The other day a website quickly caught my attention.

The name of it: Nerd Fitness.

The premise of the site is that a guy named Steve, a self-proclaimed “nerd” who likes fitness, helps “desk jockeys, nerds and average Joes” get fit.

It immediately conjures up an image and quickly identifies that Steve is catering to regular people who are either too busy or not inclined to spend X number of hours working out each week.

It quickly draws in his target audience and does it in a very unique way.

In fact, you may have even pictured yourself fitting into one of the three categories of people he helps and thought to yourself “Hey he’s talking about me.”

Steve accomplished this by creating what is called a “unique value proposition.”

What is a Unique Value Proposition?

It’s a statement that succinctly outlines how your business, product or service promises to deliver value differently from that of your competition.

Sometimes referred to as the unique selling proposition or USP, it’s what makes your business the better choice and why your prospects, clients, customers or patients decide to choose you over your competition.

It’s a critical component of your business success. In fact, deciding on your Unique Value Proposition is probably the most important marketing decision you have to make.

It will help you focus your marketing and set you apart. By standing out, it will be much easier to build a big audience.  It will be easier to get customers to spread the word about you.

And you won’t have to compete directly in a crowded space…even if you are selling a product or service already commonly bought such as dentistry, shoes or food.

A great definition comes from advertising executive and pioneer of television advertising, Rosser Reeves. In his book, Reality in Advertising, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), Reeves says,

“1. Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Each advertisement must say to the reader: ‘Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.’

2. The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique — either a uniqueness of brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field.

3. The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e., pull over new customers to your product.”

How to create your Unique Value Proposition

To create your unique value proposition for your company, product or service, take some time to explore and identify what makes you different.

Focus on what makes you truly different from what your competition offers. For example, maybe you are the only company that delivers on weekends. Or maybe your teaching style is based on a famous master teacher. To help you find your uniqueness, answer the following six questions:

• What is unique about my product?
• What is unique about my delivery?
• What is unique about my service?
• What industry norms does my company bend or break?
• What is unique about my personality?
• What is unique about my best customers?

Remember that you aren’t trying to appeal to everyone. Equally it’s important to keep in mind that you don’t want to create a Unique Value Proposition that will confuse people. So if you are having a hard time coming up with something, don’t force it. Enlist the help of an expert, ask others what they think makes you unique or revisit the idea periodically, refining it each time.

Once developed, use it as a part of your branding to help make your business memorable so people will clearly know what you are about in the first minute they read your ad, marketing or visit your website.  When you do, you’ll find you build a great audience much more quickly.

John

P.S.  Do your company have a USP? If not, or if after this exercise you determine you have a new USP, or a better one, be sure to let me know. When your PPC ads line up with your Unique Value Proposition, they will do a much better job of driving traffic to your site.  Email me at john@ppcforsmallbiz.com with your Unique Value Proposition.

St. Patrick’s Day brings out the Irish superstitions and stories about both good and bad fortune…

Superstitions such as…

 If you give a purse or bag as a gift, it must have some money or a coin in it to give the gift of wealth.

If the palm of your left hand itches, you’ll give away or lose money. If the palm of the right hand itches, you’ll come into some money.

Whether you believe in superstitions or not, St Patrick’s Day is always a great time to share some business trends for improving your luck and growing your business wealth.

Here are four tips from marketing experts who have analyzed studies and trends in an effort to make the “right palm of your hand itch.”

These aren’t based on superstition though.  What follows is sound advice and proven recommendations from marketing professionals. Starting with…

1) Do the basics first and hire help. Small Business Advisor, Gail Gardner had several tips regarding where small business owners should focus their marketing dollars in 2013.

She says that “most business owners should focus on the basics first” such as having a web presence. She also suggests that “you should let those who specialize in usability, content marketing, SEO and driving traffic…do the majority of the work.” Her reasoning: If you don’t have the time, desire or resources to maintain it, it will do you little good.

2) Target locally. As we’ve talked about in past emails, focusing locally can be very profitable. Gardner agrees.  She says it’s important to implement local marketing strategies such as listing your business in local directories, getting local blogs to link to your business and targeting local audiences with your social media, pay-per-click and other advertising.

3) Collaborate and focus on quality. Gardner also suggests “collaborating with other small businesses to educate your community on the benefits of diverting consumer spending from corporations and big box stores to independent, local small businesses.”

She says that when businesses put competition aside and focus on quality rather than price, they create a stronger and larger demand.

One suggestion is to pool resources for some of your advertising. For instance, a community in Florida formed a partnership and invited all the local businesses to join. They created a website where all businesses in the partnership are featured and pool resources for advertising and events. This helps them do more advertising and bigger ads and has improved the quality of the events they offer.

BizBytes published in the Miami Herald also discussed the importance of quality in an article they published on marketing trends for 2013. Listing the trend of online product reviews by consumers as a strong trend, it said businesses will need to make sure their products and services are quality because if not, “consumer backlash will have a detrimental effect on the bottom line.”

4) Increase your ad budget. According to a survey by Marketing Sherpa, generating high-quality leads is a top challenge for businesses. The quickest and one of the easiest ways to grow your leads is through your Pay Per Click advertising. Search agency Covario’s Global Paid Search Analysis for 2012 confirms that spending more on paid-search ads pays off.

They found that higher budgets had better lead generation and return on investment as cost per click fell and conversion rates rose during 2012.  In other words, sometimes you have to spend money to make money.

Covario’s director of performance media and the report’s author, Alex Funk recommends that “advertisers increase budgets between 18% and 20% for paid-search spending in America” in 2013.

Millionaire-maker, author, coach, consultant and marketing strategist Dan Kennedy also recommends spending money on leads. He says, “The business truth that most business people ignore is that most businesses are built by ‘buying customers.” He continues, “The marketer with the willingness and ability to invest in acquiring customers AND with an effective strategy for maximizing customer value has an enormous competitive advantage.”

I’ve read that superstitions can program your subconscious to get good results. Whether you believe that or not, one thing is for sure…if you program your business to be in line with strategies that are working, you’ll be one of the businesses that “get lucky” this year.

What is the ultimate aim of an online paid advertisement campaign? To increase the amount of traffic for your website and improve the latter’s conversion rates, right? But if the landing page (where visitors are directed to after clicking your online ads) of your website is not properly optimized, the bounce rates will remain high and the conversions, low. In the end. You’ll be using lots of money to acquire clicks that don’t actually go anywhere! Here are some easy ways to optimize your landing page and get those much deserved conversions.

What is the ultimate aim of an online paid advertisement campaign? To increase the amount of traffic for your website and improve the latter’s conversion rates, right? But if the landing page (where visitors are directed to after clicking your online ads) of your website is not properly optimized, the bounce rates will remain high and the conversions, low. In the end. You’ll be using lots of money to acquire clicks that don’t actually go anywhere! Here are some easy ways to optimize your landing page and get those much deserved conversions.

Headline

The headline is the first line that your visitors will read. It is your first impression and the biggest opportunity to increase conversions. Headlines that clearly state the benefit(s) that your visitors will get from your products or services are proven to get higher conversions than headlines that are plain or welcoming. Tell your visitors right out of the gate what they are going to gain after getting from buying your product, filling out your form. The headline should be clear and concise.

Single Focus Navigation

A landing page should be designed in such a way that it offers few distractions if any. That’s because distractions increase the bounce rate. To ensure your visitors remain on your page, you should not have side or top navigation bars on that page. Unnecessary navigation buttons might catch the attention of your visitors and distract them from completing the landing page’s goal.  Provide your visitors with a seamless way to retrieve the offer you are providing.

The Lead Paragraph

A proper first paragraph or “lead” helps improve your conversion rates significantly. Consider having a subheader to expound on the benefits of your offer. The lead must be written with strong descriptors that will capture your visitors attention and make them continue reading. Describe briefly why the offer is valuable to your visitor, once again, clearly and concisely.

Lists

Use bullets to list benefits of your products in the order starting with the greatest benefit first and ending with the weakest benefit. You should make this as clear as possible to your target audience. Break up large blocks of text, demonstrate concrete takeaways, and keep your copy short and to-the-point. Try and answer the question: what will a person take away from my offer?

Images

The best practice is to use images that clearly show the benefits associated with your product or service in a visual medium to further break up the text. These are better than generic ones like unknown clip arts and logos. If, for instance, you are offering an ebook, show a cover of the e-book. Marketing studies show product images work best when they are placed to the left of the product descriptions or lead paragraph because of natural tendencies to read left to right.

Lead-capture Form

Avoid complex registration procedures. Having a large number of fields could reduce the conversion rate. Only ask for the information you truly need to initiate them into the sales funnel, like name or email address.

Testimonials

Include an actual testimonial from a person and include the image of the person to add authenticity to the offer. You can include who they are, where they work, and the benefits they received from your product or service.

A clear call-to-action

A person arriving at your landing page is most likely being driven their through advertising, so bes ure you employ specific action words as a continuation of your ad copy. Avoid vagueness and be creative; words like ‘submit’ and ‘send’ are too general. Use words like ‘download’, ‘sign up’, and ‘free trial’ are much more appealing.

An increase in your site’s traffic can indicate the success of your online marketing campaign, but traffic that does not convert to leads is wasted advertising dollars. So, as an online marketer, your goal is to convert as much traffic as possible into leads, sales or a specific task on your website such as subscribing to your newsletter. Ultimately, you want your internet marketing to flourish. You want a high return on investment from your efforts.

Luckily, this is all possible, but only with the proper systems in place.  If you apply effective email marketing and social media marketing campaigns, run banner ads, and do pay-per-click advertising, of course, you will see increased traffic. But will these help you achieve your ultimate goal? While doing all these is essential to drive traffic, where that traffic ends up is equally important if you want to get higher conversion rates. People can easily visit your site and leave without downloading your e-book, subscribing to your newsletter or even buying your products.

So how can you make your online marketing campaign a true success? The answer is pretty simple: use a well-designed landing page! This will help you get an increased online marketing ROI, or more simply put, it will help convert more traffic into qualified leads. Landing pages are an indispensable part of online marketing because of the following compelling reasons:

Easily generate leads

Most companies blunder and send their traffic to their homepages—the equivalent of throwing your leads away. You could increase your lead conversion rates by sending your traffic to highly targeted landing pages whose message coincides with your ad copy. Landing pages, unlike homepages that are largely informational, focus on converting visitors into leads. Let’s face it, a home page has many links and distractions thus it will be difficult trying to find out what you need from there. Having one page to go through is much easier, isn’t it?

Better metrics or easy insights

With a landing page, it’s easier to get statistics such as bounce rate, click rate and re-conversions of existing leads. This information can help you make necessary changes in structure/ design and content to make an appealing page. Although there are different metrics you can collect on your homepage, you will have a hard time finding out where you need to improve because a homepage contains gratuitous links and distractions. With a highly targeted landing page, it’s easier to concentrate on what’s working and what’s not.

Cheaper advertising

Since focused landing pages bring more conversions, you generate more leads for more sales. This, in turn, decreases costs and you can put more funding into social media outreach, SEO, higher PPC ad budget and other advertising techniques. Additionally, advertising on Adwords targeting your landing pages increases relevancy because you deal with specific information. This translates to a higher quality score and lower cost per click.

So, yes, it’s possible to increase your lead conversion rates without breaking the bank. With an effective landing page, you could see a dramatic rise in inquiries  subscribers and sales. Your landing page is considered the place where visitors decide whether they are going to use the service or buy the products you are offering. When a customer clicks your link, you’ve got one shot to impress, so why not make the best shot possible!

Marketing is about engaging and appealing to your customer on a human level. It’s not about putting your products, services and their prices in front of the customer. A good way to connect with your customers from both inside and outside your immediate market is through online marketing. From email and SEO to social media and article marketing, there are many different types of online marketing available to promote your services and products.

Search Engine Optimization

Let’s face it; a website that receives more traffic is likely to generate more sales. SEO marketing allows you to increase traffic to your site by using methods that could increase the visibility of your website in organic search results. Marketers make use of website elements such as appropriate Meta tags, keywords, titles and images in the website’s content to improve search engine ranking. Establishing an online presence for your website will make it easy to be found by prospective customers.

Pay Per Click

If you are not appearing on top of natural results, use pay per click (PPC) advertising to immediately bring traffic to your site. It is a useful online marketing tactic where your ads are placed in related websites and social media. The more you pay, the higher your ads appear in related sites and search engines, and you only pay for the advertisement when a potential customer clicks on it. PPC marketing allows you to measure how your marketing campaign is fairing and quickly get results.

Email

Regarded as one of the easiest and most cost-effective online marketing tactics, email marketing is a powerful channel for lead and sales generation. It involves the use of emails to reach customers and prospects. Email marketing uses a highly targeted advertising approach, and thus the chances of conversion are very high. To start the process, customers need to subscribe to an email publication to get regular updates of their services and products. It’s a good method to attract repeat business.

Social Media

Social media is very popular, and its popularity has been increasing. You should take advantage of the popularity by utilizing social media outlets to sell your services and products. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are among the best online mediums to connect with customers, employees and suppliers. Additionally, it’s cheap since making company profiles on social sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook is completely free. Marketers use social media to direct people to landing pages where they hit them with sales pitches.

Content

Content marketing is writing articles and posting them on article directories. The key to article marketing is to provide useful information while targeting popular keywords to convince people to visit your website. Your article should be valuable and contain a call to action at the end. The call to action should invite people to click on a link for more information, buy a product or something similar.

Of course there other types such as affiliate marketing and video marketing among others. This list just gives you an idea about some of the options you have to market your business online. All these online marketing strategies, however, will not perform well if implemented poorly, but with smart work and consistent efforts, you can achieve desirable results.

Happy New Year! I hope you had a great holiday. 

One of the questions that always seems to come up after Christmas is “What did you get for Christmas?”

It seems a lot of people will answer that question with “a new cell phone” or “a new tablet” this year. 

While surfing the net after Christmas, I read the number of mobile devices activated in December jumped from an average of 4 million to 17.4 million on Christmas Day. That’s a 332 percent increase and, according to analytics firm Flurry, more than double the amount activated Christmas Day 2011. Earlier this year, Pew Internet and America Life Project and Nielsen reported that, based on consumer polling, 50% of the population now owns smartphones. Which means more and more people are using smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices to search for the product or service your business sells. 

Because of this trend, it is increasingly a smart business strategy to target these mobile device users. Today, I’d like to share with you what you need to do to make more sales and beat your competition: 

Create a mobile compatible website. 

According to Google up to 50% of mobile searches are for local information for things such as restaurants, retail, physicians, auto, hair salons, etc. If you aren’t setup to handle that traffic with a mobile website, then you are losing 50% of that traffic to your competition who is. That means if you are open for business seven days a week, not having a mobile site is like not doing business for three and a half days a week! 

Set up a separate PPC ad campaign targeting smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices. 

When consumers search for products and services on their mobile devices, they aren’t usually doing it for research. They are at the end of the buying cycle and many times ready to purchase. (Doing research is something typically done on laptops and PC’s so they can save it for when they are ready.)

Setting up a mobile PPC campaign helps you reach customers or clients who are ready to do business. 

Another thing to consider is that people search differently on their mobile devices. Typically fewer words or characters are used and keywords tend to be more generic when searching on mobile devices than when they are searching on laptops or PC’s. Regular PPC campaigns aren’t designed for the mobile user because at the time, there wasn’t a need for it. Now there is.

Combine “click to call” technology with your mobile PPC ads. 

“Click to call” technology is technology that allows people who click on your mobile PPC ad to be instantly connected to you by allowing their phone or other device to call your business. This makes it easier for people to do business with you.

Combine this with the fact that a high percentage of searches are local and most mobile search is done by people ready to purchase, and you could potentially see a significant sales boost for your products and services. 

Plus, because mobile PPC campaigns are not yet a standard practice, it is likely your competitors won’t even know such a campaign exists. That means you will face less competition from other advertisers and often end up getting more for your money–stretching your ad budget dollars further.

So if you are looking for a way to boost your bottom line this year, consider creating a mobile website and mobile PPC campaign to your plan. You’ll face less competition, make your ad dollars stretch further and target an audience who is most likely ready to buy immediately. 

John Pfeiffer