Lack of social integration may lead to a website being seen as irrelevant.

Social media integration

Social media integration should happen in stages to reach a mature level. Here are some common stages that businesses experience as they travel the road towards social media maturity.

Social sharing

Description: Social sharing are participation mechanisms that encourage recommendations and referral from social media channels such as Facebook Like or Tweet buttons.

Benefits: Triggers social alerts as a form of endorsement and starts a viral loop; for example inviting friends to the website.

Social Aggregation

Description: Aggregate social content, for example Tweets, comments, reviews, etc. Occurring on your website.

Benefits: Brings to the surface all social discussion right on your website and enhances editorial connectivity and relevancy. It is highly recommended to keep the good and the bad and then filter the ugly discussions. Focus more on brand oriented content

Social Context

Description: Users login using existing credentials and can connect with friends and/or followers right on your website.

Benefits: May increase more client signups and create a sense of familiarity and community. The page on your website can have the same look as Facebook or a Twitter page. Marketers can also leverage the registration process allowing users to register using Facebook or Twitter login details.

You may also offer instant personalisation where website visitors can immediately see their friends’ ratings and reviews on a product page on your website. How powerful is this?

Conclusion

Many businesses are missing the mark by not integrating social media. We have discovered some businesses are active on social media but are not taking advantage of their social content to drive prospective customers to their websites, nor are they using the social viral factors to increase qualified traffic, conversion rate and ROI.

Social media is always new and evolving, and as such, these stages represent a moment in time. They will continue to evolve and expand with new technologies and experiences and in the end social media is a privilege and a tool — therefore it is yet another important opportunity to run a more meaningful and relevant business.

Google AdWords

It is amazing how quickly search engine marketing has evolved into a key component of any successful marketing effort. Most companies choose pay per click advertising to promote their business online due to its measurability, accountability, target ability and performance.

Once upon time, marketing for a small business meant a two hour meeting with yellow page rep and may be one hour a month meeting with a newspaper or radio rep. A total of 14 hours per year would be spent on their annual marketing.

Then comes PPC, no longer does advertising take 14 hours a year – for many companies it’s more than 14 hours a month, or worse, every single week or day.

Search marketing is still evolving. There are more advances in targeting, tracking, analysis and optimisation still to come. To take advantage of these trends and take control of the search marketing campaigns companies have to make smarter decisions to make their business prosper .

Know how

AdWords certified agencies are equipped with the knowledge of profitable advertising techniques and tactics. They work with AdWords every day. It’s their business. T hey will get you higher click through rate for your budget and they will improve the overall campaign performance.

Quality Score

The quality score is the most important number in AdWords account as it has far-reaching effect on your Google AdWords success. High quality score can place your ad above your competitors while you pay less per click than they do. The quality score is one of hardest number to quantify and try to improve. It is not an easy task for the average marketer. An online marketing agency does this every day and can quickly and effectively identify problem areas and implement corrective actions.

Focus on your business

Instead of spending time managing your account and keeping up-to-date with trends and changes, you can focus on core business activities to grow your business and let the advertising agency do what they do best.

Multimedia advertising

Building videos or image ads can be costly and require special skill that you may not have in house. Online marketing advertiser has tools and resources to produce cost effective and professional multimedia assets.

Google Content Network Advertising

The content will show your ads on non-search pages, such as news website, eBay etc. Utilising the content network cam increase your advertising reach tremendously. The content networks use different advertising rules and it is not an easy task for the average marketer. The Online marketing advertiser understands how the content network works and how to reach your prospects in an effective and efficient way and consequently create successful content campaigns.

Mobile Advertising

Mobile phones have become an integral part of users’ daily lives. For businesses and marketers, keeping pace is essential for reaching these consumers. Local businesses with a high walk-in rate can leverage mobile device and GPS advertising to reach customers when they’re nearby. Mobile search ads accounted for 36% of our overall conversions from Google.
While you can set up Google mobile ads using AdWords interface, managing a mobile advertising campaign is not a piece of cake for the average marketer.

Conversion Optimisation

The bottom line is ROI. To have a profitable AdWords campaign you need to get your ad to meet or exceed your profit goals. An AdWords expert with conversion optimisation focus understands the psychological, textual, graphical and other elements involved in on-page persuasion and conversion. Furthermore AdWords expert uses sophisticated monitoring tools to obtain more insight into a visitor’s on-page behaviour and can also make further informed adjustments to continually improve the conversion rate and improve the visitor ‘s experience on the page.
On average, campaigns adopt conversion optimiser achieving 21% increase in conversion, while at the same time decreasing their cost-per-acquisition by 14%.

Will take care of it

How do you feel when someone tells you “don’t worry I will take care of it”. You will definitely feel good knowing that your AdWords campaign is being professionally and efficiently run.

A Online marketing advertiser can increase your profitability and ROI and at the same time can save you time.

Failing to plan

To create a website which delivers results for its owners is not just about visual design, it’s not just about usability or accessibility or indeed about the development tools selected.
An effective site requires an in-depth understanding of the marketplace within which the website operates. In particular, the context for an effective customer experience should be assessed as part of customer experience management. To understand the marketplace and to tap into it requires a sound Internet marketing plan.

Failing to organise information properly

Information architecture tends to play the role of the ugly stepsister at the Web Design Ball – it’s not sexy for many tastes. Many businesses align their information architecture to their business units or departments. The problem with this is you focus on your business structure and forget about your target audience who may look at your content in a completely different way to you.
Without a sound foundation provided by effective information architecture a site is likely to be less usable, accessible and less persuasive.

Failing to be creative

Many businesses underestimate the role of creative design and visual impact within a site and focus more on functional aspects of website design.
Creative design has a major influence on the visitor experience and persuasion. If the website does not create a positive impression the visitor will leave and won’t come back again.

Failing to be found

If you fail to understand target audience and they search for your products and services, then you may be targeting the wrong audience or no audience at all.
A key requirement is to ensure that SEO is at the core of your website developments.

Failing to be persuasive

Many business websites simply put content online, and expect visitors to know what to do next. Your website should not guide the visitors but it has the persuade them to take a desired action.
Persuasion is aimed at developing content and writing copy to convert visitors to the outcomes that are successful for your business.

The good news is that a decent web design doesn’t cost too much these days; but you have to ensure whoever is in charge of your website project is aware of the 5 reasons listed above.

Well what about the human touch, is there a means of getting back to the personal and human interface? We all remember the confident and reassuring Chemist who not only dispensed your request but was ready to engage you in a dialogue on your condition and would be happy to talk about possible alternatives. This sort of pharmacy shopping experience would seem impossible to replicate in the on-line context. But can it be approached or are most on-line pharmacies content to be left behind because their web page lacks any suggestion of the personal touch?

It does not have to be this way. There is a way of presenting to the on-line pharmacy customer a means of experiencing a more human engagement with online pharmacy shopping. The answer is (like all good ideas) simple. A blog yes an interactive blog can revitalise your web page. Such a blog can be personal, humorous, educational, a source of professional advice, a social platform, a great source of profitability, but most of all human. And for the customer this is completely free of charge appointment free and can be achieved with a few strokes of a keyboard. Imagination and participation are the motors that will drive your interactive blog but clearly an interactive blog is absolutely the right prescription

Online merchandinsing is the way online businesses optimally display and present products to increase conversion rate and average order value. It is a mix of art and science that includes analytics merchandising, seasonal strategies and individual promotional practices. Merchandising includes site layout, banners and, most importantly, effective use of search, browsing and filtring results.

Regardless of what you sell, these best practices should include your unique merchandising mix.

1. Matching Buyer Intentions and Seller Goals: Sell more items by making sure your customers can easily find what they’re looking for, and optimally present what you want to sell them.
2. Enhance usability and sales
3. Optimise landing page for conversion: Use multimedia and call to action
4. Sell Up and Sell Down: Increase margins with up-selling while you clear out inventory with down-selling
5. Cross-Sell—Don’t Leave Money on the Table: Increase average order value with cross-selling.
6. Don’t Keep Your Great Deals a Secret: Promote free shipping, sales and other special offers with strategically placed banners.
7. Make it Easy for Them to Buy: Create a more targeted shopping experience with dynamic landing pages.
8. Promote your best offer: Promote specific products within search and browse results.
9. Let Your Products Merchandise Themselves: Promote products based on results, not behavior
10. Merchandise by the Numbers and intention: Promote products based on business rules and sales metrics.
11. Know The Customer: Base promotions and communication on customer segmentation.
12. Add impulse products to checkout.

Webtech PRO Action Click Merchandising helps online retail merchandising managers maximise website selling effectiveness and optimise the shopper experience by presenting the best product choices & offers and making them easy to find and buy.

Just as online retail has revolutionized the way we shop, there has been a rewriting of the rules for web content and all online retailers need to take note if they want their sites to keep on selling.

Of course pages need to be search engine optimised to provide the best opportunity for potential customers to arrive at your website, but content also needs to be relevant to your target market as well as a specific conversational tone that has been shown to make customers immediately pay attention.

Content should be scannable but should not assault the viewer in the same way as an advertisement on a billboard. Bulleted lists are preferable to paragraphs and emotional language should be used rather than corporate jargon.

Achieving that fine balance of SEO rich content, grabbing your customers attention and delivering a conversational style of writing that creates desire and action is now what is required to turn a website into a selling machine.

Sheenagh Maguire of My Copywriter .

What is a profitable website? A profitable website attracts qualified traffic. It is well designed, engaging, current, usable, highly responsive, and it is optimally persuasive to attract prospects, convert them to buyers, and gets customers to come back for more.

Get to know your target market

Customers are at the centre of building profitable websites. Getting to know your customers is the first step in the process of building profitable websites, after all you are trying to please and persuade them to take the desired actions. The marketing data you will collect about your customers will help in creating web copy, design, navigation structure and features that will engage most visitors, and move a large percentage of them through the conversion funnel.

Optimising for traffic

You have to go beyond search engine optimisation and optimise your website for traffic from various sources such as search engines, social media networks and so on. Optimising a website for traffic is an ongoing and adaptive discipline that consistently looks for marketing opportunities, creatively explores the market trends and builds an ever expanding brand that continually reaches and engages new customers.

Persuasive Website Design

Persuasive website Design is more than the art of graphic design, it’s about understanding the user’s decision process and providing the information and tools to help facilitate and make informed decision. To be profitable, websites must be usable and focus on persuasive website design. They must motivate and engage users by taking advantage of persuasive tactics & techniques that will make them take the desired actions. The most persuasive websites focus on making users feel comfortable about making decisions by focusing on value and eliminating the feeling of online risk and anxiety.

Build confidence and trust

Customers won’t buy from someone they do not trust. Every visitor comes to your website with a degree of intimidation and fear. They want to have an enjoyable, positive and risk free experience, so they have to trust you before they are confident in dealing with you.

Establishing trust with your website: visitors take three steps

1. Knowledge: when visitors first land on your website, you have only a few seconds to convince them to stay. During these few seconds you have to demonstrate your unique value proposition.
2. Knowledge: when visitors first land on your website, you have only a few seconds to convince them to stay. During these few seconds you have to demonstrate your unique value proposition.
3. Engagement: Engaging your on-line customers involves giving them more control and providing them with information and tools to make informed decisions.
4. Experience: You have to ensure that website visitors have an overall wonderful experience.

Customer Engagement

How can you make your customers more interested in your products or services over your competitors and do it in a consistent manner?

Social Media

Engagement through social media is a medium to long term strategy and it requires time, resources and investment in planning, executing and tracking the engagement campaigns. The ROI from social media strategies won’t disappoint as long as you take the right approach and target the right social media medium such as Facebook and Twitter.

Customer Reviews & Ratings

The power of selling through a testimony or recommendation is unrivalled. Depending on product or service, customer reviews and ratings can help persuade users to move forward with a purchase.
A study from Deloite has found more than eight in 10 (82%) of consumers who read product reviews online say their purchase decisions have been directly influenced by the user reviews.

Newsletter

One of the most proven ways to re-engage your customers is to send them periodic and targeted emails highlighting recent news and offers.

Some strategies to avoid losing money on AdWords

Setting your marketing Goals

Regardless of the adverting medium, the first thing you should do in any advertising project, before you spend a single cent, is to set the goals your advertising campaign needs to accomplish. If you do not have goals set, you cannot define and measure success and you cannot optimise your campaign to increase performance.

You have to dig into your business model to understand how the business is making money and what is required to do to grow the business.

Once the business examines itself and understands how and where it makes money, set measurable and realistic goals for what the marketing campaign needs to accomplish.

Some common goals

• Set percentage ROI on products and services sold
• Minimum number of sales per month
• Minimum revenue per month
• Number of leads per month
• Cost per lead and acquisition

You cannot manage what you don’t measure

Optimising AdWords campaigns can only be done with proper metrics. If you don’t have the numbers to assess your campaign, there is no way to benchmark your campaign performance against your goals. Therefore for every goal you set, you need to define a set of metrics.

Google offers a conversion tracking tool allowing you to see cost per conversion, total conversions, and ROI etc. Google conversion tracking can also track offline transactions such as call tracking.

Bidding can make or break a campaign

Smart bidding will move your AdWords account from a cost centre to a revenue centre. Knowing where your dollars are being spent, watching the returns on investment, and making appropriate adjustment to optimise your campaign are paramount to making a profitable AdWords campaign.

You have to keep in mind that a bid is only value to tell Google how much you are willing to pay for a click. The ad copy and keywords allow you to reach customers with the right message. Your landing page will create the first impression and entry point into your sale funnel. The organisation of your account will have as much to do with your success as the bid will.