So you might be new to pay per click advertising, or you might just be someone who has managed their own campaign for years. Either way, this post should help you to understand why pay per click landing pages are very important to the success of any campaign. The landing page idea is really designed to help in a couple different ways.

The first way is return on investment tracking. The landing pages we create for our clients are tracked very closely for conversions and phone calls. When Invoke Interactive designs a landing page for a pay per click marketing campaign, the entire focus of the landing page is to create a call to action. After all, the sponsored link section of Google costs money for every click and the people clicking on the ad section of Google are buyers not browsers. They understand when clicking that they will be sold something and so we make sure to capture that clients information as quicky as possible.

The second reason that landing pages are very important for pay per click marketing campaigns is it helps the Google quality score. Invoke Interactive designs landing pages around the campaign and focuses on making that quality score as high as possible to give the ads the best chance for conversion. What we mean by that is we select a keyword group, example being “Auto Accident Las Vegas”. We design a landing page specifically for people looking for an “Auto Accident Las Vegas Attorney”. The quality score is based on the click through rate, bounce rate, and keywords vs content of the landing page. By creating custom landing pages for the subgroups within a campaign, our clients are achieving much higher conversions and thus a much better return on investment.

Are you looking to increase your conversions? Sick of wasting money on campaigns that don’t seem to generate real sales? Call us today and we can help! Our advice and information is FREE…so what do you have to lose? CONNECT WITH US TODAY!

One of my buddies is an insurance salesman for a local small town insurance company.  He was telling me about a recent seminar that he went to that was put on by some sales guru.  One of the things he talked about was how the guy said that “you are your brand.”  I’ve heard that before in the sales cds and books that my mom used to make me listen to when I was just starting out.  “101 ways to promote yourself”, “Gorilla Marketing,” etc.  In my previous life I sold payroll services and I attended a networking group called BNI.  It was a really good group and I learned a lot, made some good friends and received some good referrals.  Every week we met at 8am and had our breakfast, passed referrals and networked with each other.  One thing that we did was get a 10 second introduction.  The idea was to come up with something that was catchy and then we would go around the room, stand up and say our 10 second “commercial”.  The goal was to give the other people in the room something to remember during the week and then they would refer all the people they interacted with back to you.  You were basically branding yourself.  I was “the payroll guy”.  Now I’m the “internet marketing guy!”After about 3 years I realized a problem.  The problem was that I only received referrals when the topic happened to come up in conversation, not because the other member of BNI asked about that business owners need for payroll services.  I had bankers, bookkeepers and CPA’s in my group, people that should be giving me 5 referrals each week but weren’t giving me any.  My branding was working because when I did get a referral, I often heard the client that was referred to me reference what I said in my pitch “I’m the aspirin for your payroll headache”.  What wasn’t working was a greater problem, one that no brand could overcome.  I think we’ve become a “needs” driven society.  Only when there is a pain point do we actually do something about it.  All of my shopping is done nowadays on a “needs” basis, not a want basis.  If you’re a business owner and you know your website sucks but in your mind you’re not at a point where it has gone from a want to a need just yet.  I may tell you that your website sucks and that you are losing business because of it but you still won’t do anything about it. Only until your pocket book is affected will you see it as a need.  So how does this tie into branding?  Since I’m the “internet marketing guy”, I’ll tell you.

My recommendation is to brand yourself so that you’re able to take someone from a want to a need.   So how does one do that?  It’s first important to understand the mentality of buyers in 2011.  In my experience, consumers are pretty lazy and don’t want to do a lot of work.  Google has become such a crutch for society that all they have to do is go there, type in what they are looking for and boom, there are the best results right in front of you. If you’re selling to a consumer, you have to make darn sure that you’re on that first page of Google and that you make it very easy for that person to buy from you.  This is echoed by the fact that 90% of people don’t go past page 1 (I just did a search on Google for that string and used the number from the first page I pulled up)!  You accomplish that with a great website and search engine marketing from Invoke Interactive. From there the brand you create must somehow be one that is authoritative and taps into the emotional state of the consumer.  Make it a no-brainer for that consumer to buy from you.  Take out a piece of paper and think about the last 10 sales you made.  Why did they buy from you?  If you don’t know, ask them.  Your newest clients are your best resources.  How many was it because of the cost?  How many because of the quality?  They liked your website?  They were referred to you?  Find out the why’s and then make that the focal point of your brand.  Make your website your brand.  Make it represent who you are and what you represent.  I personally think everyone should invest in a website.  We are a digital society so why not embrace it.  I know, it’s too public.  It’s not like you have to put your address on there or whatever.  My wife won’t even put pictures of our children on the internet for fear that someone can figure out the longitude/latitude and come snatch them up.  Our website is who we are and we’re doing whatever we can to become a brand.  You’ll start to see that if you live and breath your brand and become “that guy” that you’ll start to get easy referrals from the internet.  If you ever need help with coming up with a brand, please let us know.  We’d love to help.  www.invokeinteractive.com.

I think any entrepreneur knows how much of a rockstar Richard Branson is, and I felt it would make a good blog post because most small business owners are very quick to cut marketing and public relations budgets when the going gets tough. The problem with this methodology is that you are running your business out of fear of not having enough money to make the bills, but the number one reason you wouldn’t be able to make payroll is because you don’t have any customers. So why would you cut the lifeline that delivers new customers to you?

The companies who have stayed course with their marketing budgets and in many cases increased them, are the companies that come out of the economic struggles with the market share. Does that mean you should just spend careless marketing dollars…of course not. It means strategically place your marketing dollars. The Internet offers so many ways to build your small business on a limited budget, it just takes knowledge. Let us help you! Our consultations are free!!

Tough economic times provide the perfect opportunity to become aggressive and grab market share as competitors scale back their marketing efforts. The McGraw-Hill research study showed that four years after an economic downturn, companies that maintained or increased marketing typically experienced 14 times more growth than those who cut back! So listen to Richard Branson and some pretty solid study results and grow your business, take that market share, and of course CONNECT WITH US…we can help!

I hear this all the time; I have a website already, that’s all I need.  Really, that’s all you need?  So why is it you’re not getting any business from it?  There’s a perfectly good answer, no one is finding it.

I try to use the illustration of a billboard in the middle of the desert.  You can have the nicest billboard in the world, with everything that everyone needs to know about your business.  You have the phone number on there, a great picture of you and you sit back and expect the phone to start to ring.  I’m sure you see where I’m going with this.  No one calls you because no one knows it’s there.  You can give people directions and the address and then maybe they can see it but there are no roads to get there and since no one lives in the desert they certainly aren’t going to drive by and see it.

The connection here is that consumers live on Google.  Our site get’s 72% of it’s traffic as a result of Google and other search engines.  You have to tell Google where to find you and make sure that you build your website with the proper driving directions.  This is called search engine optimization.  It’s not enough to only have a great website.  A large majority of people will turn to their mobile device or their computer and go straight to Google to look up whatever it is they need at the moment.  Think about your own tendencies as a consumer. You don’t want to be the business that can’t be found on page 1 of Google because I can guarantee you that your competition is already working on it!

Here’s another mind blower:  Recognizable phone numbers don’t even matter anymore because you don’t need them.  I had an attorney tell me that they spent a lot of money on a unique phone number.  Waste of money, I told him.  When you can go to Google on your phone, type in what you’re looking for, hit a button and make the call, you don’t need to remember anything anymore.  I can remember phone numbers from my childhood but I can’t even remember my mom’s phone number because it’s stored in my phone and I don’t have to remember it.  Do you think that I’m actually going to remember a number I see on a billboard by the time I get home?  Unless you’re going to spend millions of dollars each year on jingles, billboards and tv/radio ads, a unique phone number is absolutely worthless.

So, take your hard earned money and invest it in what works:  Search Engine Marketing.  It’s proven to work and with social media integration, it’s all you really need.  Call Invoke Interactive today for a free consultation.  Thanks!

If you own a business and plan to market yourself on Google or other search engines, here is the one thing you should take away from this article…. Google only cares about the end users experience. What does that mean? If you are Google and you can deliver the best possible results every time someone does a search, what do you think that will do for the amount of people who will use that search engine? It’s not rocket science that people use Google because they are very very good at delivering the best possible results for what you are searching for. Thus, business owners want their website featured on the search engine that gets the most traffic.

Google places is the newest update from Google that replaced Google Local. In a nutshell, it gives the “yellow page” feel to the search engines on a localized level and allows the smaller businesses to compete locally for first page placement on Google.   Check out the video below to get a better idea of how Google Places can help your business.  CONNECT WITH US TODAY for more information!