Get in some face time with your customers by conducting market research with a focus group. Essentially, a focus group is a way to receive constructive feedback directly from your customers or potential customers. Focus groups are used in planning, marketing and evaluation by answering questions that will help you improve your company’s product or service. Focus can help you resolve existing issues or even generate new ideas.
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When doing Search Engine Marketing (SEM), or paid search, it’s important that search engine results take consumers to a specific landing page, as opposed to your home page. This is especially true for long tail keyword searches (”Long tail keywords: a smart SEM strategy”).
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Level the playing field on Yahoo!, Google and other search engines by buying the branded key words of your competitors. Recently, we turned you on to the importance of buying your own branded key words. By buying your competitor’s branded keywords, you would ensure that whenever someone searches for the name of their business, your company’s name would also pop up in the paid search results. This is a common tool, and one you can use with a clear conscience. While most people think this is something the search engines don’t allow, they do, but with some restrictions. For instance, you shouldn’t pretend to be your competitor or even use their brand-name in your ad. As long as you represent who you truly are, you should be good to go. But you might want to check with each of the search engines you are advertising on to ensure you are not breaking their terms of service.
Yahoo!, Bing and Ask – respectfully known as “the other three” – may not be monopolizing the current online advertising industry like Google, but they do offer other significant benefits. Since there is less competition, your company may have a better likelihood of ranking higher. Also, consumers coming from Yahoo!, Bing and Ask may convert at higher rates. As you may remember from an earlier post, it’s not just higher traffic that counts, but the traffic that converts the best. By focusing on the smaller search engines, your marketing dollars may just go farther.
Why should you pay for every search a consumer types as he decides between a “red sports car,” a “blue sports car” and “a tan minivan”? When paying for clicks, businesses tend to focus on the perceived top 10-20 search terms in order to bring consumer traffic to their site. However, how often are these consumers ready to buy? The terms that are most popular and most managed by site owners are rarely those that provide the most business. Translation: They’re just browsing.
Continue reading ‘Long tail keywords: a smart SEM strategy.’
