If you are using internet as a platform to market your product and services then there is noting better than the Google Adwords marketing program. The success of your online store would be dependent upon the number of potential buyers who would visit your site.

This could be understood as – if you have a real shop, the bricks and mortar shop, you would make it as attractive as possible to allure the customer. You would invest in the show window, displaying your product in a way that they would be wanted by people who cross by. Over and above you would have various marketing strategies to sell your products. The Google Adwords marketing does some thing similar for your online store. It would rather than displaying your products, it would display your link on the Google Organic Search page. This means that when a potential customer uses the Google search engine, the list of websites would be displayed depending upon the keyword that the person uses for the search. While the potential buyer would see the list of sites there would be links placed on the top and to the left of the page. The changes of the potential customer clicking these links are high when he is still on the search page. If you are using Google Adwords marketing to promote your product and services, it would mean more traffic to be routed towards your website. This implies there are more potential buys in your online store, increasing the potential sales.

Basically, by using the Google Adwords marketing you are reaching out to more and more customers to sell your products. There are many more companies who are offering such services. But the fact that Google is a well know brand and is used by almost 90% of the people across the world for researching, makes it the most effective one. At the same time, the charges to get the Google Adwords marketing are not too much. This could be considered as the most cost effective way to market your products and services without spending thousands of dollars. The popularity of Google search engine would get you more that 100% returns on whatever you are investing by using the Google Adwords marketing services.

When you enroll for this the Google professionals would work on the SEO optimization in such a way that your link would be placed on the 2nd or the 1st page of Google organic search. The cost that you would incur depends upon where you are willing to place the link, for directing people to your website. The rates of placing the links would be different depending upon the rating that a link location would have. This rating is generated after the analysis of the data, which reveals that which location is mostly clicked over the others. Higher the rate of a location would mean more potential customers routed to your websites.

If you want to see your business growing go for Google Adwords marketing before it is too late.

This is a guest post by Paul Roetzer, founder and president of PR 20/20, a Cleveland-based public relations and marketing firm, and the industry’s leading provider of standardized services and set pricing.

  

In Marketing 101, we are taught the four Ps of traditional marketing – Product, Price, Place and Promotion. While these fundamental elements are still relevant, they may not be as important in business today as the four Ps of inbound marketing – Personas, Participation, Publishing and PageRank.

Inbound marketing refers to permission-based marketing strategies (e.g. blogging, social networking, search engine optimization) in which you connect with consumers online when they are actively looking for what you offer.

The result is a more measurable, efficient and effective lead-generation system, powered by social media relationships, Website traffic, inbound links and search engine rankings.

So let’s take a look at the four Ps of inbound marketing:

1) Personas

Buyer personas are the foundation of highly effective inbound marketing campaigns. Essentially, a buyer persona is a profile or biography on a distinct market segment (e.g. customers, prospects, mainstream media, bloggers) you plan to reach and influence.

According to David Meerman Scott (author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR), some of the key questions to ask when building your buyer personas include:

 

• What are their goals and aspirations?
• What are their problems?
• What media do they rely on for answers?
• How can you reach them?
• What’s important to them?
• What words and phrases do they use?
• What sort of images and multimedia appeal to them?

 

You also want to consider their social technographics profile:

 

• How active are they in social media?
• Do they blog?
• What social networks do they participate in?
• Do they use RSS feeds?

 

Well-crafted buyer personas help your organization build Websites and publish content that differentiate your brand, build relationships, connect with consumers and generate leads.

2) Participation

“Once every hundred years, media changes. The last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. In the next hundred years, information won’t be just pushed out to people: It will be shared among the millions of connections people have.” – Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder (Rolling Stone, June 26, 2008)

In the above quote, Zuckerberg was specifically addressing the evolution of advertising, but it captures the impact of social media on business and society.

The social Web (aka Web 2.0) has given businesses the opportunity to share knowledge, influence audiences and affect change, internally and externally, like never before.

At the same time, it gives the general public virtually unlimited access to information, and the power to influence the opinions and actions of consumers and businesses around the world, 24 hours a day.

So what can businesses do in this world of consumer-generated content and mass collaboration? Participate.

Monitor RSS feeds from your favorite blogs, forums and news sites.
Comment on blogs.
Utilize social networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.).
Post ratings and reviews.
Contribute to forum discussions.
Connect with people on Twitter (customers, peers, influentials, etc).

3) Publishing

Inbound marketing is powered by content – blogs, podcasts, videos, optimized press releases, case studies, white papers, eBooks and articles. And unlike traditional outbound marketing, in which you have to buy space in print media or airtime on broadcast media, the social Web has created an almost endless array of low-cost and free distribution channels to directly reach and influence consumers.

Every business should have a content publishing strategy designed around the needs and interests of its buyer personas. Success comes from a long-term commitment to continually publishing high-quality, relevant content that earns links and dramatically improves your probability of ranking for keywords on major search engines.

4) PageRank

PageRank is a numeric value (0-10) assigned to Web pages that was originally developed by Google co-founder Larry Page while at Stanford in the mid-90s. Page theorized that you could rank a site’s popularity by counting the number of (inbound) links pointing to the Website.

Page also realized that some links were more valuable than others, and PageRank was designed to give greater weight to inbound links from important Websites.

So while Google states there are “500 million variables” considered in calculating PageRank, inbound links are widely believed to be the most important.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and content publishing are the two key inbound marketing strategies your organization can employ to build inbound links, increase PageRank and bolster your search engine rankings.

According to comScore, Google controls an estimated 63 percent of the U.S. search market, which equated to 7.4 billion core searches in August 2008.

So while the exact algorithm and relevance to search engine rankings are still up for debate, there is no denying the importance of PageRank to inbound marketing.

What do you think? How relevant are the traditional four Ps in business today? What are your thoughts on the four Ps of inbound marketing? How important is PageRank to a site’s performance and influence?

 

 

 

Putting aside whether we’re actually in a recession, or not, I think it’s safe to say that the “R” word is on everyone’s mind.

Given that I’m in sales, and I haven’t had anyone tell me that “I’m not buying because I can’t get a bank to give me a new credit card.” Or “I’m not buying because I don’t think anyone will buy my services in this economy – no matter how many leads I generate,” I think it’s probably safe to say that the economy is not affecting many of us. 

At the top, the economy is certainly showing signs of struggling – with bank failures, proportionally higher job losses, state budget shortfalls, etc.  And this could certainly trickle down.  Coincidence or not, we all are certainly paying more for food, gas and oil. So, this post is not meant to belittle hardships others are facing.

But, I do believe that we can get ourselves out of this mess by basically stepping on the gas pedal of innovation and doubling down on our respective career and businesses’ growth strategies. And not doing anything or retreating from our strategies because we “fear” it could get worse, would be disastrous for each of us individually, the businesses we manage and the economy collectively.

One of the areas where many companies are innovating is their internet marketing strategy. “R” word or not, many companies are investing significantly in inbound marketing strategies. They are publishing their way into thought leadership positions. They are networking their way into sales opportunities. They are redesigning their websites as lead capture machines and leveraging analytics technologies to improve sales efficiencies. These companies are innovating their sales and marketing processes and most importantly, finding ways that sales and marketing can work together to grow their business quicker and more profitably. 

Here’s why the “R Word” shouldn’t stop you from making decisions about your internet marketing strategy: 

1. Be Where People are Looking. Inbound vs. Outbound. The internet is primarily an “inbound” marketing channel where you “pull” prospects to you, by being where they are looking for your solution. The internet can deliver sales ready leads.  If they are looking for your solution, your sales cycle will naturally be shorter. 
2. Spend Time. Not Money. Almost all internet marketing strategies require more of your time and less of your money compared to traditional marketing and advertising solutions.
3. Everything is Measurable. You can test everything. Some people get a little carried away with measuring every move. Not every connection on a social network, every email blast you send or every blog post you write, etc is going to turn into business. But, when your online marketing activities turn into leads, opportunities and sales, you will know exactly what activity to do again. 
4. Your Competitors are Shifting Their Spending. According to eMarketer, more will be spent on online marketing and shifted from traditional marketing approaches as a result of the “R” word. (IAB too.) Can you afford not to be where your competitors are?
5. Constant Improvement. If you’re doing the same thing you did to advertise and market your business as you did 25 years ago, you have a problem. Your problem is not that you’re still wearing bell-bottomed nylon suits. It’s that you probably don’t know what’s working and what’s not working. (See #3 above.) Measurability has a really interesting side effect. Since you can now measure things, you can now improve. I’m not talking about tweaking colors and copy. I’m talking about walking into the CFOs office and showing how you delivered more opportunities to the sales team on a smaller budget. 
6. Prepare for the future.  It’s hard to argue with the statement that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong“. Ok, it isn’t hard to argue with that. But, much more experienced marketers than I have proven that investing in down times is the surest way to capitalize on good times:

When times are tough it is time to invest, not cut. This comes from years of research dating back to Ogilvy’s Alex Biel and Millward Brown interaction surveys. All show that, if we cut marketing during such times, the impact is damaging and it can take you longer to get back to where you were.

Of course, this is easy to say, but harder to do. The Pavlovian reaction is to cut, but the media industry can learn from someone like Rupert Murdoch, who historically has never done that. You’ll see him investing in editorial and products at a time when other people are throwing the baby out with the bath water. The talk to do ratio is high, the doing is low.

If anything, when inbound marketing is done right, the web turns your marketing department into a publishing group, not that much different than Murdoch’s empire. 

Are you investing like Murdoch historically does? Like Warren Buffet? Or cutting back?

What are you doing differently in your sales and marketing processes in order to grow your business – despite this mess?

PS. As a bonus, here’s some great discussion on how to handle the “R Word” objection in the sales process.