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Advertising without tracking: big mistake

With every type of advertising you spend money on, you want to track your results. Just like any other part of your business, you gotta know if your investments are ponying up.

Here’s where we mix things get a bit different though.

When you buy a TV ad, you measure last year’s profits and compare them to this year’s profits. If you start to see a lift (and you aren’t running any other promotions), you become aware of how that ad affected your bottom line.

Things aren’t so vague when it comes to online advertising though. When you spend money on an ad (such as Google Ads), you can see exactly which keywords brought you a new customer, using the magic of conversion tracking.

How It Works

When someone clicks on your ad, they go to a page on your website. If they like what they see, they might purchase something from you or fill out a lead form.

Conversion tracking allows you to measure every time this “conversion” happens, and pinpoints how it happened. This is what separates online advertising from regular ads in a magazine or newspaper.

If you don’t have accountability in your marketing, then you have no idea how much ROI your ads are producing. If you’re running online ads, this is something you MUST do.

Where To Put Conversion Tracking

Typically conversion tracking goes on the “thank you” page after someone takes a desirable action.

For example, say you want to track people using the contact form on your website. They fill out their name, email, and leave a comment. Then they press “submit”, and are taken to a page that says:

“Thanks for contacting us! We’ll get back to you soon!”.

That is the page you want to track, because the only time someone views your “thank you” page is when they’ve filled out your form. That is where you put the conversion tracking code.

If you have multiple forms or purchases you want to track, it’s easiest to just create a single thank-you page and have every form link to it.

A more complicated, but more granular approach is to create multiple thank-you pages based on different products that you have. Or you might have a single thank-you page for your forms, and a different thank-you page when someone purchases a product (which is a different type of conversion than just filling out a lead form).

This lets you assign different values to different types of conversions.

If you have someone running your ads for you, they should be knowledgeable on how to implement this tracking code for you. They’ll need access to your website though.

Name It

It’s easiest to name your thank you page:

www.yoursite.com/thank-you

There are multiple reasons for this. For one thing, it’s simply easier to tell what’s going on while you implement your conversion tracking if the page has a simple name.

Beyond that, you can use custom URL rules if you implement remarketing into your site. This is a more advanced topic that goes beyond the scope of this article, but it’s important to know that there are some really tangible reasons for you to name your thank-you page in a simple manner.

I encourage you to set up conversion tracking today though. If you do nothing else, just make sure that your site is starting to deliver this data so you can start to track the effectiveness of your advertising. If you are running Google Adwords, refer to this help page for setting up your conversion tracking.

Infographics display the content of your website in an interesting way that grabs a reader’s attention. If you haven’t seen one before, take a look at a few examples here, here, and here.

As a local business, how would infographics benefit your business?

A Higher Class Of Content

Infographics are popular for a reason: you’re able to convey information in a succinct way. If you were trying to explain when to service a vehicle with a “Car Maintenance Schedule”, wouldn’t you get the picture across much quicker with a graphic instead of just plain text?

There’s no replacement for good writing, but the way you use graphics can bring your website to the next level, and give oodles of other benefits, such as…

Better Search Engine Rankings

Google, Bing, Yahoo – they all care about multimedia on your site. When you have original, high-quality videos or images on your website, your pages gain a bonus on their rankings – and yes that means infographics too.

If you properly mark up your infographic with alt text, Google will even know that it’s an infographic (rather than just a typical image) and give extra brownie points on your rankings.

Visitors Love It

The more you enhance your content to help visitors understand your industry, the longer they’re going to stay on your site and look around. And the more you can educate them, the more they’re going to trust you.

Beyond that, even if a customer already likes you and trusts you, they’ll be that much more excited to see what you have to share, building even more affinity with your business.

If they show up to find that you’ve completely blown them away with an incredible infographic, they’ll be real happy with you, that’s for certain. Which leads to…

…Social Sharing

First off – the more your website is shared socially (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) the higher your website will rank on Google; search engines are paying attention to how you do on social networks. And that’s only an indirect benefit of having people share your infographics.

Beyond that, you have the direct benefit of more people seeing your website on social networks, and clicking through to your site.

If you’re a local business, the biggest benefit is that most of your competitors are likely not taking advantage of this exciting content format. Isn’t it great to be the first to do something? What a great way to set your business apart from your competitors!

It’s true that infographics aren’t cheap to create, but if you’re at a point where next-level content will make a dent in your business (you have a lot of exposure, or your product is worth a lot), you should consider it.

There are different up-and-down trends that you’ll see in your website’s traffic. This is dependant upon the type of marketing that you implement.

Advertising Campaign Trends

When you start an ad campaign (either through a website, Facebook, or Google Adwords), it’s like you’ve turned on a switch, and traffic immediately starts coming to your website. This is illustrated below on this traffic graph.

As you can see, traffic is relatively steady once the advertising starts. It fluctuates minorly, but no major changes occur once the traffic has started.

The obvious disadvantage of an advertising campaign is that once you stop paying for advertising, the traffic switch is turned off.

Adversely, when you run a content marketing campaign, the traffic you “earn” stays with your site, even when you stop producing content. This obvious advantage has vast implications; your site all of a sudden has a tangible value with real equity, because organic search-engine traffic can equal dollars.

Content Marketing Campaign Trends

When you start putting content up on your website, you’ll find an up and down trend starts to occur. This is less stable than the type of trend you see in an advertising campaign, which typically sends you steady traffic (illustrated above).

Below you can see a graph of about 6 months of traffic data.

You can see where the content marketing started, where the graph jumps up. From there, you can see that traffic wildly jumps up and down depending on the month and day. But if you compare the first bout of traffic (around 1,000 page views per day), to where the traffic was near the end of the graph (around 3,000 page views) you know that there’s been huge increases.

That’s why it’s so important to take the average traffic over a month, or 3 months, to really know if you are seeing increases.

Being Patient – Play The Long Game

If you’re looking at your traffic stats every day, you’re doing it wrong. As you can see from the graph above, traffic gained organically tends to go up and down, but the averages are slowly raised (and they go up faster if you output more content).

You may even find that some months have overall lower traffic. As long as that trend doesn’t continue for 3+ months, it’s nothing to be concerned about. Content marketing is the long game – with big rewards. Even after you stop writing, traffic continues pouring in.

Let’s see a Google Ad pull off that trick!

 

You have a site, and you’ve got a convincing home page that has an easy way for customers to contact you. Now it’s time to build some traffic.

The best way to build traffic is to get expert, original content written for your site. The reasons to write content are many, far above just getting rankings.

Builds Trust & Credibility

When a customer arrives on your site and sees a nice friendly picture of your staff, or reads about “how friendly you are”, a small amount of credibility is built.

Imagine a visitor is having a problem with their plumbing. They search “how to unplug a plugged sink”, looking for answers. As a plumber, you’ve written an article with step-by-step pictures on how to do it.

The customer is then thinking to themselves, “hmm…this seems like an awful lot of work; work that I don’t really want to do.”

Guess what they do next? Seeing as though you’ve provided them with the information that they needed, and your content was so good, they call you! By answering their questions, a huge amount of credibility is built for you.

Creating areas on your site where customers can become legitimately educated on your business is great for building trust, and trust = more sales.

Helps You Create & Refine The Voice Of Your Company

As you write (or a ghostwriter/employee writes for you), you become much more educated on how you want the “voice” of your company to sound.

You read over what’s written, and thought-by-thought you realize “I don’t like the way this sentence comes off, let’s change it to this”.

Finding your voice online is ideal, because the risks are fairly low if you accidentally portray a voice that you didn’t really want. Imagine having to learn how you want your “voice” to be through highly publicized news pieces – what a nightmare!

By working through content on your website, you can find out how you want to interact with your customers, and how you want your company to sound to them.

Educating your customers online is a wonderful way to establish the face of your company. Do you want customers to view you as:

• Playful, or serious?

• Funny, or straightforward?

• Sophisticated, or accessible to anyone?

• Flat, or emphatic?

• Excited, or reserved?

• Friendly, or stern?

Regardless of any voice you want to portray, customers are going to see you as knowledgeable because of it.

Boosts Your Google Rankings

And let’s not forget the original content reasoning: traffic!

By building content about your line of business that answers your customer’s questions, your website becomes a valuable property in the eyes of the search engines.

Google, Bing, Yahoo: they’re all designed for 1 purpose – to help people find information. If you can provide information that people are looking for, then the search engines can deliver…you! Or your website at least.

By creating valuable, original content for your website, you’ll receive one thing in return: traffic. And with traffic, comes more leads and more sales.

Want the sure-fire way to get to the “first page of google”? Make content!

To summarize, writing great, original content “from the experts” will:

• build trust and credibility between your company and your customers

• increase traffic to your website

• help you refine the voice of your company.

To really sell a customer on your service or product on your website, you want to show them that you truly understand the problems they have in regards to your business.

This goes beyond a simple “I’m hungry, so I’ll buy a hamburger”. It’s more than just “My teeth hurt, so I’ll see a dentist”.

As consumers in a modern society, we cannot go back to the simple times of needing simple solutions to our problems. We cannot remove the emotional needs from the physical needs.

On top of the physical needs of being fed, or getting our teeth fixed, we also have emotional needs that “need” fulfilling. They’re really just wants, but a modern consumer views them as needs. This is true at least in our current state of ideals, where emotions are very important to us – in previous centuries, emotions haven’t been quite as important.

So where does that leave the dentist, who just…fixes people’s teeth?

The Problem/Pain Of Your Business

It leaves him in a place where he needs to focus on emotional needs in order to sell his services. In marketing, the easiest way to grab someone’s attention is to focus on the pain of their problem.

For a dentist, there are quite a few cliche pains/problems that you could focus on:

• I have a toothache, which is painful for me (the obvious problem).

• If I go to a dentist, this will be a very uncomfortable experience for me.

• It’s frightening to go to the dentist.

• I might find that I have more cavities or problems than I want

The two most well-known complaints about the dentist are fear, and discomfort. If you were a dentist, I would recommend you choose one of these problems as your main problem, and then drive that pain home.

Once you’ve reminded your customer of the “pain” (in this case, discomfort) you can then show them how your business is the solution to their problem.

This is a basic concept of copywriting (writing to sell) and the problem/solution idea should be showcased all over your website, marketing materials, billboards, newspaper ads, radio ads, etc.

You want people to know you as the solution to their emotional and physical problems!

Let’s Take A Look At A Local Chilliwack Business

Here is the website for a chilliwack dentist who uses this exact problem to his advantage. You can see that his headline reads:

“No More Pain, No More Fear.

I’m A Chilliwack Dentist Who Cares About Your Comfort”

From the very first headline, you can feel how this dentist focuses solely on the problem and emotional pain of going to the dentist.

He then drives that problem home in the first few paragraphs:

“At Dr. Hildebrand’s office, your comfort is my first priority.

Some patients find the dental chair to be an anxious experience. To help rid your anxiety, I encourage you to let me know about any discomfort you might have so I can fix it immediately. Maybe you need a pillow for your neck, or some additional freezing – just ask and I’ll make it happen, all with a smile! 

I’m always aiming to make your dental experience comfortable; Dr. Hildebrand is the place to go for comfortable dentistry.”

If you were someone that was afraid of going to the dentist, wouldn’t you be inclined to choose this dentist over someone else who says something generic like:

Chilliwack Family Dentist

We know how important having a great smile is to looking and feeling good. That’s why Dr. Garth Hildebrand and the entire team at our Chilliwack, dental practice is committed to providing the highest quality in family and cosmetic dentistry.

We invite you to look around our site to learn more about Dr. Garth Hildebrand and our Chilliwack dental practice to see how we can be an integral part of your dental care.”

Ugh! Painfully boring and generic. If you were deathly afraid of the discomfort associated with dentists, would that do anything to help you? I doubt it.

Now that you realize the importance of a problem/solution to focus on your business, how do you come up with one yourself?

Ask Your Customers

You can start by getting your customers to give you their biggest objections to using your business (over your competitors).

“What was the obstacle that would have prevented you from buying my product/service?”

That is the perfect question to ask for this type of feedback.

Once you’ve gotten a bunch of answers, put them in a list and examine them. You want to look for the most striking objection you can find. What do you really view as an important problem?

Beyond asking customers, you can also just do your best to examine the negative cliches in your business. For the above example (dentists), it’s a big cliche that everyone hates the dentist because it’s uncomfortable or painful.

Take a mechanic: we know they’re supposed to be kind of “shysters” who will sell you things you don’t need (like a new Johnson Rod for $500!) – the cliche is that they aren’t trustworthy, but this mechanic puts all his marketing on trust to help curb that pain, and it sells!

Find your customers biggest pain. Start by making a list of all the problems consumers have in your business, and then decide on which one you think is the most powerful.

Maybe the pain is “shipping is expensive”, so you decide to go full-out on saying that you offer “free shipping”. Sure, maybe your competitors offer free shipping too, but by consistently reinforcing yourself as the company with free shipping, customers start to emotionally align you with that concept – this type of alignment causes familiarity, and more importantly sales!

Get your pens and keyboards out – and start listing!

Who are your biggest clients?

Do you have a client or customer who would be worth mentioning on your website to help build credibility for your brand? If you do, then make sure you prominently display them on your site. When new customers come rolling in, they’ll see the types of other clients you service, which will breed familiarity and trust for you.

This is similar to having a testimonial from the brand, except you’re just associating yourself with them, rather than showing off a review.

Companies have done this for forever with sponsorships, celebrity endorsements, as well as doing it online in the manner described above.

After all, we both know that you wouldn’t be drinking Pepsi-Cola if the young Britney Spears from this 2002 commercial wasn’t drinking it. She’s youthful, right?

People are familiar with Britney Spears. By starring her in a commercial, and showing that she “approves” of their product, people then, by default, become familiar with Pepsi.

Familiarity = sales.

It needs to be said again:

Familiarity = SALES

Drop someone’s name that people are familiar with, and customers magically become familiar with you.

Examples Of Name Droppers (Online & Offline)

Optimizely (the A/B split testing company that we mentioned in our last post) uses their customer list to showcase their credibility:

Tesla Motors: In this video featured on the Tesla Motors website, you can see how Tony Hawk “endorses” the Tesla car by using it’s safe rear-camera in a way that it wasn’t exactly designed for:

Heck, we even drop some names ourselves on our home page:

How Big Do You Need To Go?

If you have a client that people recognize in the community, who would bring you credibility, and it’s socially appropriate to do so (probably just mentioning “Bob from down the street” wouldn’t be appropriate), then that’s big enough.

For a worldwide brand like Pepsi, you might need a Britney Spears or Beyonce to make any difference to sales. For a small town brand like “Phil’s Website Design”, just showcasing one or two recognizable businesses should be enough to tip the scales in your favour.

Use your insight and intuition to make the call on who you include.

You be the judge.