Recession-Proof Your Business With Online Marketing by Bob Regnerus
March 2nd, 2009
Filed in: Online Marketing
I get a lot of questions from people who ask me what to do with their marketing in this type of economy. So I decided to share with you some tips and strategies from one of the best online marketers out their today, Bob Regnerus. He is known as the “leads king” and if you want to bump up your online marketing and most importantly your RESULTS he’s definitely someone you should be listing to.
So, here’s part one of this four part series.
Part One: Riding Out the Storm
If you can bear to listen to the news for more than a few minutes these days, you’re almost certain to hear someone use the phrase “a perfect storm” to describe what’s happening to the economy. Maybe it’s a tired phrase, but boy, is it accurate. The housing and credit markets have collapsed, the stock market swings by hundreds of points every week, and the world’s best-known companies are on the verge of bankruptcy. The only question seems to be which corporations the government will bail out, and which ones will sink.
So what’s the best thing for a business to do when the economy gets hit by a hurricane? Is to head for shelter and keep a low profile until the storm blows over? Not necessarily. Smart business owners see opportunity in uncertainty, and they turn troubled times to their advantage. As bad as things are, there are still customers in your market, and there’s still money to be made.
Your competitors are rowing for shore right now, and if you keep sailing, you’ll be miles ahead when the storm subsides. But that doesn’t mean you can just stick to business as usual and expect things to work out. Along with everyone else, you’re looking for ways to trim your budget these days. Where do you start? Payroll, unfortunately, is where most businesses cut first, and you may need to do the same. After payroll, marketing is usually the next to go, and that’s where you really have to be careful. Reducing your overall marketing spend may be necessary in the short term, but if at all possible, don’t cut your budget for Internet marketing.
Internet marketing isn’t dead weight. It won’t sink your ship in an economic storm. In fact, it’s the very last thing you should throw overboard. My own business is doing fine today (knock on wood), but if it were in trouble, I’d stop my phone service and cut off the heat to my office before I stopped advertising on the Internet.
Internet marketing is the most effective way to build and maintain your customer base, and it’s the best tool you have to survive in a bad economy. In this four-part series of articles, I’ll explain why Internet marketing is such an important part of your survival strategy, and I’ll tell you how you can use the Internet to not only survive in this economic climate, but thrive.
Where is Your Money Going?
There are many, many reasons you should focus on Internet marketing in this economy. I’ll discuss a dozen of them in this series of four articles, but the single most important reason is this: online marketing is 100% measurable and accountable. When you market your business on the Internet, you know exactly where every penny is going and what you’re getting for it. It’s always good to know those things, but when money’s tight, it’s absolutely critical.
Measurement and accountability are like the charts and compass on a ship. When the weather’s fine, you might not need them—you can just cruise around under clear skies and trust that you won’t get lost. But when the weather turns rough, you need equipment to tell you where you are and how to get where you’re going. Internet marketing gives you access to that equipment.
When you spend money on traditional advertising, like newspaper space or television time, you can only track your results on a macro level. Even if you spend $100,000 for a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, you won’t know how many people saw the ad. You won’t know if the people who saw the ad were the people you wanted to attract. You’ll only know if your overall sales improve in the days or weeks after the ad runs, and even if your sales do go up, you can never be 100% sure that your six-figure advertisement was behind the increase.
On the other hand, when you spend money on Internet advertising, you can track your results on a micro level. You can direct your advertisements toward the right people, and you’ll know exactly how many people responded to your ad.
Charting Your Progress
Online marketing gives you measurement tools that don’t exist in any other medium, even so-called “direct-response” television advertising. When you learn how to use those online measurement tools, you can create an effective marketing campaign no matter how difficult the economy becomes.
The most common form of online marketing is pay-per-click advertising through a service like Google AdWords. When you use AdWords, you choose the keywords you think your customers are looking for, and you choose how much you’re willing to spend to attract those customers. AdWords displays your ad when Google users search for your keywords. The more you’re willing to spend, the more prominently your ad is displayed.
When a Google user clicks your ad, you pay a fee to Google—hence the name “pay-per-click.” After someone clicks your ad, you can follow their activity on your website to find out if they respond to your initial offer, and if they do, you’ll be able to keep track of them in the long term. In fact, you can make note of every dollar they spend with you and trace it back to your Internet ad.
There are four key statistics I help my clients track when they begin an online marketing campaign. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to collect this sort of information about the customers you get through any other type of marketing:
Cost per visitor: This is the average fee paid to Google (or another pay-per-click service) for each click on an advertisement which sends a visitor to your website. Cost per click can be broken down by keyword or advertisement, or aggregated for an entire marketing campaign—that’s true of these other statistics as well.
Cost per lead: Most of my clients don’t try to close a sale as soon as they get a website visitor—they use their website to collect information from their visitors, in return for a small (usually free) product or service. When website visitors provide their contact information, they become sales leads, so your cost per lead is what you’re spending for each person who clicks on your ad, visits your website, and “opts in” by giving you their email address or phone number.
Cost per sale: Cost per sale is just what it sounds like—the amount you’re spending on marketing for each sale you close.
Total campaign ROI: This is the number my clients really care about. How much did they spend on your campaign, and how much money did it generate for them? With other media, you can only guess at that sort of thing, but if you’re marketing on the Internet, you can nail it down to the penny.
With these statistics, you can track each individual’s experience with your website. Each time someone clicks your online advertisement, you’ll know which keyword generated the click, how much you paid for it, and whether the person who clicked the ad eventually bought something from you. Doesn’t that sound better than spending tens or hundreds of thousands on a single TV or newspaper ad, crossing your fingers, and hoping that it somehow pays off?
Correcting Your Course
Measuring your marketing spend and website results is just the beginning. The information you collect will only help if you take the time to analyze it and learn from it. The second reason online marketing can help you in a bad economy is that it gives you the ability to analyze your data and optimize your marketing campaign.
In Chapter 13 of my book Big Ticket eCommerce, I cite four case studies in which measurement and analysis led to dramatic improvement in my clients’ marketing campaigns. Some of those clients wanted to cut their marketing expenses, and others needed direction for an expanding budget, but the concept was the same in each case: my clients were able to put their money to better use because they were able to track and analyze their results.
The executive education program at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, for example, was spending $100,000 a day for one of those full-page Wall Street Journal ads. They were getting inquiries about the program, but not from the right type of candidate, and they had no way to focus their campaign on the people they wanted to reach.
As I describe in the book, we started an online marketing campaign for the program, and measured the responses we received and the money we were spending. With the information we collected, we were able to test different versions of the program’s website, different ad copy, and different pay-per-click options until we were getting the right results.
After six months of intense measurement and testing, we had slashed the campaign’s cost-per-lead, and the program was finally attracting the candidates it wanted. If they had continued to rely on print ads, the school would still be hemorrhaging money, achieving unsatisfactory results, and looking in vain for a way to correct the situation.
After the Storm
Our economy will eventually recover from this “perfect storm,” but it will never be the same. The new economy we’re heading into will look very different from the one we’re watching fade away. The banks, manufacturers, and investment firms which dominated the economy for the last 50 or 100 years will cease to exist, and the ones which survive will play a very different role.
Innovation, flexibility, and rapid change will be the name of the game in the new economy, and no matter what industry you’re in, you’ll need the ability to identify your customer’s needs and respond to changes in the market. Online marketing gives you the best chance of surviving until the new economy arrives, and it will give you the best chance of dominating your competitors when it does arrive.
Bob Regnerus is the creator of the Big Ticket eCommerce System™, a four-step process that helps businesses with complex or high-priced products and services maximize their sales using the internet. Utilizing the proven methods of this system, he has created thousands of websites, attracted more than 35 million website visitors and generated 2.2 million leads for clients in more than 30 industries. To get a FREE copy of Big Ticket eCommerce sent to you by mail, visit http://www.FreeBigTicket.com right now.
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