If you are looking for a local Fort Worth internet marketer and found this page, then I have done a good job promoting and optimizing this page!
Unless you landed on BragInteractive.com and are just browsing the site, you probably found this page while doing a search in a popular search engine like Google. Internet marketing at its finest!
The goal of internet marketing is to drive visitors from online advertising and marketing to a website to increase business sales and leads.
I have put together this page to go over the different internet marketing activities, but before we get into that, please read how I took a website from zero to 8k-20k visitors a day over at FortWorthSEOServices.com. This will give you an overview about myself and explain how I have learned everything involved with internet marketing. I also learned that in doing internet marketing be sure that you have a good internet provider. You can try this website and get details on how to do it.
Hopefully you took the time to read how my skills have developed over the years. Using this knowledge will help your business generate and convert more online leads.
Internet marketing includes a lot of services to help market and drive traffic to your website. Some of these services include:
- search engine optimization
- email marketing
- paid search marketing
- content marketing
- social media marketing
- user experience and conversion optimization
These are pretty broad internet marketing services and several of the services have sub-tasks and different strategies to drive traffic to your website.
Lets get into how to use each internet marketing service with some local examples.
Internet Marketing for your Fort Worth business
Now that you know a little bit about me and the different internet marketing services available for your business, I want to go over how I would use these services to drive more customers to your website. Salesforce can help you to have a good customer service.
Instead of just listing out each internet marketing service with a little description, I thought it would be nice to show how each service can be used by laying out a Fort Worth business internet marketing plan.
Optimize your Website
This is one of the most important parts of the whole internet marketing campaign. Your website must be built and optimized in a way to capture leads, convert online visitors, drive organic traffic, and be accessible on every device.
The times are over where you can just have a brochure-type website that briefly lists your services and contact information. You may get some word of mouth business from a website like this, but you will not be getting any organic search engine traffic.
Why?
Mostly because your website content is horrible. Just having a homepage, about, services, and contact page is not enough these days! Having a few sentences or paragraphs about your business services will not get you ranked in the search engines. If you want to be successful online, you really need to create and distribute quality content.
Website Content
Recent studies suggest that long-form content ranks higher in search engines. I don’t want to get too deep into website content, I actually have a blog post about the importance of content over at FortWorthSEOServices.com. Just know, content is very important when it comes to internet marketing.
Quality content will not only help you rank better in search engines, but it will also attract and retain an audience that will ultimately drive new business for your company.
Web Design
The way your website is laid out, your calls to action (CTA), headlines, and of course content all influence your website conversion rate.
Here is something you might find interesting.. Do you currently have an image slider on your website? This might have been a feature that was on the top of your list when getting your new website?
Notre Dame University did a study on website carousels and found:
1% of users clicked on a feature
Great.. So 1% of users actually looked at and interacted with something that generally takes up half the page! If you want more information on this just Google “homepage slider conversion” and enjoy!
Instead of using an image slider, you should be using this important area to get the user to take an action!
Another point I want to stress in this section is the fact that your website should be mobile friendly. The best route for this would be to make sure your website is responsive. If you have a responsive web design your website will display properly on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.
Going back to SEO, Google is actually ranking websites that are mobile-friendly better than non-responsive websites. Keep this in mind when reviewing your website.
Your website should never be 100% complete. You should always be adding new content via blog posts and A/B testing headlines, CTAs, landing pages, and forms. The goal here is to increase your website conversion rate as best as possible!
This leads me into the next section about analytics.
Analytics
In order to determine what is and isn’t working on your website, you MUST have some kind of tracking. The tool I recommend and one of the most popular online is Google Analytics.
Like with any other important business decision you make, you need data to help you determine the best direction to take your website. Google Analytics provides all the data you need for your website and more. Some of this data includes:
- number of visitors
- visitor location
- traffic source
- bounce rate
- time on site
- most view page
This is just the high level information that Google Analytics provides. Where it gets interesting is when you start creating goals and doing different A/B tests that help you understand how your website is performing!
In my experience, you rarely see websites that use Google Analytics to its fullest. Normally, you see businesses that login and check traffic stats and that is about it.
To really get the most out of Google Analytics, you need to track and test the elements and actions on your website. For example:
- A/B test different headlines and CTAs to determine which one has a higher conversion rate. You maybe a fantastic copywriter, but you will be surprised to learn which copy is actually bringing in new customers.
- Track the whole process of your conversion funnel. This will help you determine where potential customers are dropping out and where you need to make changes in the process.
- Track number of downloads
- Track number of button clicks
- Setup different website goals.
- Determine which traffic source has the highest conversion rate. Maybe you need to reallocate some of your marketing budget…
- Determine if those marketing flyers/mailers are actually working and bringing in new customers.
These are just a few examples! But these are all things your business should be tracking and learning. Knowing this information will with out a doubt help grow your business. Knowledge is power!
Once you have a website that is optimized and ready to convert visitors into new customers, it is time to drive traffic.
Driving Traffic to your Website
There are all kinds of ways to drive online traffic to your website and hopefully you are already doing some traditional marketing which is probably trickling in a bit of traffic. In this section I will discuss some of the primary sources that will generate online traffic.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is the process of getting your website ranked in the search engine result pages for keywords that relate to your business services. Online, this is referred to as organic traffic and generally comes from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and a number of other search engines.
To even consider getting your website to rank for keywords that relate to your business your website and content must be optimized correctly. This is another area online where your content is very important!
If you are serious about driving traffic to your website, SEO should be top of mind. It is such an important task when it comes to internet marketing that I have created a dedicated site for the service offering. To read more about search engine optimization and how it can help your business, head over to FortWorthSEOServices.com.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
When you do a search on Google or any other major search engine and you see the ads at the top and right of the results, these are PPC ads.
PPC advertising allows you to bid for keywords that people search for and display an ad to them. For example, if you are a local Fort Worth plumber, you might want to display an ad to people that search for “local plumbers” or “plumbing help”.
Once someone clicks on your ad, you pay Google a certain amount depending on how competitive the keyword is at that time.
Like with anything else online, there is certain techniques and strategies that need to be used when setting up and running a PPC campaign. Don’t think you can just pick some keywords, point the ad to your website homepage, and BAM new customers will start flooding in!
If you go about it the way I just described you will be paying a lot of money per click and will burn through a large sum of money pretty quickly depending on the industry.
As I mentioned above, there are certain strategies you must take in order to run a successful PPC campaign. Similar to SEO, Google tries to display the most relevant and best ad for the user. This means you must organize and optimize your PPC campaign around related keywords. It also means you must have pages, maybe even dedicated landing pages, for the keywords you are bidding on within your campaign.
Poor PPC management will lead to higher cost per click (CPC) and a low ad position. If you plan to run a PPC campaign for your business please do a good amount of research or reach out to me before getting started.
An advantage to PPC campaigns is you can drive traffic to your website today. Whereas with SEO, you are looking at a few months (depending on the targeted keywords) before you start to see results. A well optimized PPC campaign can also shed light on which keywords convert the best on your website. This knowledge can then be used in your SEO campaign.
Other Advertising Methods
I have gone over a couple of the major ways to drive traffic to your website. There are of course tons of other ways you can push traffic to your website, but a lot depend on the business and what makes the most sense. Some other advertising methods include:
- social media advertising (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
- press releases
- classifieds
- banner advertising
- newsletter ads
- affiliate programs
- paid reviews/listings
- sponsorships
- retargeting
Again, depending on your business some or all of these advertising methods may not be the best fit. It is important to know and understand your customer value and continue to test!
The last area I want to touch on before closing out is email marketing and customer retention.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the process of gathering visitor and customer emails in order to start or continue your business relationship.
This is a very powerful online marketing technique and can produce continuous revenue for any business.
Don’t believe me or have mixed emotions about email marketing?
Check out some of these email marketing statistics from SalesForce.
An example of this would be an ecommerce store like Amazon. Once you purchase something on Amazon you are asked if you would like to subscribe to their email list. If you accept, Amazon will send you offers on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. This keeps Amazon in front of their previous customers and continues to drive sales.
Even if you don’t have an ecommerce store for your business you can still use email marketing. A popular way to build an email list for a service based business is to offer a discount or to give something away for free in order to receive the visitors email.
For example, let us use the Fort Worth plumber again. This goes back to the web design section of this page, but he must have a strong CTA to get users to insert their email to subscribe to his email list.
The first CTA on his website would be to convert visitors that are looking for a local plumber now. The secondary CTA could be to sign up for his email list. This may not be a customer today, but with the right email strategy he could stay top-of-mind and be the go-to plumber in the future!
To get these visitors to sign up for his email list he can’t just have a signup form that says “Please sign-up for my email newsletter”.. That wouldn’t be a high converting form! Who wants to get plumbing related emails anyway?
In order to get people on his email list, he needs to come up with some sort of guide, gift, discount, offer, etc. to get them to sign up.
This needs to be tested!
Which offer works the best? Which headline converts the best? Should the sign up button say “Sign Up” or “Subscribe”, maybe it should say something totally different..?
Test it!
The beauty about email marketing is you can reach out and send emails to your email list at any time. You need to be careful and not SPAM them though or people will start to unsubscribe.
For our plumber example, we need to think about the best times to send out emails to our list. A few examples that come to mind include:
- When the user signs up. Send a welcome email introducing yourself and telling the subscriber about your services.
- Send an email around the first freeze of the season reminding your subscribers to wrap their faucets.
- Around holidays. (Plumbers get a lot of business around the holiday season because people put a lot of junk down the disposal)
These are just a few examples, I am sure you can come up with an email campaign for your business.
When used correctly, email marketing can be very powerful!
Wrapping It Up
I hope this helped you realized how important internet marketing is for your business. Driving online traffic to an optimized and tested website will result in new business for your company.
Every business is unique and will use each internet marketing service differently. It is important to continue to test, analyze, and make changes as you gather data about your online campaigns.
If you have any questions or want to start driving online traffic to your website, feel free to contact me directly.