In this part of emarketing channels I will talk about using PPC (Pay Per Click) as a marketing channel. PPC is when you pay a search engine or website for traffic by paying for a click or per thousand impressions known as CPM.

What is PPC?

PPC is the process of setting a campaign to bid on keywords and paying for clicks or per thousand ad impressions. You set a maximum cost per click or cost per thousand impressions and compete with other advertisers in a market place. The cost is determined by the competitiveness of the keyword and value of a visitor for that term.

How can I use PPC as a marketing channel?

Keyword research

The first step you will need to take is keyword research this is the practice of finding keywords relevant to your website

and analysing the amount of traffic available for the term, the average cost and the competitiveness of that keyword term. There are lot’s of keyword tool’s that you can use online to find out this information. What you will normally find is the more traffic and likeliness of a sale for a term the more competitive and costly it will be.

You also need to take into account whether the keyword is a buying or information term depending on your business model if you sell products then you will want to target the buying terms and if you publish you will want to go for the information terms.

Getting started with your PPC campaign

Once you have a list of keywords you want to target and decide how much budget you have for PPC and what your average sale is worth this will help you decide on how much you can pay for a click. The basic formula for working out how much you can pay for a click is to estimate how many conversions you will get and then take your margin off your average sales value for those orders and then you are left with your maximum price you can afford to pay for the click/s.

Structuring your PPC campaign

PPC campaigns are usually structured with the overall campaign name, adgroups and keywords. The adgroups are themed around the campaign and any keywords are then put into the adgroups. For example your campaign could be ‘widgets’ and your adgroups could be ‘blue widgets’, ‘red widgets’ etc. The keywords in the ‘red widget’ adgroup could be ‘buy red widget’, ‘review red widget’, ‘red widget sale’. So you need to theme your campaign and adgroups using the keywords you have already researched for your campaign. You will also need to write or design an ad creative for your adgroups. It is recommended to create multiple ad’s so you can test which ones perform the best. Once you have structured your campaigns and set daily/monthly budgets you are now ready to start the campaign.

Monitoring your PPC campaign

The final and main part I will cover in this post is monitoring your PPC campaign. This is very important as the numbers you have researched may be slightly different to the ones you achieve. You need to put the time in to correct these as soon as possible before the campaign runs out of control. The main areas you will look at is cost per click, click through rate and conversions. If you work backwards from the sale you can figure out if you need to increase or decrease your bids. For example if you have a keyword with an average order value of £25 and a conversion rate of 20% you will on average get 1 sale per 5 clicks which will make your £25 sale. This means you can pay up to £5 per click. So if you want a margin of 50% your maximum bid for that keyword should be £2.50. This means for every £12.50 you will get a sale of £25.

Do this for all keywords after they have received a bit of traffic to optimise your PPC campaign and return on investment. One tip is do not get 2 clicks and use that as a representative sample I always aim for >25 clicks before I can see a trend and make assumptions about average sales values and conversion rates. The final area you will look at is click through rate, the way to improve your click through rate is to make your ad more compelling and relevant to the keywords you are bidding on. You can also remove keywords that have low click through rate to improve the overall adgroup click through rate.

Now you can get started with creating and running your PPC campaign. Do you have any questions? Do you currently use PPC as a marketing channel for your business please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

In this part of emarketing channels I will talk about using SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as a marketing channel. Your website should be picked up by search engines anyway but there are actions you can take to improve the traffic you get from the search engines.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimising your website for the best possible search engine placement to maximise the traffic received. SEO fall’s into two categories on-site and off-site. Before you take any action you need to start with keyword research.

How can I use SEO as a marketing channel?

To start using SEO as a marketing channel for your business you will need to take actions that will help improve your search engine position in general the closer you are to the number one position the more traffic you will get from the search engines.

Keyword research

The first step you will need to take is keyword research this is the practice of finding keywords relevant to your website and analysing the amount of traffic available for the term and the competitiveness of that keyword ter

m. There are lot’s of keyword tool’s that you can use online to find out this information. What you will normally find is the more traffic for a term the more competitive it will be.

You also need to take into account whether the keyword is a buying or information term depending on your business model if you sell products then you will want to target the buying terms and if you publish you will want to go for the information terms.

On-page SEO factors

Once you have found the keywords that you will target your SEO efforts towards you need to start with the on-page factors. On-page factors refer to the source code of the page and the keywords on the page there are a lot of on-page factors but the main ones to concentrate on are title tags, description tags, heading tags, image tags and the copy on the page. Another factor of on-page optimisation is internal linking which means the links within your site and what text is used in these links.

Off-page SEO factors

The second aspect of SEO is off page factors this refers to links pointing to your site,

where they are from and how many you have. A lot of SEO’s try to blanket the internet with as many links as possible this is not necessarily t

he best strategy as links have a quality value. A link from a well known website is much more valuable than a link from a standard small website. There are lots of ways to get links you can do PR, publish content to someone else’s site, ask for them and lot’s of other ways.

Now you can get started with your SEO efforts. If you concentrate on these areas you should start to see your search engine positions rise in the search engine listings. Do you have any questions? Do you currently use SEO as a marketing channel for your business please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

In this part of emarketing channels I will talk about using email as a marketing channel. Email is personal but a great channel to have as it is pretty likely that email will be around longer than other social sites. If you are going to use email as a marketing channel there are a few things you need to consider before starting but we will start at the beginning.

What is email marketing?

If you have been online for any amount of time you will have encountered email. You also have likely seen email marketing messages in your in-box this is email marketing. It is a way to communicate with customers one to one or one to many. Email marketing is the use of email to communicate with customers and potential customers.

How can I use email as a marketing channel?

To use email as a marketing channel you need to consider what messages your going to send and how you will build your email list. We will start with the first what messages are you going to send out?

This can be a difficult decision decide to only send sales emails then your subscribers will remove themselves from your list or mark your email as SPAM. The best way I have seen email marketing done is to provide some free content and include an ad in the email for the product. This way the email is valuable to the user even if they are not ready to buy the product. If you do decide to do a newsletter style email on a regular basis then you may consider adding a blog to your company website as this could be where you publish the free content.

Some companies use email to announce p[promotions, competitions or updates about the company. This can be quite effective if you do not want to provide any other content on a regular basis and can still be a good strategy for communicating with your users via email.

The second aspect of email as a marketing channel is the email list you are going to send to. There are two ways you can go about building your email marketing list the first being you can buy a list. I would not suggest this as you can not guarantee the value of the list until you send to it and your unsubscribe rates could be pretty high.

The other way is to marked your opt-in page which s where you get potential customers to give you their email this can be done in lot’s of ways through social media, SEO or PPC. Some people also grow there lists by getting other list owners to mail the opt-in page to their list. The main way used to get opt ins is a free gift for sign up although this has been used a lot and you need to offer something pretty great to get their email. Or just tell them what a great newsletter it is and allow them to subscribe based on that.

Do you have any questions? Do you currently use email as a marketing channel for your business please share your thoughts in the comments section below.