News,views and tips with regards to all things digital…

Ho Ho Ho! Christmas is here, it’s that time of year when you spend time with friends and family, give and receive presents and generally over-indulge! You gotta love it!

As industry starts to slow down over the holiday period it is important to remember that the online world never stops, people keep searching, enquiring and buying regardless of the festivities.

The credit crunch doesn’t slap on a Santa hat and get all merry over the holiday period either, so our present to you is a brief guide to search marketing in the credit crunch era.

One of the most important advantages to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the fact that it is utterly accountable. There are clear and well established measurement systems in place that have been proven to work.  Read on for some techniques that we utilise for all of our clients.

Search Landing Pages

Create landing pages that illustrate your strengths and have very strong and clear calls to action.  These pages must be easy to navigate and straight to the point.  Match copy within in the landing pages to that in your paid search advertisements. Landing pages are ideal for special campaigns and allow you to directly track their success. We regularly implement landing pages for clients and the results speak for themselves. They can be quickly created and built in to your existing site. We also recommend microsites which allow you to engage the customer further and are just as trackable as landing pages. Click here for an example of a microsite we recently implemented for http://www.goodpractice.net

Making the Most of Your Budget

It is sensible (in most cases!) to re-allocate budget from other media to pay per click (PPC). SEM can be quickly altered to integrate with the rest of your marketing activities. Move budget to campaigns i.e. press, that are attracting traffic via search. Perfect Storm are experts at allocating and managing online budgets and ensuring SEM works in tandem with your marketing mix.

Spend on the Right Words

Quality is key when it comes to keywords. Every business has words that have the highest conversion rates so focus on these and create a solid list. Remember that your paid ads must be relevant to your content. We carry out extremely in-depth keyword research to ensure the compilation of a relevant and effective keyword strategy.

Know Your Targets

Use research tools and real-time demographic profiles to understand your target market. Create tailored ad copy with your research results in mind. Taking these steps can achieve higher rankings when your audience is searching which in turn leads to hits and hopefully the all important conversion.

Test It!

The features are in place to allow you to test as many ads as you want so make sure you take advantage of this! Test that copy until you cannot test it anymore! This way you can make sure that your copy grabs the attention of your customers.

Track It!

You can track and account for your web activity with simple analytics that will produce clear and useful reports.  Accurate monitoring allows you to keep a track of costs and ROI. Web analytics allows you to see what is working best and where and when it is working.

Educate!

Your staff need to know how to interpret the analysis data. They have to remember that high traffic levels are not a key metric and that conversions and click through rates are king. High traffic and low conversion rates equate to poor quality traffic. Having a decent level of understanding within your staff is very important.

Outsource

All bias aside, it can be a time consuming process managing your online campaigns in-house and can allude to false economy. In this nasty financial climate it is quite likely that you are cutting resources and this can lead to your SEM receiving less attention and a rapidly dropping return on investement.

Perfect Storm can create, implement and manage your digital marketing strategies. We are specialists in SEO, PPC, creation of online ads/landing page/microsites, online branding and social media marketing.

So there you go, a highly useful present from us to you. Want to find out more about digital marketing and all of it’s various elements and how Perfect Storm can work with you? Call Mike on +44131 553 8664 and let’s have a chat. Or email me on mike@perfectstormdigital.co.uk

Have a fantastic festive period!