The Call To Action

by John Eberhard                                                                                                            

One of the most vital aspects of any ad, promo piece, promotional email or web site is called the “call to action.” And for many business people, it is probably one of the least understood.

The call to action is the thing that comes at the end of your ad, promo piece, web page, or promotional email, and should be included in all website marketing. It is where you tell the person what you want him to do. This is where you tell him to buy the product now, to fill out the form, or to pick up the phone and call.

You might think that it is obvious at the end of the ad or web page or promo piece that the person should do what you have in mind. Not so. You have to tell them convincingly what you want them to do. Or let’s put it this way: if you tell them convincingly what you want them to do, your percentage of people that do so will increase dramatically.

I remember working with a guy once who was relatively new to marketing. I looked at the first ad he designed and I realized it had no call to action on it. I tactfully explained what a call to action was, and the ad got modified to include one.

So your call to action tells people what to do. But there is another important element to a call to action, and I notice that some business owners instinctively get this and with others I have to explain it. And that is the offer.

The call to action is where you incorporate your offer. By that I mean that you have to offer them something to sweeten the pot a little bit, to heighten the reader’s interest and get him to take action now, rather than moving on.

With promotions where you are trying to get the person to buy right now, usually with lower ticket items, your offer could be some sort of discount or buy-now, or an add-on that the person gets for free when they buy. Often you can come up with an add-on that adds significant perceived value, but is not that expensive in relation to the price of the item. I think that in the current economy it is more important than ever to come up with an offer that will increase the percentage that buy now.

With higher ticket items, you usually are in the business of lead generation, meaning that you are trying to get the person to respond and give you his contact information so that one of your salespersons can contact and sell him.

So with lead generation, it is helpful to give him an added reason to respond. So you offer him something, usually for free. Like a newsletter subscription, or a free report or white paper, a product demo, or whatever. You want to make sure that your offer is related as directly as possible to the topic of the product or service you are offering. For instance, if you offer a free white paper, it should be on a topic that is directly related to your product or service. That way the people who respond will be much more likely to be qualified prospects, because otherwise they wouldn’t be interested in the white paper.

I have written another article on hard and soft offers, and it is important to understand those. Over the 21 years that I have been involved in marketing, I have found special offers to be very helpful in terms of increasing the percentage of response.

Over the next week, check out the ads or promotional material you see and notice the call to action. Notice if the marketer included any kind of special offer to heighten your interest and get you to respond now. Notice how effective each one was for you. This will help you in crafting your own effective call to action.

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Build Your Own Facebook

by John Eberhard

Building your own social networking website with advanced functionality such as the ability to invite friends and have a friend network, having users each have a profile page and upload images and videos for others to see, may have been a pretty daunting idea in the past. Programming for building such a site would have run into the thousands or tens of thousands.

But there is an emerging trend of companies building complex sites and then offering them as off-the-shelf site templates that you can use. The functionality is built right into the site already. All you have to do is customize the site with your own name and graphics and look.

One such new solution being offered is phpFox, which offers a Facebook-like product that they sell for an inexpensive one-time fee. The software allows you to do the following with your site:

• People sign up and become members
• They have a profile page listing information about them
• They can invite others to become their friends
• An activity feed that shows the status updates of all your friends
• Creating custom user groups and charging fees for membership if you want
• Notices for events
• Instant messaging between members
• Posting images, videos or music
• A marketplace where users can list things for sale
• Create ad campaigns that target everyone or specific groups or demographics

In other words, you can set up a site that is essentially just like Facebook. So why would you want to do that? Well you’re not going to try to go head to head competing with Facebook (if you’re smart) because they are well established and are currently the top social media site in terms of traffic. That would be like trying to compete with Amazon or eBay. Not going to happen.

But what you could do with such a system is to set up a specialized site that is a social network for some specialized group or demographic, like computer consultants, or chiropractors, or dentists, or computer gamers, or classic car enthusiasts, or photographers, or sports fans, or people from a certain city.

You could monetize your site by having advertising (like Facebook does in the right hand column) or charging for memberships.

Of course you have to bear in mind that just putting up such a site would usually not result, just by itself, in millions of people coming to it. You’d still have to work out how to market the site and drive people to it.

But the point is that the availability of inexpensive software like this with all this advanced functionality, makes it possible for you to put up your own social networking site. And if you have a specific niche in mind, a certain group or demographic that all share a certain common interest, and there isn’t already a social networking site like this in that niche, it might be just the ticket.

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Handling the Local Angle

by John Eberhard

One of the issues that many companies have to deal with when they are laying out a website marketing strategy, is the issue of geography. Where is the business located? And where does it do business? Is it a local business servicing people in one metro area? Is it a business that does business in one entire state? Regional? National? International?

Many of the online marketing actions you can take are NOT limited in their geography. In other words, they get the word out nationally or internationally. So if your business is a local restaurant or home improvement company, servicing people only in a small area, those strategies aren’t necessarily the best for you.

For example, I was recently approached by a firm that wanted to target prospects in southern California. But they wanted to do search engine optimization and link building to get their site ranking high in the search engines. This is all well and good. But I was envisioning where this was going to go, and even if we clearly stated on the web site that we service people only in southern California, I could see getting lots of leads from out of the area. I could even see getting only a minority of the leads from the target area.

You can always target keywords that include the name of your location, but this only works if there is some decent traffic associated with those localized keywords.

Google has recently announced a new feature on search called “Nearby.” If you go to the main Google search page, then type in some search, right near the top there will appear a link for “Show options.” Click on this and a column will appear on the left. A little ways down the page it will say “All results” in black and “Nearby” underlined in blue. If you click on “Nearby” then all the results will be geographically nearby.

This is a nifty feature that perhaps Google should have offered a long time ago. But it’s sort of hard to find. So for the time being until this feature becomes easier to find and more widely used, Google’s main search results are not local.

So let’s talk about the various website marketing methods and whether or not they can be used to target locally.

1. Search Engine Optimization: Doing SEO on a site is designed to help with getting the site to rank well in the search engines for certain keywords. So unless you have some keywords that include names of cities or towns near you, and those keywords have some decent traffic, doing SEO does not allow you to target geographically.

1. Blogging: Having a blog, posting to it regularly, and including links within your post going to various pages in your site, is a great way to generate traffic to the blog, and also builds up links to your site. And sending a notification to the blog search engines after each post is what drives traffic. But once again unless you are including the name of your location in your blog posts (in the headlines, links etc.) you will be attracting visitors from all over.

1. Optimized Press Releases: Sending out press releases optimized with your target keywords is a great way to build quality links to your web site. My thought on press releases is that they generate some traffic, but it is more of a method of building links. So I think it does not matter so much if the business is local.

1.  Article Marketing: Submitting articles to article directories, also called content hubs, remains one of the best ways to build up quantity links to your website. But again, unless you are sprinkling the name of your location throughout the article, you will tend to get readers from all over. But again this is mainly a link building action, so my thought is that this works equally well for local businesses, because we’re mainly looking to create links.

1. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC): Pay per click advertising with Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Ad Center allows you to exactly target where your ads will appear. So if you only do business in Glendale, Pasadena and Burbank, California, then you can set it up so that only people living in those cities will see your ads. They will not appear to people searching in Florida. You can pick the whole US, individual states, or other countries. So for a local business that only does business in a certain geographical area, PPC is the best way to drive a lot of traffic that is restricted to one geographical area or zone. As I have mentioned in other articles, PPC is not a good fit for every type of business, because the cost can make it not viable for low ticket items (under $100). But if you selling a high ticket item, it’s usually a great fit.

So in summary, for the local business, pay per click advertising is often the best fit in terms of driving local visitors to your site and generating local leads. That may change as Google makes their “Nearby” feature more prominent and it becomes more widely used. But for now, PPC is the best tool for targeting the local customer.

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Paid and Organic Traffic

by John Eberhard

When a website owner wants to increase traffic to his website, he doesn’t particularly care how it is done – he just wants more traffic.

Pay per click advertising (PPC), through Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Ad Center, is a great source of traffic for many companies. For companies where pay per click advertising is a good fit, I recommend a two-pronged approach, namely:

1. Get a pay per click campaign going on Google and/or the other providers. This will provide immediate leads coming in the door.
2. While the PPC campaign is getting in leads right away, start a longer range campaign to increase organic (non-paid) traffic.

Organic traffic is defined as traffic that comes through any non-paid means, i.e. not from the pay per click providers. So how do you increase organic traffic?

There are two primary means of increasing organic traffic: 1) raising your rankings in the search engines for the keywords that you are targeting, and 2) putting up a strong and continuing presence on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Raising Your Search Engine Rankings

I have stated in the past that you don’t just generally rank well or poorly on a search engine. You rank well or poorly for specific keywords. So it is important to do keyword research and figure out the best keywords to target. You have to find keywords that have good traffic, i.e. lots of people searching for them, but that do not have a ton of sites competing for them. If there are too many sites competing, you will not be very likely to be able to rank well for those keywords. So you have to find the gold nuggets: high traffic, low competition.

OK. Once you have figured out your list of target keywords, the next step in raising your rankings in the search engines is to do link building. The best ways to do link building are:

1. Article Directories: Writing articles and submitting these to article directories, also known as content hubs. I’ve been doing this type of link building for about four years and it is extremely effective in increasing the volume of links to a website. For reasons I don’t understand, link building with article directories is virtually ignored by the plethora of Internet marketing and search engine optimization websites, blogs and experts out there. One friend of mine thinks this is because the public at large can use article directories effectively, thus leaving the “experts” out of the loop. Whatever the reason that the so-called “experts” never mention it, I know that it works in building hundreds or thousands of links, because I’ve done it and seen the results.
2. Optimized press releases: These are press releases that you write, including 2-3 targeted keywords per release. We then put these up on the client’s blog, on our Client News blog, and submit them to several online PR sites. These online PR sites tend to rank very well on search engines, so these press releases create high quality links. The article directories create quantity of links, and the press releases create quality links.
3. Blogs: Both articles and press releases can be put on a blog or series of blogs (I create 6 blogs for a client and then post each item on all 6), with links within the post back to the client’s main web site. And what text do we use to link? Our targeted keywords of course (Did you guess that one? 10 RealWebMarketing.net points). Each article then counts as more links to your website. Don’t forget to send a notification called a “ping” to all the blog search engines after each post.
4. Squidoo and HubPages: You can take articles and put them up as pages on Squidoo and HubPages, with links coming back to your site. HubPages has a bit of an “anti-marketing” attitude and will only allow one link per article, while Squidoo allows you to put in as many links as you want per article.
5. Social Media Business Directories: You can create listings on social media business directories such as Hotfrog.com, Aboutus.org, Plaxo.com, Plurk.com, etc. These all create good quality links.

Once you start a link building campaign, I recommend checking your rankings in the top three search engines each month for your entire list of targeted keywords. Use software such as Market Samurai or Internet Business Promoter. Then count up how many #1 keywords you have, how many top tens, top twenty, top one hundred, etc. By doing this you can really see your progress month to month. Be prepared to stick with a link building program for at least 6-12 months.

Social Media

Another way to increase organic traffic to a website is to set up accounts on the big social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. Then you have to spend some time on there and add lots of friends (Facebook, MySpace), followers (Twitter) or connections (LinkedIn).

Once you have a decent number of friends/followers/connections, you have to post updates on what you are doing. I do this regularly using a site called Ping.fm, so that it posts my updates to all of the sites above. So I only have to post from one place.

So what do you say in your updates? Well of course you have to make it individual for you. But I have found good success in just posting a quick note about what I’m doing. Such as “Working on a new web site for a dentist client,” or “Working on pay per click advertising campaigns for clients,” or “Posting client press releases on blogs.” What this does is that it creates an awareness out there that I am an Internet marketing consultant. People know I am that guy who does that Internet marketing stuff. So when they need that stuff, guess who they call? You can do the same.

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Hard and Soft Offers

by John Eberhard

When engaged in some kind of promotional activity, whether it is an ad, or pay per click ads, a direct mail piece, or even a web site, you have to have an offer.

What is an “offer”? It is the thing that you are offering to the public to get them to respond. But some companies have a fixed concept of what the offer is. As your local educational marketing guru, I am going to expand your mind and expand your concept of what an offer is. What many companies think of when they think of what they are offering, is known in marketing parlance as a “hard offer.”

Your marketing guru

In marketing technology, there is a scale of offers, from “hard” to “soft.” A “hard offer” is defined as an offer that is basically to buy the product or service right now, a discount on the price of the item, or something that leads directly to a sale, such as an appointment with a salesperson (whatever you might call it, i.e. “free consultation,” “free inspection”).

A “soft offer” is any kind of offer that gets the person to respond right now, but does not lead directly to a sale right now. About the softest offer you can get is for the person to be entered in some kind of sweepstakes. Some other types of soft offers could include:

• An email newsletter subscription
• A special report or “white paper” on some specific topic
• A free software demo (for software sales)
• A free software utility that does something useful
• Attending a free webinar or teleseminar
• Attending a free in-person seminar
• Some inexpensive gift, like a free T-shirt, pen, hat, etc.

The concept of a soft offer is that you get more people to respond than would have responded if you only had a hard offer (“Call now to buy this product”). The idea with a soft offer is that you are collecting identities on a list, and that you can then use that list to develop and strengthen the interest of that person until he buys.

By doing these things you are building your email list, and you now have a sort of captive audience, that has expressed interest. And you can send repeated communications to that audience, for free. You can send them all an email newsletter. You can send them emails pitching books. You can send them emails right before the some new service is offered. You can send them emails pushing any special offers or discounts you have.

This also fits with some marketing experts who say that it usually takes 5-10 contacts with a company before someone will buy something from it.

You are working to develop these people. The analogy is you pick the low hanging fruit, those are the people who reach who are ready to enter a sales cycle now. But the other people who are interested but not ready to buy now, those are fruit that have to be ripened.

I suggest a bit of caution in what you offer as a soft offer. Stay away from sweepstakes and free giveaways that cost money such as T-shirts or hats (except at trade shows). Generally you want to offer something that only a real prospect for your products or services would be interested in. That’s why I really like soft offers like an email newsletter subscription or a free report (also called a “white paper”). With a free report or white paper, make it on a topic that only your prospects would be interested in. That way you’ll be attracting people and building a list full of people who really are prospects.

You can still have your hard offer for those people who are ready to buy right now or talk to a salesman right now. But with the soft offer, you are collecting names for your mailing list. Then you can repeatedly offer them things to buy.

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Marketing Attitude

by John Eberhard

I have been doing marketing for 21 years. I really love marketing for a couple of reasons.

First of all, when I was a kid I really loved all the creative arts, including music, photography, painting, writing, etc. So I love marketing because it offers the chance to be creative, especially with copywriting and design.

Secondly, I love the fact that with marketing, I can craft a message and design a promotion, then send it out to thousands or millions of people, then move hundreds of people to respond. It’s like I can reach out to all those people and cause a response, i.e. create a large effect. It’s a very powerful medium.

One of the first jobs I had in marketing was at a medium sized software company. The whole team would work hard on doing surveys on our target public (IT Managers), then design the ads and write the copy. Then we’d draw pictures of what we wanted to use in the ad, then take them out and show them to IT Managers and make sure it communicated the right thing. Then we’d have the pictures created in final form by a pro illustrator, photographer or computer graphics artist, then send out the ads. Then hundreds of responses would come in, sales would boom, and the company would make millions of dollars.

So I saw how powerful marketing was and it was and is exciting to be part of that.

One of the vital components of doing marketing is that you take one communication, and you send that communication out to hundreds or thousands or millions of people. Each company has a certain target public who can potentially buy their products or services. This may be a certain type of person or it may be limited to the geographical area around the business if it serves the local public. But within that target public, you want to send out your communication as broadly and to as many people as possible.

On social media networks you can apply this principle by getting as many followers or friends as you can. Apply some sort of criteria to who you befriend or follow, so that your friends are your target public as much as possible. Also on social networks be aware of the fact that you can’t pummel people with “buy my stuff” messages all day long, because it is a social network. You have to observe the etiquette and follow the way other people communicate on the network.

In recent years I have seen certain attitudes creep into the collective consciousness that it is somehow bad to communicate a commercial message.

For some strange reason, in the IT field there is a pervasive “anti-marketing” attitude, the idea that to market some product or service is bad.

Another of these is the idea that it is not OK to send out commercial emails, or elaborate ideas of how much permission you have to have in order to send someone an email. To be sure there has been a lot of abuse on commercial email lines, and the volume of email today is high.

But my attitude is to go for it and just make sure you follow the laws. Don’t do anything deceptive in your emails, put your street address in it, include an opt-out option and take people off your list within 10 days when they request off. And don’t get into a propitiative attitude with the public of “Oh please Mr. Public, is it OK that I send you something? Are you sure it’s OK? You won’t be offended, will you?”

One boss of mine used to say that it is easier to get forgiveness than get permission. I like that idea.

Another of my former bosses said that his policy with the mailing list was to continue mailing to them (this was before email) until one of three things happened: 1) they died, 2) they asked to be off the list, or 3) they bought something. I loved this aggressive attitude and have continued in this vein throughout my marketing career.

The moral of this story is that being aggressive is the way to go in marketing. Follow the rules of the road, but don’t buy into the idea that you shouldn’t communicate. Get your ideas out there, as widely as possible, get your responses, and flourish and prosper.

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One Size Does Not Fit All

by John Eberhard

I have observed a couple other companies that are marketing Internet marketing or social media marketing programs that are the same for everyone, regardless of the type of business. In other words, the marketing program is a template, and everyone is sold that same program.

Although this approach may simplify selling the program to prospects, I do not think this approach will work in the long run or get good results for the clients. And when I say “good results for clients,” as usual I am referring to leads or sales for the client. As why else would a business pay money for marketing online?

I believe that each type of business requires a different approach, and that one has to consider such factors as the price of the product or service, the target public, what other marketing media work well for this product or service, how much traffic the web site is getting now, how technologically savvy the target public is, what other competing web sites are doing, whether the business targets a local, regional or national area, and other factors.

In my experience, each type of business requires a different mix of Internet marketing actions. For that reason I design a customized Internet marketing program for each client.

For instance, pay per click (PPC) advertising is not appropriate for each type of business, especially if the price of the product is low, like under $100. But it works great if you are selling something that costs say $1,000 or more. PPC also has the added benefit that you can target exact geographical areas. So it tends to be a good fit for businesses that are servicing only a local area, that are selling a high ticket item, such as home improvement businesses. I have seen the effectiveness fall off for luxury type home improvement products over the last few years (due to economic factors), but for things that people really need for their homes, PPC is extremely very well right now.

As another example, link building, through article marketing, press releases and blogging, is very effective in raising your search engine rankings. But it takes time, like 6-12 months of consistent work, to get real results. So a company has to be able to afford to do that longer term building. And I usually pair it with something to get results more quickly, like pay per click advertising.

I have also observed that social media is more appropriate and effective for some types of businesses than others.

So is it more work to design a customized program for each client or type of client? Sure. But that is the route to real results. And if a company is selling the same package to everyone, they might sell some packages. But in the end I believe the results will not be good. And that muddies the field and the subject for everyone. The route to real results is a customized program for each type of business.

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