Getting Survey Data Inexpensively Online

By John Eberhard

It’s important to know what your target public needs and wants before launching expensive promotion to that public.

But it’s often hard to impossible for small businesses to be able to hire a market research company to do surveys for them. So I’m going to tell you how you can get survey data inexpensively online.

Email Survey

The first inexpensive way to get survey data is to send out a bulk email asking people to fill out your survey.

The first thing that makes it possible to do this is that you have to have access to an email list of your target public. For instance, if you are a home improvement company, your target public is homeowners in your geographical area. So you have to get an email list of them. If your business does consulting to dentists, you have to get an email list of dentists. Bear in mind that only a small percentage will fill out your survey, so you have to plan on a list of thousands of names.

Next, you have to offer the person something of value in order to do the survey. It would be nice if you didn’t have to do this, but I can tell you that in this day and age you have to offer the person something. What kinds of things?

1. Starbucks Card: I have had success doing this type of survey, on professionals, by offering them a $5 Starbucks card. Depending on who you are surveying, a $5 or $10 gift card from Starbucks or some other place will probably work great. Of course if you offer some tangible item like that you have to make sure you get the person’s street address.
2. Fancy Pens: When I worked at an insurance claims company several years ago, we had fancy metal pens made with the company name on them. Then we sent out an email to claims examiners asking them to fill out the survey and including a picture of the cool pen we were offering in the email. That worked great. And friends who still work at that company tell me that they now use glow pens, i.e. pens that light up, and that that works great.

You can get creative and think of other things to offer. But if you think about it, if you can get a survey done for $5 to $10, that’s a pretty cheap survey, much cheaper than if you hired a professional surveyor to call people. And in the last 20 years, it has gotten harder and harder to get people on the phone in general, and professionals or high level executives in particular.

There is one other cost to think about and that is the email list. Unless you have been in business a long time and already have a large email list of clients and/or prospects, you will have to spend some money to get an email list. Some companies will sell you the email list outright, but that is rare. Most email companies will rent you the list, and you send your email to them and they will send it out for you.

You have to have a link in your email to the page where people will land and fill out your survey form. There are several companies that let you set up an account and then run online surveys on their system. Survey Monkey is one. One limitation with these services is basically your survey has to be mostly multiple choice questions. The plus is that for the multiple choice questions, the service automatically tabulates them for you.

I like to just put my questions into a form page on my web site and send people them there. Then the results get emailed to me and I tabulate them.

Email surveys are a great way to get survey information inexpensively. In a future article I’ll other ways to get market research information online.

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More Client Case Histories

By John Eberhard

In writing monthly reports for several clients recently I was able to see the results of our marketing their web sites over a period of time.

Client A
Tree Nursery, Northwest US
Designed a new web site for the company in February, 2011, did search engine optimization on the new site, then set up a Google AdWords account for them, and began a medium heavy link building program. The purpose of the link building program was to get them to rank highly on search engines for their targeted keywords, thus increasing their site traffic.

Current Keyword Ranking:
Keywords with #1 position: 4
Top ten ranking keywords: 24
Top 20 ranking keywords: 53
Top 100 ranking keywords: 121
Top 500 ranking keywords: 164

Current links to site: 15,700

Here’s a comparison of their site traffic this year compared to last year.

Month	2011 Visits	2012 Visits
April	4761	8175
May	3483	8071
June	1966	5786
July	3729	5297
August	3859	5,559
TOTALS	17,798	32,888

 

Client B
Editor for Authors, Texas
This client came to me in August 2010 and wanted search engine optimization done on her web site. We did the SEO and then began a medium program of link building. In the summer of 2011 we added social media marketing.

Current Keyword Ranking:
Keywords with #1 position: 12
Top ten ranking keywords: 19
Top 20 ranking keywords: 26
Top 100 ranking keywords: 35
Top 500 ranking keywords: 42

Current links to site: 14,100

Twitter followers: 5,198

Here’s a comparison of this client’s traffic from 2011 to 2012. Note that in May 2012 we had problems with Google Analytics and did not get an accurate count. Note most months in 2012 are double or more of the traffic from 2011.

Months 2011	Visits	Page Views	Months 2012	Visits	Page Views
Jan  11	316	901	Jan 12	650	1,249
Feb  11	239	759	Feb 12	551	1,288
Mar  11	248	562	Mar 12	703	1,474
Apr  11	189	524	Apr 12	679	1,322
May 11	283	757	May 12	314	838
Jun 11	294	655	June 12	556	1,098
Jul 11	246	617	July 12	684	1,476
Aug 11	298	806	Aug 12	715	1,591
TOTALS	2,113	5,581	TOTALS	4,852	10,336

 

Client C
Home Improvement Company, Southern California
This company came to us in August 2009. They wanted search engine optimization for their site, and we started managing their Google Adwords campaigns, and started a heavy link building program which we have continued for three years. We also started a blog for them separate from their main site.

Current Keyword Ranking:
Keywords with #1 position: 7
Top ten ranking keywords: 20
Top 20 ranking keywords: 32
Top 100 ranking keywords: 85
Top 500 ranking keywords: 103

Current links to site: 19,100

Twitter followers: 3,804

Here is a comparison of web traffic for the first six months we worked with the client compared to the last six months. The most recent traffic includes traffic to their blog.

Months 2011	Visits	Page Views	Months 2012	Visits	Page Views
July 09	877	3364	Mar 12	1689	3349
Aug 09	953	3268	Apr 12	1755	3821
Sept 09	978	2792	May 12	1513	3107
Oct 09	1020	2881	June 12	1477	2909
Nov 09	983	3000	July 12	1788	3484
Dec 09	730	2112	Aug 12	1462	3022
TOTALS	5,541	17,417	TOTALS	9,684	19,692

 

Summary

SEO, link building and social media marketing are extremely effective in building traffic to a web site. But it takes time and you have to be willing to stick with a program.

 

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Impact on Facebook

by John Eberhard

Social media sites are constantly evolving, partly because of the types of things that people post there. Facebook, the largest and most influential social media site, is no exception.

I am going to give you some tips on what types of things to post to Facebook when marketing some product or service, in order to get the most impact.

Facebook allows you a number of options in the types of things that you can post as a status update. You can post:

• A text only message
• A photo or graphic, including a text message about the graphic and if you like, a link to some other page on the Net
• A photo album, i.e. a collection of photos, plus text commentary about each photo if desired
• A link to some other page on the Net. Often, but not always, a small thumbnail of a photo from that page will get posted too. You can also include commentary about that link.
• A video, so that the video will play on the Facebook page
• An invitation to an event of some kind

Unfortunately, posting a text-only message on Facebook doesn’t have much impact any more. This is due to the heavy proliferation of people posting photos and graphics, often graphics with writing on them. With all this graphic content on Facebook, the text-only posts are getting sort of lost.

So if you want to post any content on Facebook to market your business, it needs to be graphic in content in order to break through the noise. Come up with some photo, video, or graphic that will promote your business. This is easier with some businesses than others. You may have to get creative and work on what type of graphic content would be right for your business.

And don’t use a tiny photo. Bear in mind that if someone clicks on the image, Facebook will enlarge it to take up almost the entire screen, with your text comment and any comments from others on the right hand side.

But I have sometimes seen people post some tiny photo, so when you click on it, the photo doesn’t get any bigger and is still tiny. As my wife’s old marketing boss used to say, use up some of that real estate. Plus, people now have the expectation that if they click they will see a larger version of the photo. Post a large photo, Facebook will reduce it for how it will appear in the news feed, and then when people click on it, it will appear larger. And a larger photo has what? More impact. That’s right.

I have recommended using Ping.fm, now Seesmic.com, and hooking up all your social media accounts to it, so you can post one thing and it goes out to all the different sites. The problem with this is that Seesmic.com is geared to Twitter, with the same limitations of text-only and a limit of 140 characters. So if you post via Seesmic, you will of course have a text-only post. Not that you can’t do that, but I think Facebook now merits special consideration and a custom posting just for Facebook, and of course, the use of photos or graphics.

And of course I’m talking about photos and graphics that promote your business, not cute photos of animals or feel-good sayings over a sunset.

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The Google Penguin Update

by John Eberhard

Periodically Google comes out with a major change in its algorithm, that then changes the way Google responds to people’s searches, and changes the way many web sites will rank. In other words, after a major algorithm update, your site may suddenly not rank as well for your major targeted keywords.

So fewer people will see your listing on Google, and fewer people will click on it and come to your site. Which would mean less traffic to your web site all of a sudden, potentially a lot less. For people who have spent years working on building up the traffic to their site, this can be quite upsetting.

Last year people were concerned about the Google Panda update that happened in May 2011. But the Google Penguin update (what’s next, Google Aardvark? Google Albatross? Google Komodo Dragon?) which came out in April 2012 has dwarfed concerns about the Panda update.

Quite simply Penguin is the most dramatic algorithm change in years. And some sites have been hit hard. If your site experienced a dramatic loss of traffic around the end of April of this year, you have likely been smacked by the Penguin.

Have You Been Gaming the System Again, You Naughty Boy/Girl?

The crux of the Penguin update has to do with search engine optimization, and specifically it has to do with links to your site.

The one thing that Google hates more than anything else in the whole wide world, is to feel that people are “gaming” their system. I have described elsewhere the silly logic that they have adopted, where they have based most of their ranking system on the number of links pointing to your site from other sites, but they don’t want you to do anything proactive to increase the number of links coming to your site.

You are supposed to just keep putting great content on your site, and people will see that and think it is so great that they will put a link to that content on some other site.

In my business I have opted for the road of (gasp!) proactively creating links to my site and clients’ sites.

So the Penguin update is essentially geared to detecting an “unnatural” link pattern, and penalizing sites where that pattern seems to indicate that we have been naughty boys and girls.

Types of Links

According to the makers of Market Samurai software, the Google Penguin update looks at all the links to your site, and puts them into three categories. Then if you have too many links of one type, your site is penalized. It’s all very arbitrary, but the general hope on their part is that they can stop people from doing all that pesky link building.

The three types of links are:

• Brand links
• Target links
• Generic links

These links are based on the words on the page of someone else’s site that links to yours. When you have words on a site that are made into a link (usually underlined and in blue) that is called “anchor text.”

Brand Links: These are links where the word that is linked, i.e. underlined and in blue, is either simply a web address, or the name of your company or your product. In my case these would be http://www.realwebmarketing.net, or “Real Web Marketing Inc.”

Target Links: These are links where the words that are linked are a keyword phrase that you are targeting. In my case this would be things like “web design,” “search engine optimization,” or “pay per click advertising.” If these words were underlined in blue and linked to my site, on someone else’s site, those would be considered target links.

Generic Links: These are links where the words that are linked are some random or meaningless words, not your name and not some keyword. For example, “click here,” or “learn more.”

It used to be that we were told that keyword anchor text, or “Target Links” according to this new system, were the most valuable type of links that you could have. But now Google has decided that these are the bad boys of the link universe, and if 50% or more of your links fall into the category of Target Links, you are in trouble. Your site has possibly already been penalized, or soon will be.

The safe percentages that Market Samurai recommends are:

• Brand links – 40%
• Target links – 20%
• Generic links – 40%

Luckily the link building program we have been doing for clients for years tends to produce the highest percentage of brand links, and a lot lower percentage of target links, so we are not particularly worried about this update.

We can do a check on anyone who is worried about their site and their links, especially if your site experienced a big dip in April.

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Generating Leads with a Web Site

by John Eberhard

Everyone who has a web site wants to generate leads with it. Sometimes the site isn’t doing anything. Sometimes it is generating some leads, but not enough. Sometimes it is generating a steady flow of leads, but the owner of the site wants to get more leads and at less cost.

How Much Traffic?

The first thing to put your attention on is the flow of traffic. How much traffic is the site getting? If you don’t know, the very first thing to do is to find out. Google offers a free service called Google Analytics, which will tell you how many people are visiting the site, where they are coming from, what pages they visited and so on. So if you don’t have a quality web statistics program on your site, the very first thing you should do is to install Google Analytics.

Generating Traffic

Here are all the various ways you can generate traffic to a web site:

1. Pay per click advertising
2. Getting organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
3. Having a Google Maps / Google Places listing that is near the top
4. Having listings on other business listing sites
5. Social media marketing
6. Blogging
7. Video marketing on YouTube
8. Having your web address on printed items such as brochures, business cards, fliers, direct mail, or ads

Pay Per Click: This is one of the best and fastest ways to generate traffic and leads from a web site, with Google AdWords, MSN Ad Center and Facebook ads. This works best for high ticket items because the cost is relatively high. I don’t usually recommend it unless you are able to spend $1,000 or more per month on your Google AdWords budget. Plus to compete well I recommend having an experienced person manage it for you. But for developing a steady stream of leads, pay per click is one of the best methods.

SEO and Link Building: This is where you get your web site to rank highly in search engines and so develop a steady stream of traffic. This is a great way to develop traffic, but it takes time (6-12 months) and doing it right is not cheap.

Google Maps: This is for local businesses where Google displays a map and 3-8 listings on the first page that correspond to the orange balloons on the map. This is much faster and less expensive than developing organic traffic. But with really competitive industries, it can still take several months.

Business Listing Sites: We put up listings on these types of sites as part of our Google Maps program. It’s a good way to get your business in front of people searching.

Social Media: This is probably the best way for a small business to generate traffic, especially if you don’t have any money to spend. But it is very effective for businesses at all levels. Larger businesses often pay others to generate friends, followers and connections for them, and sometimes to manage communications with the networks.

Blogging: Most people don’t understand that simply writing and posting content on your blog regularly will generate traffic. See my article on this.

Videos: Having one or more videos about your business, that explain what your business does and what benefits you offer, is a tremendous advantage in marketing. Prices have come down and are generally pretty affordable.

Printed Items: You should make sure that your web site address is printed on all of your printed items. People will often get some promo piece and then go to the web site for more information.

Conversions

OK, now you’re increasing the traffic to your site and you’re tracking how many people are coming. Now, how do you get them to contact you, by either calling or filling out some kind of form on the site? In web marketing we call that a “conversion.” We also call that a lead.

Well I have seen figures saying that the national average for web conversions is about 3%, meaning 3% of web visitors contact the web site owner and become a conversion. I have seen it be a lot more, and sometimes a lot less (like none). But the first thing that tells you is that if your site is only getting 50 visitors a month, you will be lucky to get one or two conversions.

One development in the last year or two in the direction of increasing conversions is that many marketers are putting a form in the sidebar on every page. Also put your phone number in a prominent position, either in the sidebar or the header at the top.

Another important consideration is what you are offering. You could offering a free consultation or free estimate, or some kind of discount. See my article on offers.

Another important consideration in increasing conversions is to make sure your web site is organized in a simple way and your navigational structure is easy.

If you get traffic to your site and make sure your site is well organized in such a way as to maximize conversions, you will increase your lead flow.

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Real Web Marketing Blog Categories

By John Eberhard

I have been writing a newsletter and blog article nearly every week for the last four years, and I was recently going through my blog and putting all the articles in categories. Blogs are organized in such a way that you can create categories for your articles, then assign each article to one or more categories.

Once you assign your articles to categories, the blog will display all the categories, you can click on one, then see all the articles that are in that category. It’s sort of a table of contents structure.

While I was doing this I was struck by how much material I had on all the various topics. And it occurred to me that probably most people, even those who follow my articles closely (and I occasionally meet people who say they keep all the newsletters and put them in a folder), have not been exposed to all of these articles.

So I decided to provide links to all of my blog categories. These can now also be seen on the sidebar of my website. The numbers next to each category show how many articles are in that category.

• Article Marketing (9)
• Blogging (23)
• CMS (4)
• Email Marketing (15)
• Internet Marketing (41)
• Link Building (13)
• Local Marketing (9)
• Marketing for the Arts (2)
• Marketing Offers (1)
• Marketing Strategy (10)
• Online PR (8)
• Pay-per-click (34)
• Reputation Management (1)
• Reviews (2)
• Search Engines (18)
• SEO (22)
• Social Media (37)
• Software (1)
• Surveys (2)
• Traffic Building (6)
• Uncategorized (24)
• Video (5)
• Web Content (12)
• Web Design (18)
• Website Tracking (8)

If you click on a category name the link will take you to that category and you will see all the titles plus a short excerpt from each article.

Enjoy!

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Marketing Analysis and Planning

by John Eberhard

 

Marketing analysis and planning is a vital action to do regularly with any marketing campaign. This means to review your statistics and then make decisions on how to proceed. You can do this weekly or monthly.

The first step is to collect your statistics.

Let’s assume that your marketing campaigns are oriented towards generating leads for sales people. Then the most important statistic you have to get is the number of leads.

I will define a campaign as either a) a promotion going out that has a specific message and/or offer, or b) a promotion going out utilizing a specific media, such as magazines, newspapers, Google AdWords, email, etc.

But in order to track things properly and do any kind of analysis, you have to also track where each lead came from, i.e. what prompted them to respond to you? This usually involves either asking the person what promotional campaign they responded to, or having some sort of coding system, where each form on your web site is coded to tell you where that person came from. Unfortunately most businesses are really poor at this.

Some other statistics you would probably want to track:

• Amount of promotion out
• Number of visitors to your web site
• Total number of leads
• Break down the leads by campaign or according to different media, i.e. from email, from advertising in magazines, from fliers, from pay per click advertising, etc.
• Cost per lead. This is the total amount spent on a campaign divided by the number of leads gotten. In some cases you have to let a campaign run its course before you can compute this. From this you will often find that a specific campaign in a certain media will have much lower cost per lead. That is your more successful campaign.
• Proposals out and/or dollar value of proposals out. If your company does proposals to prospects, then you want to track the number of proposals out and the dollar value.
• Dollar value of sales. You can track this by which campaign the lead came from, but you have to have a good sales lead database to do it.

The statistics you track could be some variation of the above, depending on how your business runs.

So what are we trying to determine from all these statistics?

1. We want to find out whether statistics are going up or down, and then take appropriate actions to get them up. Often we find that promotion has dropped out or gone down, which is the first step in the whole chain and one of the things that is easiest to be at cause over.
2. We want to find out which promotional campaigns are working and which ones are not. You determine that by which campaigns are producing leads in the door, and which ones have the lower cost per lead. If you have a good database set up you can also check which campaigns are producing actual sales.
3. If a campaign is working well, you want to either leave it running as is, or decide to increase it in some way.
4. If a campaign is not working well, either by having low leads (or no leads) or by having a higher cost per lead, then you want to either stop that campaign altogether, or change your campaign in some way. Changes could include changing the message or offer, changing the graphics or colors, or changing the media where the campaign is running.

Media: One of the first and most important jobs in marketing for a business is to discover which media work best for you, i.e. email, referrals, pay per click advertising, magazines, radio, TV. This is different in every industry. One tip here is to observe what your competitors are doing. If they are consistently using certain media you can be relatively sure that those media are producing results for them. Because they wouldn’t keep spending money on them if they didn’t work. Then when you try different media, you have to analyze the statistics as above to have a clear idea of what works best for you.

Message and Offer: You have to work out what your message should be and how to best communicate it. Surveying your target public is the best way to determine this. Another important thing is your offer, i.e. what you are offering to entice people to respond. An entire article could be written on this topic. You could be offering:

• Something free like a free report or white paper or newsletter subscription
• A free inspection or consultation
• Some free item along with the sale
• A discount of some type, often for a limited time
• Just offering the item for sale with no discount

You can survey different offers or just try different offers and track which ones work the best.

Summary

It’s vital to track your marketing statistics on a regular basis and make decisions based on what you find. You want to reinforce successful actions and drop out the unsuccessful ones. You may have to change the media where you are running your campaigns, or change your message or offer.

Good luck with your analysis and planning.

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