To determine what you should be willing to spend on marketing, you need to consider: Lifetime value of the customer Fixed Costs Variable Costs Marketing Costs Here’s an example of an existing company that manufactures widgets. Each month you sell 1,000 widgets at $15 each for total revenue of $15,000. Your variable costs – sales […]
Prevent competitors from stealing your search leads with branded keywords
If you’re looking for the most cost-effective, easiest-to-close leads for your business, your goal is to get to the people who already know (and trust) your brand, know they need what you sell, and are just trying to decide if your services are best for them. For example, here is a progression of searches from […]
Hold Optimized Marketing accountable in 5 minutes/month
When I was the Team Leader of my Culligan dealership, each quarter I’d receive marketing reports from my ad agency. Marketing was always one of my favorite things to do so as soon as the email came into my Gmail inbox, I’d “star” it so I could set aside half an hour to look at […]
Are you ready for MobileGeddon?
In just a few days—April 21, 2015—Google is poised to unveil one of the biggest changes to their search engine rankings ever. Web marketing geeks around the world are calling it “MobileGeddon”… Companies around the world are scrambling to meet this deadline so they can avoid a harsh Google penalty that could cost them thousands […]
“Field of Dreams” Marketing
One of the most memorable lines in cinematic history comes from Field of Dreams. A faint whisper tells Ray (played by Kevin Costner)… “If you build it, they will come…” The traditional way of developing a marketing strategy: Find an Ad Agency Agency asks you about products you want to sell Agency researches other dealers’ […]
Use A/B split-testing to increase your leads without increasing your budget
In his book, How to Become a Rainmaker, Jeffrey J. Fox points out a study of salespeople who make more than a quarter million dollars per year in commissions. The study found that highly successful salespeople have an interesting common characteristic. They tend to implement new ideas very quickly. If they go to a seminar […]
Great Websites aren’t Built, They’re Tested
What is the most trusted brand in the United States? If you guessed Coca-Cola or Nike or Procter & Gamble or Apple, you’d be close. However, according to Entrepreneur.com, the most trusted brand in the US is Amazon.com. A company that is less than 2 decades old (it first hit the Internet in July 1995) […]
How we help businesses that already have a website
Does any of this sound familiar? 3 months ago you invested in a brand new website but you’re still not getting great performance. …Or the leads you are getting are low-quality. …Or your conversion rate just keeps hovering around or below 3%. …Or your web designer has never even told you your conversion rate. …Or […]
Top 19 Myths of Internet Marketing for Small Business
Whether it’s SEM, SEO, or website design, there are a lot of Myths out there that just don’t hold up to testing so let’s tackle the top 19 right now. Keep in mind these myths are for service-based small businesses with the primary goal of generating leads. For e-commerce, current customer portals, forums, blogs and […]