to optimize existing online marketing campaigns. [Read more…]

Why you NEED to be using rich media online

When I first started working in interactive media — over 15 years ago now — the Web was all about text. Sure, there have always been images on the Web and video’s been around for a long time, too — I produced a live video Webcast back in 1996, even. But that stuff was hard and had kind of a lousy user experience — dial-up Internet speeds made image and video downloads painfully slow, software for audio and video required special software that was often buggy or that installed all kinds of spyware and other stuff you didn’t want on your computer.

Those days are long gone now, though. Audio and video online are easy now — nearly 70% of all adults online have watched a video online and nearly 20% of them watch video online every day.

And, what’s more,  online video is becoming key in helping businesses connect with their customers and potential customers. There’s a growing body of research  that video online drives a number of important business results, including awareness, engagement and actual conversions.

[Read more…]

Why Web site usability matters

Screen shot: http://www.joneschijoff.com/

At Fruition, we talk a lot about Web site usability and good online user experience. It’s kind of what we do around here. But as a business person, why should you care about whether your Web site is clean-looking and easy to navigate?

It’s about conversions

Increasing your site’s conversion rate is the easiest and most cost-effective way to generate new leads and new revenue from your site. Period. You don’t need to spend a dime on driving new traffic to your site  to generate additional revenue if you can increase the number of your current visitors who become customers. And the payoffs can be huge.

Let’s take, for example, a site that gets 20,000 unique visitors in a month. There are a lot of sites that do this kind of traffic. If we can increase their conversion rate — the percentage of those visitors that become customers — by 1%, that’s 200 new customers a month.

What’s the lifetime value of a customer to your business? For a lot of our clients, that number is in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. And what would you spend to increase your sales by $200,000 a month?

So how does Web site usability factor into this math?

[Read more…]

Tuning your ROI measurements to your objectives

Tuning

Recently on LinkedIn, Emily Foshee asked:

How do you measure ROI from your social media campaigns? Do you go by new fans on your Facebook page? Do you go by traffic increases to your company’s website? Or do you go by visitor/page reviews?

The short answer for us is “all of the above,” The long answer is, “it depends.”

We find that social media has benefits in 4 main areas:

  • Generating awareness of your brand
  • Increasing engagement with your brand
  • Increasing your brand’s influence
  • Motivating specific actions (purchases, leads, sign-ups etc).

Different clients will have different objectives within that range of possibilities, so we’ll craft a custom dashboard to help them track the stuff that’s most meaningful in terms of their objectives.

To measure awareness, we’ll use metrics like unique Web site visitors, page views, fan/follower counts etc.

To measure  engagement, we’ll use metrics like comments (blog, facebook, etc), ReTweets, time spent on the Web site and so on.

To measure influence, we’ll track third-party mentions and links and things like that.

And to measure action outcomes, we’ll track total conversions/sign-ups and conversion/sign-up rates.