Following up from last week’s blog post on 6 Ways to Market More Cost Effectively, Sandy Gans, Social Media and Inbound Marketing Consultant for Angled End Identities brings you some more innovative and money-saving tips to get you ahead of the competition, and more importantly increase ROI from your online marketing campaigns.

4# Websites Are No Longer Brochure-Ware

If you are not already aware, the slickest, snazziest websites are not always the ones that are generating the most inquiries and leads for their companies, especially if the their Adwords campaigns to do not match up to relevant landing pages on their site.

It doesn’t matter how clean, well-designed and easily navigable you believe your website to be – the average web surfer’s attention span will not stay on even the most aesthically pleasing sites for more than a few seconds if they cannot immediately glean the information they are seeking from you (and will be likely to go back to Google and click down the other sponsored ads for your keywords if they can’t). This has not only costed you valuable marketing dollars but has caused you to miss out on a potential new customer, simply by not giving them the information they want at the very second that they want it.

This means optimizing landing pages by having larger call-to-action buttons, shorter contact us forms, more compelling offers to encourage people to complete those contact forms, or simply more compelling, engaging and less-cluttered copy on the site.

5# Data-Driven Decisions Lead to Cost-Effective Ones

Once you have built up some core metrics on which keywords are great at bringing in traffic but not so good at converting into inquiries, quality leads, or sales, and vice versa; and have now discovered which far cheaper long-tail keywords you can get into the top 3 spots on Google for cheaply, you now have data to work with to optimize your campaigns accordingly. That is, think of more long-tail keywords that may cost you a few misclicks but which you can afford because of the drastically reduced cost-per-click, and spend more money here, while reducing budget on expensive, directly relevant keywords which are costing you and your competitors exorbitant sums of money to stay in the top 3 placements, and are no more likely to convert into paid customer than a long-tail keyword, perhaps even less so if the most popular keywords could encompass a broad range of searchers’ intentions, e.g. Golf, or Attorney.

6# Advertise on Facebook and Niche Sites

While costs- per-click in Facebook are on the rise, and Twitter will soon be charging for sponsored Tweets within unsubscribed users’ streams, they do  give the advertiser (and particularly one who is targeting a niche segment) to only show ads to people of a certain gender, relationship status, sexual orientation, geography, and whole slew of other interests; for example, travel, computers, gaming, music, movies, and so on. So if you are a cruise line specializing in gay or lesbian cruises for example, you can custom-tailor a campaign in under an hour to only show your advertisement to those who have listed their interestest as ‘Men’ or ‘Women’ or both on Facebook, that have also listed ‘travel’ as an interest. This is far more likely to lead to a higher click-through-rate (and at a much lower cost per click) than if you had just chosen a random 100,000 users to show the ad to.

Niche Interest Blogs and Sites

Keeping with our example of Lesbian and Gay Travel, you should also consider making a list of all the LGBT travel sites and blog that are on the web and receive a decent amount of traffic. Alexa  is a great tool for this as it also shows you the month-on-month traffic for the site, as well as the percentage of users by geography. You can also do a keyword search in Google, or any blog directory to get highly-trafficked sites, although remember that the more the page views a site gets per month, the higher the cost per millem (thousand views) may also have the highest banner space rates.

Once you have narrowed down the and then negotiate a price for running a couple of banner ads on their sites for a month or two. Because the sites are niche, their traffic will likely be lower than a more main stream site, and so their CPM (cost per thousand impressions) will likely be significantly lower than a mainstream travel blog site like TripAdvisor.com for example. You could even try offering the sites a Cost per Action payment method whereby any resultant visitor or even better customer who originates from that site gets a revenue share or a flat rate commission. This is a low-risk way for you to get your ad on a site, as you only pay the publisher once you have got a nibble. The more nibbles you get from the site, the more you can offer to pay them in terms of getting premium placement on the site. Most small publishers will be happy to give their top affiliate earners better placement if it means more money for them, and it appears that their readers genuinely find the ads that they are seeing useful.

How Do I Start My Low Budget Marketing Campaign?

If you are not sure how to track which traffic came from which ad from which site, this is something that Angled End and HubSpot can help you set up quickly and cheaply. Complete the short form here to begin the conversation! We can also design a variety of eye-catching banner ads for you that will grab your target audiences’ attention, without annoying the publisher who is going to run the ad for being too ‘flashy’ or distracting from their content.

To learn more about getting a professional looking, fully-SEO optimized and easily updatable Content Management system – including advanced blogging tools- that won’t break the bank contact us today!