In our everyday life we are bombarded with multiple advertising and marketing messages that a lot of us just tune out.  So how does one take advantage of internet marketing techniques to reach your audience?  I think the answer is simple, put yourself in your customer’s shoes.  A lot of internet marketing professionals spend countless hours locked behind closed doors, thinking, planning and then executing on ideas that people really have no interest in.  The reason why is that they don’t consult, question, ask or engage their potential customers to find out what’s important to them.

As a consumer I need products and services everyday….gas, dry cleaning, power, job related information and the list goes on.  However some of these are necessities so we are going to exclude them.  The ones that aren’t need to have significant value to move through all of the online clutter.  That means that the marketer has to show me value in a very short amount of time in order to engage me.  For me, personally, I look for good content that is going to enhance my professional career, products that will simplify my life and services that aren’t hard to find.  So if your focus is on internet marketing, are you just focusing on your product or service and its benefits, whereas your focus should be on your customers pain points or benefits that they will receive from your product or services. 

Every company has great products and services, just ask them and they will tell you, but is this really the case?  If marketers would put consumer’s needs and wants first, instead of what the product or service can do, then companies would be able to increase sales, brand following and loyalty.  The goal is to make the connection with the customer for life, establish a relationship and solve their problems and needs.  However if your marketing includes how great you are, what new features you have implemented or what you have done for other customers, your missing your mark.     

While running an internal campaign for mobile website development, I stumbled upon an issue that I can imagine many people are having besides me.  The issue is conversion tracking when a user is not filling out the form on the page that you are sending them to. 

In this case, we are driving visitors to our mobile landing page development form and requesting them to fill it out.  After a user clicks on the ad and is driven to the landing page and doesn’t fill out the form, but performs another action on the site, would that constitute a conversion?  Any visitor that comes from a cpc ad and completes any action on a website (not necessarily the one you wanted them to do) and has conversion tracking code implemented, will show up as a conversion from the original cpc source. 

So if you’re targeting a user to complete a sale, and they fill out a form for a newsletter, then your Adwords account will still show a conversion.  Adwords conversion tracking won’t follow a user around your website (unlike retargeting that will place a cookie on the browser), so any action that has conversion tracking will capture that as a conversion.  One way you can verify what conversion is being completed is to set up goals within Google Analytics.  By cross referencing your cpc campaign with your analytics account, you can find out who completed what goal and attribute the goal to the conversion.  If you use both of these tools in-conjunction, you will be able to pinpoint with accuracy where your conversions are coming from.