Here are two ideas to improve the effectiveness and profitability of your online marketing efforts. In a perfect world, you are already employing these tactics, but if not they are worth a serious look.
Remarketing
One of the reasons that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has become such a significant component of marketing campaigns is the incredible ability to isolate a target audience and appeal to them directly. Compared to all prior forms of direct marketing, it has proven to be particularly powerful.
From that perspective, the logic of Remarketing is simple to understand. In case you are not familiar, Remarketing is the practice of placing banners ads on other websites which participate in networks like Google's or Bing's. Depending on your campaign settings, the ads are served when people who have visited your site, but haven't "converted" (completed a designated action) visit other sites that participate in the network, such as the New York Times, espn.com, etc. The banners they see may then offer incentives to come back (a coupon code for a discount off their abandoned cart) or simply be branded reminders enticing them back to your website.
The volume of traffic generated from Remarketing isn't typically tremendous, but the quality tends to be quite high, given their familiarity with your website / business. Why would you not want to remarket to individuals who have already selected your site, but for one reason or another didn't take your desired action step(s)?
If you would like to learn more about Remarketing, please check out this blog post.
Continual Content Creation
Consider Google the Anti-Cliff Notes company. By that I mean, now more than ever, there are no shortcuts to achieving impressive Organic results within Google's index.
Google is placing an unprecedented emphasis on the creation of fresh content. Content, though "is not your father's content". Gone are the days when adding new pages to your website was the only way to build your SEO standing. Now content comes in many forms. This includes blogs, video, tweets, photos, etc. which can all be optimized to help gain traction within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
The point to stress here is that it's not practical for most businesses to be adding all these types of content all of the time, but rather I encourage you to make an effort to develop some types of content on a consistent, ongoing basis.
Being an effective marketer today is very different than at any point in history. A much more fluid and evolving set of skills are required. Remarketing and Continual Content Creation are two elements of effective programs.
