How to Improve Your Online Marketing Results

by Jamie Lee

Advertising Articles

Published on this site: December 11th, 2010 - See more articles from this month

Several factors are integral in determining your advertising campaign success and conversion rates. A good frame work to assess your campaign would be to base it on the 40-40-20 rule.

The 40-40-20 dictum is that 40 percent of your marketing success is dependent on your ability to target your audience, another 40 percent is dependent on your value proposition, and the last 20 percent is reserved for everything else, including creatives.

Identify Your Target Audience Segment (40%)

Firstly, to capture the attention of your target audience, you first need to be able to segregate and identify this group of people you are trying to reach.

You cannot advertise effectively if you don't know who your message is intended for. 40% of how your campaign turns out is dependent on your ability to distinctively target your audience segments. Clearly marketing beer to pre-school children is recipe for disaster.

An audience segment is a sub-set of a market that displays characteristics that cause them to demand similar products or services based on qualities of those products. Segments could be identified based on price tolerance, gender or geography.

A true market segment is one that meets all of the following criteria: it is distinct from other segments, it is homogenous within the segment, it responds similarly to a market stimulus, and it can be reached by a market intervention.

Only when you have clearly identified your market segment can you tailor your advertising campaign to target these people. But first, you need a sound understanding of your product and the market segment that the product caters to. Then, you need to understand your market segment - their demographic and psychographic characteristics, purchase behaviour, media habits, and so forth.

Depending on your advertising channel, this targeting can be done through demographic filters or behavioural filters.

Efficient keyword portfolio management across major search engines and optimisation of the entire bidding process is especially important. Managing a keyword portfolio is essential: analysing each keyword on its individual merit and as a unit.

Chances are, you need to have thousands of keywords to maximise your ROI through search. However, automation and bid management tools can save you a large amount in click costs.

Just remember to bear in mind that these tools also need management, rules setting, objectives planned and control over a valuable marketing budget often too large to solely place in the hands of a software device. Also, be aware of the technical variations and differences in performance of the search engine.

Value Proposition and Funnel Design (40%)

The next 40% depends on your sales funnel design and overall value proposition articulation. You have a specific goal for your ad campaign and your advertisements are supposed to serve as a funnel to drive all incoming traffic into your goal.

The sales funnel begins by capturing the attention of prospects. Some prospects are convinced to become buyers of the product your ad campaign is marketing, demonstrating that they have a need for what is on offer and are willing to invest money to solve their problem.

The sales funnel continues to nurture the best customers, filtering out mismatches and refining the specific target customer, offering them more specialised products and services, often at higher prices.

By the end of the process the funnel has identified the highly-responsive customers who purchase everything on offer and experience the most value and satisfaction from every purchase made. It is from these responsive consumers that the majority of profits are made.

More than just selling a product, you want to be seen as selling a solution.

Because the shift to solutions selling also tends to require changing customers' perceptions, one of the most crucial aspects to success is understanding and convincingly communicating to your target audience the value proposition - the benefits specific to the customer and to the solution - as well as the most powerful differentiators that enable that value to be delivered.

This is depends on how you articulate your overall value proposition. As always, a compelling message is crucial. That said, the message is meaningful to a potential customer only if it is relevant, impactful, credible and clear. Remember these points while trying to be persuasive.

Advertising Design And Creative Collaterals (20%)

The remaining 20% is a function of design and creatives. Humans are, after all, visual creatures, and respond better to visually-appealing and attention-grabbing material. Be it print ads, TV or radio commercials or viral ads, there's nothing like creative, smart and clever advertising that grabs eyeballs.

As we have seen, to create a successful advertising campaign you have to start with knowing the people you are selling to, then creating a strategy with your sales funnel design, overall value proposition and design creatives that is tailored to them.

Copyright (c) 2010 Jamie Lee

Jamie Lee: Conversion Hub is the appointed digital advisor to Direct Marketing Association of Singapore (DMAS). Conversion Hub is also the Gold Recipient to the 2009 W3 Awards - Best Visual Appeal and Silver Award Winner in the International Davey Awards 2009. Jamie Lee is a Consultant in
Singapore's leading Search Engine Marketing and Conversion Rate Optimization Company - Conversion Hub. She also actively contributes to forums on topics related to Search Advertising and social media marketing.