Web Marketing Strategy Update

In the current economic climate, if you’re running a business you’re probably facing one problem consistently. You’re just too successful. It seems you can barely even get to work in the morning without customers and clients hurling their money at you. Your profits are rising so quickly that you have to rescale all your line graphs to make them fit on the paper.

Clearly one area you can address to try and get your company through this troubled time is marketing. Marketing is your primary channel for communicating with your customers. When it goes well you can engage your customers and motivate them to not only try your product, but keep coming back to it.
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If you want to improve your website sales conversions — and I’m sure you do — have a read of MarketingSherpa’s new Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2007.

This is not the latest, greatest marketing twaddle of some Internet marketer who’s been online all of 5 minutes, but no-nonsense, “just the facts please” information from people in the trenches that will help you:

• Raise shopper-to-buyer conversions and increase buyer lifetime
• Improve search engine marketing ROI, despite rising costs per click
• Reduce shopping cart abandon rates
• Increase email open rates, number of clicks received and conversion rates
• Compare your own marketing stats to those of your peers
• Ensure your marketing tests and site revamp ideas are approved by management

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If you’re interested in writing ebooks and the like to sell online, here’s a good and fairly comprehensive article on the subject posted by Aaron a few weeks back.

He gives a ton of advice together with his personal experience from his SEOBook that will be of value to almost anyone considering marketing ebooks, etc.

He talks about:

1. Surveying the Market
2. Competitive Analysis
3. Your Goals
4. Writing the Book
5. Using Paypal
6. Business Models
7. One Updated Book or Many?
8. Marketing Your eBook
9. Bundling
10. Joint Ventures
11. Tracking Content Theft
12. Product Naming
13. Sales Letter Writing
14. Leveraging Affiliates
15. What Aaron Could Have Done Better
16. Sales vs the Knowledge Curve

MarketingSherpa has released their 2nd Annual Search Marketing Benchmark report. 3,271 search marketers provided real-life results data for the survey, making it the biggest SEM study respondent base ever.

The new report includes:

• New stats on clicks, costs, conversions (and fraud)
• Which SEM tests work and which don’t
• Differences between agency-side vs in-house SEM results (Should you hire an agency or do it yourself?)
• How much marketers are budgeting for SEM for 2006 (breaks out b-to-b vs b-to-c)

Some excerpts:

Only 34% of 3,007 active search marketers that MarketingSherpa surveyed in July 2004 said their PPC ad results were “very good.” 13 months later, 43% of 3,271 surveyed MarketingSherpa readers said PPC ad results were “very effective” — a nine-point jump.
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