June 21, 2015
What is a “custom audience”? It’s advertising to people who are already familiar to you.
In other words, a custom audience is made up of a list of email addresses, or phone numbers, or physical addresses, etc.
Facebook first tested a custom audience product back in 2013. Recently, it’s been opened to the general public.
The way the Facebook custom audience advertising works is you give Facebook a list of your contacts, and then instead of advertising banner ads to random people on Facebook, your banner ads will instead be advertised only to people on your contact list.
Currently Google and Bing are experimenting on a similar product where your search engine ad is only seen by people on your contact list.
So obviously a lot of people in the marketing industry are excited by this.
It’s no secret that one of the reasons email marketing can be the most effective marketing technique in 2015 is because advertising is always more effective when your audience knows who you are.
For those thinking that you don’t want to stalk your customers by doing email marketing with them, advertising to them on Google, Facebook and everywhere, there’s a way to tone down the stalking ; )
With almost every custom audience product, there is something called a “cap frequency” that limits how many times a day each person sees your ad. So you can limit each place you advertise to people only seeing your ad once a day to blend in with the other ads.
Collecting and organizing customers contact info has never been more important!
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September 21, 2014
Some small business owners make a decision to do email marketing themselves.
They figure, I have the email addresses. I can type up an email. Maybe include a couple graphics. Why would I pay someone else to help me do this?
I would bet that a majority of people that do this are unaware of the main obstacle to this task which is known as deliverability. Meaning the challenge of email marketing is getting your email to land in someone’s inbox instead of their spam box.
Each IP, the industry abbreviation for internet provider, requires email marketers to follow the rules in the CAN-SPAM Act from 2003 on what you can and can’t do in your emails.
So chances are, if you’ve been doing email marketing yourself and weren’t aware of these rules, there’s a pretty good chance a large majority of people you’re trying to send email to, are not receiving the emails because they’re going to spam.
Even worse, repeat offenders can sometimes be blacklisted from sending email. In other words, if you become a repeat offender with AOL, AOL might choose to blacklist not only from sending email blasts to anyone with a “@aol.com” email address. They might blacklist you altogether from sending individual emails to anyone@aol.com.
I strongly recommend to small business owners that are serious about their email marketing tactics being successful, to work with professionals that know how to get emails to people’s inboxes. Which, of course, is something we at Customwave can help you with ; )
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June 10, 2014
From time to time people ask me what’s the biggest problem in internet marketing today in 2014. My response is that our client’s customers are broke and don’t have money.
Now, it’s not like this in every industry. Business executives still need airport transportation. People still need important packages delivered ASAP. But other industries like home remodeling, sign makers and even lawyers are struggling.
Specifically, the two problems is that some businesses are in the “WANT” business. Where customers want your service, but dont “NEED” your service. Someone might really want to remodel their kitchen, but they don’t have the money right now and have other, higher priorities. For lawyers and other businesses that charge a lot for their products or services, the problem is that the cost is too high.
It’s important to keep the clients customers in mind when figuring out the marketing strategy.
For instance, if I’m talking to a client in the “WANT business” that has a marketing budget of say $500 a month, my advice on how best to spend the money will be using it to stay in touch with every person that visits the website.
Because if the money goes towards Google advertising, the Google ads will get people to the client’s website. It’ll get the client calls. But it won’t likely produce customers for the client with the customers likely not being ready for one reason or another.
So what do we do?
Start with remarketing. With remarketing, we have the ability to track and stay in touch with every single website visitor by serving them banner ads on different websites throughout the internet. For instance, have you ever gone on a website before and then later on, start seeing banner ads for that website all over the place? That’s what remarketing is.
So let’s say there’s 100 people going on your website each month. Every month that goes by, you’ll be tracking and serving banner ads to another 100 people each month. After 6 months, you’ll be advertising to 600 people that have been on your website before. After 1 year, you’ll be advertising to 1,200 people that have been on your website before. And so on.
The value in this is that sooner or later, your former website visitors will be ready to do business with someone. Might be 2 weeks. Or 2 months. Or 6 months. But a lot will be ready at some point. In the meantime, you’re advertising your brand everyday to them. Reminding them. Building top of the mind awareness. And then the day will come when that former website visitor clicks on the banner ad and likely not only calls you, but becomes your customer too.
What else can you do?
Email marketing. There are ways we can collect email addresses from some of the people that go to your website by offering them discounts or free amenities if they submit their email address. So sending out an email blast every couple weeks is another way to stay in touch with people until their ready.
Regular display banner ads on different websites throughout the internet is a low cost and effective way of getting lots of people to your website and also increasing brand awareness. This will help too.
And finally, having a good reputation is important too. Like if you go to Google and type in your company name, it’s important no bad reviews or customer complaints pop up. If potential customers find bad reviews about your company, this can cause potential customers decide to not do business with you.
But vice-versa, positive reviews for your company can help lead to someone to be more likely to become your customers.
One of the most important things to remember about reputation management is that there’s tons of review websites out there, but the only way someone will ever go on any of them is if they show up in Google if someone types in your company name. So the main thing is to make sure is to focus on the review websites in the first 5 pages of Google when you search your company name. And if you have the budget, make sure you have no bad reviews in Bing and Yahoo as well.
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March 23, 2014
What I’m about to say is more theory on my part than actual fact. I think when people think of reaching an enormous amount of people, they think of TV.
I’m just here to share how many people have been on entertainment related websites in January 2014. Nielsen says that the number is 167 million people in the United States. YouTube alone got a little over 110 million people in that one month with each person averaging 12 visits throughout the month.
Overall, there were 198 million Americans online in January 2014. Average time each person spent online throughout the month? 29 hours and 43 minutes.
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March 19, 2014
They’re finally here!! Google finally has unveiled it’s much anticipated “smart watch”. Watches that little display screens that act like mini computers. Even smaller than cell phones! We’ve already seen how much smart phones have taken off. So it’d be a wise assumption that the US consumers will adopt the watches in the same way. So for us marketers, making sure our websites are “smart watch” compatible and show up properly on watches will become a new part of the job description. To me, the more devices there are out there that connect to the internet, the more website traffic and online marketing opportunities there will be : )
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March 19, 2014
Very thought provoking article on marketing: American Express CMO Jon Hayes explains that marketers win not by having best technology or knowing how to talk to consumers the best. He says marketers win when they’re able to best interpret changes in technology to figure out how best to use it. And interpreting changes in society to figure out how to tailor the message to consumers. Like its not about the ads themselves. It’s about figuring out the value of how to use the technology for marketing purposes. And how to custom fit the new process for each individual business. For instance, it’s key to understand with banner ads, the value is not in getting the clicks to produce immediate phone calls. The value is in branding in the area your potential customers are in.
Read MoreToo many internet marketing firms want to have plausible deniability when it comes to a client’s sales. Whether it’s search engine optimization, paying Google per click, too many in our industry want no accountability for the actual results. I actually used to be the same way, back in 2005, 2006, 2007, just learning the ropes.
Most of the time, when internet marketing companies don’t have proper tracking in place to know what types of results they’re getting, it’s because they’re not confident in their abilities to increase a client’s sales. Therefore, they stick their heads in the sand not wanting to know the actual results. Again, when i was younger, I used to be the same way.
The thing I’ve learned is that it’s not enough to just advertise someone on the internet, specifically on Google. It’s not enough to just get someone phone calls. To really succeed in this industry, you need to help your client’s make more money. At the end of the day, that’s the only thing that matters.
Now someone might say, well, we can’t control whether a website visitor makes a decision to call the client. And that part is true. However, the thing you can control is the quality of the phone calls and email leads. Some months there will be a few more calls, some months there’ll be a few less, but as long as the quality of the calls are good, the client should still be able to get new customers and make more money.
A lot of companies in our industry do a pretty good at client acquisition, landing new small business customers. But many of those same companies do a terrible job at client retention, keeping those small businesses for any longer than a year. The reason why companies like Reach Local and Go Daddy aren’t dominating even more than they are is because they constantly lose clients because they focus on advertising. They don’t focus on making the small business client money.
And how could they? This industry is so new and so young, there’s not enough people that know what they’re doing to take care of all the demand. Colleges are just getting around to starting to teach internet marketing, but because this industry is fluid and changes rapidly every year, their information is often times outdated and obsolete. Most small businesses that work with someone in a call center with limited experience, training, and knowledge have a bad experience. Therefore, the small business cancels after the contract is over.
So as internet marketers, what exactly can we do to help our clients make more money? How do we do that?
You have to focus on the quality of phone calls and sales leads. Decrease the junk leads as much as possible.
Every business is different. And for every business, they will want a specific type of customer. Find out what type of customer they want. Then get really specific on which keywords you target to make sure you get them the right type of call.
Find out the schedule of when they want to be advertised. If the client is getting clicks at 2am in the morning and doesn’t have anyone to pick up the phone at 2am, you don’t want to be advertising them at that time. Only advertise the client when they’re in a position to answer the phone or return email quickly.
Find out which devices they want to advertise on. Some businesses will find it more valuable to be advertised only on cell phones, versus all devices. Or only computers and not cell phones.
There’s a world of opportunity in our industry. The vast majority of internet marketers are not doing that great at their job because what we do is so brand new and we’re still trying to figure it out. But the people that will really succeed in the next 5-10 years will be the internet marketing companies that can RETAIN small business clients. KEEP them. Have them advertise with you for years and years. And the only way to do that is to help them make money from your work.
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GFI just put out an absolutely wonderful survey that asks people when they check their email!
The winner? Weekends at 81%!
You can check all all the stats of the survey here.
Why is this such a big deal? Because if you send out your email blast when people don’t typically read their email, it makes them less likely to read yours.
I’ve always suspected that the weekends were the best time to do email marketing selling Customwave Internet Marketing services, but now I have my proof!
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