Your iFIND business listing provides an opportunity to create a definitive profile
for your company and give the consumer a compelling reason to use services, visit
your website and take the next step.
How do you do that?
Well, to help you iFIND provides some Best Practices guides to make sense of it
all.
Establish your Account
Create your account by filling out your contact information, username and password.
You can change your username and password to something that can be easily remembered.
Please make sure to fill out all required fields.
Advertisement Set-Up
Upload your company logo
Provide a compelling company description
that tells prospects about your services, destinctions, etc.
Craft your banner ad text. This section
provides you with additional space to briefly describe your company and service
offering.
Click Update once all fields are completed.
Tip 1 - Logo
Your logo embodies your brand and introduces your business to the consumer. Successful
logos are:
Visually appealling
Simple and professional
Colorful and characterize your company
Tip 2 - Ad Text
The purpose of the Ad Text is to encourage the consumer to take the next step and
click on your ad.
Build credibility and trust
Introduce your brand by using your tagline
Create a 'call to action'
Tip 3 - Company Profile
The best profiles engage the consumer and raise their interest in your company.
Introduce your offering
Differentiate yourself from your competition
Describe your products and services
Build credibility
Explain who you are (i.e. years in business,
awards, etc.)
Keep it simple
Use clear and concise language
Provide a 'call to action'
Offer an incentive to contact your company
Create a 'call to action' that will engourage
the prospect to click.
It sounds obvious, right? Common sense tells you that your website, an online tool
to market your business, would integrate with your online marketing efforts. After
all, you are driving traffic to your website in your ads and listings using links.
But is your website ready to give you the data you need to analyze each of the channels
driving traffic to your site; and are you taking advantage of some basic metrics
and online marketing tools to optimize the return on your advertising dollar?
There are four basic parts of the online ad, which (like all advertising campaigns)
are centered around a goal. First, establish the goal, whether it be lead generation,
online sales, a newsletter sign-up, whatever. Then, structure your ad and website
to accomplish that goal.
The four parts to make your ad successful are:
The ad
The link
The landing page
The conversion page
We’ll put these parts in play in a minute, but first, here is what needs to be reviewed
from a visitor or consumer’s perspective:
With your goals in mind, develop the ad to grab the attention of a specific individual
looking for your product or service.
The consumer clicks on the ad and goes to your website to learn more about the information
just presented in your ad.
The consumer buys your product or service, or basically does whatever it was that
was set out as the goal for the ad.
You get the reward, whether it is a lead, sign-up, purchase, etc.NOW, let’s say
you’re doing this same set of steps across a variety of different channels - lead
generation, pay-per-click, organic search, newsletter, magazine, etc. How can you
tell which channels are doing the job, and are worth investing and reinvesting in?
Below are the same set of steps, but with the behind-the-scenes effort that puts
you in better control of your advertising dollars.
With your goals in mind, now it is time to develop the ad to grab the attention
of a specific individual looking for your product or service.
The consumer clicks on the ad and goes to your website and learns more about the
information that was just presented in your ad.
The link itself has a tracking code embedded in it - in fact, all of them do - so
your visitor tracking program can filter out all of the traffic from your marketing
channels and report them to you individually.
The web page they land on, appropriately titled the "landing page" isn’t your homepage.
Instead, it’s a page custom-designed to put someone clicking on an ad directly in
front of the information you advertised.
Or, if your ad is more general in nature, then you link to your homepage, but put
a variety of targeted "ads" on your own site that encourage the visitor to purchase,
sign up or whatever your goal was.
Point being, don’t focus your energy on driving qualified traffic to your website
and then leave them hanging; you know how they got to your site, you designed the
ads… now give them what they were looking for and turn them into customers!
The consumer buys your product or service, or does whatever it was that was set
out as a goal for that ad (called a conversion). Your webmaster places some code
on your "thank you" page, or the page that a visitor would land on after accomplishing
the conversion. There should be a special tracking code for each ad, and each marketing
channel driving traffic toward this goal.
Since the above "path" is replicated for each advertisement and marketing channel,
you or your webmaster analyze them all periodically to identify which ones are effective
enough to create conversions and which aren’t. Your tracking program helps by filtering
out the activity to your website using that unique tracking code, comparing it to
conversions, which you compare to dollars and cents to determine your return on
online advertising spending.
Online marketing is a learning process. With each campaign you will learn more about
which advertisements or promotions generate leads and help you close business. Once
you complete a few campaigns you can compare the quality of the leads and rate of
conversion and then determine which online campaigns are most effective at generating
business for your company. Then you can concentrate your efforts on the methods
that make a true impact on your bottom line.