Understand Your Traffic Streams

If there is one thing that we would like you to take away from this blog post, it is that you cannot use generalizations when it comes to tracking and testing your marketing efforts. You really need to understand where your traffic streams are coming from and micromanage each stream, effectively, if you want to make an overall improvement in your performance. It makes little sense to try and establish averages over a number of different initiatives, just so that you can see how you are doing in overall terms.

We always seem under pressure to come up with statistics, to show that we are being productive with our time or initiatives or to prove that the money truly is “well spent.” The truth is that any analytics program worth its salt will enable you to drill down and really analyze every single visitor.

If you favor Google Analytics, you may have one of those plug-ins added to your blog to show you how you are doing through a summarized form, complete with miniature graph over the last 30 days. You will see your average “bounce rate,” and this may send you running for the hills, but after all what use are these figures by themselves?

The whole purpose of tracking and testing is to make changes. For sure, you could be the smartest marketer in creation or just plain lucky, find that your promotional and advertising methods work right out of the box and you need to do little to modify. We all know marketing a business is about trial and error and even the most educated and successful among us make mistakes and need to make changes. Be prepared to understand that you need to track each initiative before you put it in place, associate results with that particular track and you must be able to differentiate those results from any other concurrent initiative.

It is important to develop separate landing pages and associated anchor text, crucial reference points to enable you to quickly see where consummated sales originate. Remember also that a good proportion of visitors to your site will be poorly qualified and these will certainly help to skew your conversion rates.

If you are lucky enough to have a very highly trafficked site and have not taken steps to differentiate your sources, you will find it very difficult to move forward with any confidence. Whatever you may do to try and increase conversion rates in one particular area will be difficult to quantify as your average conversion rate, bounce rate or simple visitor rate will tend to absorb your efforts.

If you have not set up a trackable, definable list of goals and events and your landing pages are insufficiently identified, then it may be time for you to start afresh, redefine your objectives, come up with a plan and a means to track it and set a future date to start understanding and manipulating your traffic streams correctly.

Are all your traffic streams profitable - if not which ones are dragging you down?

Adam Toren

Marketing v. Advertising: Know the Difference

One of the biggest challenges of being a small business owner is that you must become an expert on many facets of business even if you lack education and practical experience.  Just because you went to school and got an accounting degree doesn’t mean you know much, if anything, about advertising.  Yet, in order to succeed, you must gain at least some level of competency in all these different areas; at least enough to know if the people you’ve hired are doing a good job.

One area that I want to address in this post has to do with marketing v. advertising.  The reason is that the marketing world has undergone a sort of rapid evolution in the past couple years with the insane popularity of Web 2.0/Social Networking.  Web-based marketing, including affiliate marketing, is often good-old fashioned advertising (or worse, spam) dressed in sheep’s clothing.  It is important to recognize the differences between marketing and advertising to make sure you’re getting the most from your marketing budget; and since your marketing efforts are you company’s “first impression” to the public, you also want to be sure you’re representing yourself in the best possible light.

The best way to describe it is using the analogy of a toolbox.  Marketing is a toolbox full of stuff that you can use to represent your company; and advertising is simply one tool.  What that means is that you must have an overall plan of action in place before you make a decision about any kind of advertising.  An ad campaign that does not fit into your overall marketing strategy can actually do more harm than good.

Many advertising agents will try to sell you ad space/time using statistics, and get you to jump on a bandwagon with other companies similar to yours who are doing the same thing.  But you have to look at the big picture.  Your success depends entirely on your ability to stand out from the pack.  If you’re using the same “tried and true” methods to advertise and market your business, it doesn’t matter how good you are—it’s not going to get you any attention.

The great thing about marketing is that it is actually a creative endeavor.  You can devise new ways of doing it which will become part of your company’s identity.  Much of the corporate marketing that is done is highly refined, created to appeal to the broadest range of people.  But recent success stories show that it is the unique, niche markets that have quirky personalities that are thriving.

The bottom line is this:  You’re not going to succeed at business without a solid marketing plan.  And that doesn’t mean buying premium ad space or giving away stuff with your logo on it.  It means looking at your overall market, comparing the strategies of other companies; being innovative with your writing, promotion, and advertising; and having a way to track the effectiveness of your campaigns.  It means basing your advertising decisions on more than just cost.

In the world of online marketing, you can get lost in the shuffle.  Each one of us is bombarded with emails, messages from our “friends”, and banner ads that it has become easy to tune these things out.  Remember:  the key to effective marketing is always going to be making a personal connection with your prospective customer.  So try to look at all your marketing and advertising with a fresh eye and imagine yourself seeing it for the first time.  What does it say about your company and your product?  Is it compelling enough to make you want to find out more?  Is it associated with other, controversial or unattractive concepts?  Be prepared to hear honest feedback and to use it as you constantly refine and redefine your marketing strategy.