How Efficient and Effective is Your Marketing?

As I write this, the U.S. economy has been declared officially in a recession. And for all of us who aren’t big enough and/or incompetent enough to warrant a government bailout, it’s a challenging season, one full of re-evaluations.

A cultural sign of the times: I heard an NPR radio program delve into the origins of the phrase “tightening one’s belt,” complete with interviews of belt manufacturers. In happier times, I might’ve found this an amusing play on words, but now? I found myself cringing just a bit at the light tone, thinking of friends who’ve lost their jobs.

But back to the current economic challenges, and the opportunities they present.

Yes, I did say opportunities, and I don’t mean it in a Pollyanna, “the sun will come out tomorrow” sort of way. I mean that this is a time when businesses can discover more efficient, effective and high-return ways to market and sell than they’ve used in the past.

Marketing Efforts: Areas to Expand or Improve

If your company has not evaluated the following initiatives recently, it’s time to give them another long, hard look:

#1: Create a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Campaign

Done right, search engine marketing is one of the highest-return marketing channels around today. Yes, there are many ways to fail at it and waste a lot of money, largely because there’s more to it than simply knowing how to use the available tools. It requires art and experience, as well as technical skill. The current SEM environment reminds me of the “my brother has Photoshop” syndrome all over again, but this time with huge dollars in the mix.

The point is, to be successful an SEM campaign must be

• well-planned - to address your business strategy, goals and budget
• well-structured - to allow the greatest budget control and topical focus
• well-worded - to entice interest, clarify your offer, and pre-qualify your traffic
• well-managed - so it is continually optimized for conversions and ROI, not managed towards other metrics that don’t matter for your business

Given this kind of approach, an SEM campaign can be a marketing superstar for your company, even if you’ve heard about - or had - poor experiences with it elsewhere. Get expert input, planning, and as much management help as you can afford, it’s an expense that pays itself back and more.

#2: Audit & Update Your Existing SEM Campaign

Updates to an existing SEM campaign can eliminate wasteful spending and improve sales and conversion rates. If your company already has an SEM campaign, it’s probably time to audit and update it.

What results might you expect?
Yesterday I spoke at the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference, where I presented a client case study for a project that included a PPC campaign rebuild. I’ll cover this in more depth in a later post, but to quickly summarize, for this client we were able to provide the following results simply by auditing and rebuilding their PPC campaign:

•  Cost / Sale: -55%
•  Total media spend: -47%
•  Lead volume (in this case, phone calls):  No reduction
•  Prospects (lead quality): +23%

This is just one example of the dramatic difference a well-structured PPC campaign can make to a business. In this case, our client was able to reduce costs, increase quality, revenue and profit without reducing their market share. In fact, they were able to then use their media spend savings to expand their marketing outreach.

SEM campaigns are not meant to be “set and forget” marketing initiatives. They need expert, ongoing care and feeding because the conditions in which they exist are constantly changing.

A few examples of the changes that can affect your PPC campaign’s effectiveness:

• Ad platform changes. A glance at the official Google Adwords Blog shows a record of multiple updates to the platform over just the past few months. Some of these changes, such as an update to the Adwords interface design, are relatively minor. Some, such as the new Search-based Keyword Tool, are opportunities for improved planning. Others, such as ever-more-detailed reporting capabilities, can pave the way to improved overall campaign efficiency and reach, and are ignored at a company’s competitive peril.
• Competitive changes. New advertisers begin search marketing every day. Established ones update their messaging, change their offers, or start poaching on your brand name. A new rap artist with the same name as your keystone product springs into popularity, making all your broad-matched keywords show up for album searches. All these competitive circumstances need regular monitoring and response.
• Internal company changes. It’s surprising (to me, at least) the number of SEM campaigns we’ve audited that contained outdated messaging, links, and even product names. A regular campaign audit can uncover these areas of wasteful spending.

See my colleague Amy Konefal’s post titled SEM for ROI - Top 10 SEM Checklist for some tips on important things to do to improve your PPC campaign.

#3: Optimize Your Campaign Landing Pages

I view customized landing pages as an integral, indispensable part of any online marketing campaign, whether SEM, SEO, Email, Video, or other placement advertising. Especially in this economy, it’s not enough to simply drive traffic willy-nilly to a web page and call the campaign a success.

What results might you expect?
If your company is using your site’s home page or other on-site pages as landing page, then the results of a customized landing page can be dramatic.

In our own experiences with clients, a conversion-optimized landing page can improve online campaign conversion rates by 10% - 1,600%. Typically, we see a 2X - 3X improvement.

And that’s in addition to the improvements a smart PPC campaign can deliver. As with PPC campaigns, there’s almost always room for further, incremental improvements after the initial project.

Landing pages are talked about a lot, but their potential impact on profitability doesn’t seem to have fully taken hold in the business world. It’s a little puzzling to me, because numbers like the ones I just quoted - which come from actual CLM client projects - could be a game-changer for companies.

#4: Improve Your Shopping Cart & Checkout Process

What would a 5% lift in online sales rates from this day forward mean for your business? How about 50%? These are increases that an improved checkout process can deliver. Again, it’s another area of huge opportunity that somehow hasn’t stirred as much interest as I, at least, think it deserves. By opening up the bottom of your sales funnel, you make better use of all the potential sales that come your way.

I have yet to see a perfect online shopping cart and checkout process, especially among the providers popular among small- and medium-sized businesses. Nearly all of them have at least one major usability and conversion flaw that can drain sales and cost companies money, which is part of the reason why shopping carts - measured across all industries- had an average 59.8% abandonment rate (according to the 2007 MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide).

But while checkout perfection may be an impossible goal, improvement is not.

Improvements as simple as changing a button design or adding security notifications can return many times their cost - not just once, but on an ongoing basis. Other medium-effort changes such as redesigning a login page - or integrating it differently into the checkout process - can return major increases in throughput. Again, on an ongoing basis.

That’s the real beauty of this type of project: You do it once, benefit from that day on.

Quick calculation exercise:
Consider your own company’s current online sales. If you spent $5,000 to update some key points of your checkout process and by doing so improved your checkout throughput by 30%, how long would it take to pay back that project cost? A day? A month?

Even more importantly, once the project cost is paid back you still have a much more effective checkout process, one that’s worthy of all the high-quality traffic you’re pulling through your optimized SEM campaign and landing pages. What would that increased throughput mean to your business on an ongoing basis?

Getting down off the soap box

I may write this from the perch of my street-corner optimization soap box, but my hope is that more companies will explore the high, ongoing returns that optimized SEM campaigns, landing pages, and sales funnels can provide. The results can be dramatic if you’re first starting out with optimization efforts, and even for more mature sites an update can return impressive gains.

I’ll share more numbers and case study examples in the future, and you can also check out some of our past conversion optimization and SEM case studies.