Baiting, then pitching, is the act of promising one thing then delivering on something else, generally in the form of a hard sell (the pitch). I have nothing against baiting in general – that’s what marketing is often all about. However, you do need to deliver on what you promise – if you want to sell, you do it with subtlety. Internet marketing is one area where baiting then pitching is rife, and most users strongly detest the practice.
Email marketing and social media marketing are two of the major problem areas when it comes to baiting then pitching. As a customer, there’s nothing more annoying than receiving a newsletter that offers some advice on how to use a product if I click through to the website only to find that the advice is the sale of the latest version of that product. Yet it happens all the time, and business owners then wonder why their newsletter subscriptions are dropping off.
Social media marketing is no different. There are many instances where businesses have sent tweets or Facebook messages that makes an offer to attract visitors. Many of these offers do deliver – however, there are just as many that not only don’t deliver, they push the sell strategy.
Getting traffic to a website can be a difficult task. The last thing you should be doing is scaring them away again, especially if you are leaving a sour taste in their mouths. Failing to deliver is a business sin when it comes to Internet marketing. Deliver on your promises, and the subtle use of selling tactics will deliver results. Baiting your visitors then pitching to them is one of the fastest ways to scare off visitors.
While most online businesses are stressing over SEO, social media marketing, and perhaps even pay per click campaigns, email marketing rolls along delivering a steady flow of targeted traffic. Email marketing suffers from an image problem in some sectors. First, it is viewed as being too hard. Secondly, it is viewed as being below the old-fashioned junk mail that still floods our snail mail boxes.
These are both misconceptions that need clarifying. Let’s take the second point first. Today’s email marketing campaigns are as much controlled by the receiver as it is the sender. If you run your email campaigns correctly, then the only email addresses you have are those who have opted in – and they always have the opportunity to opt out again whenever they want. As to junk mail, that depends on you. You can choose to send junk, or you can choose to send newsletters that receivers will read and find useful.
Is email marketing too hard? Hard is probably too strong a word. There are several services available that will handle the grunt work for you. That is, collecting and storing the email addresses. You just need to make a form available to your visitors, and they will do the rest.
You actual marketing emails are up to you. They can be very simple and very plain emails inviting your recipients to come back to your website, perhaps offering discounts or special offers. You can also make your newsletters quite professional by hiring a specialist in this field.
Email marketing is neither hard nor junk mail. A recent report has highlighted how successful promotional emails are in relation to search and social media marketing. If you haven’t tried before, I suggest you do a little research.
A post on Search Engine Journal highlights some of the problems that face businesses when it comes to pay per click marketing. There are several good points made in the post, particularly when it comes to who you hire to manage your pay per click marketing campaigns. The difficulty faced by management is that pay per click is so foreign to them, but they have trouble understanding some of the analytics presented to them.
The management of pay per click marketing should be seen as a professional service. Managers often know little of accounting or legal matters, so they hire professionals to look after those areas of their business. The Internet should be seen in the same light. When hiring a professional organization to manage any of your online activities, you should apply the same due diligence you would show to an accounting or legal firm.
One of the points the post on Search Engine Journal highlighted was that of basic dishonesty - to quote from the post:
Many businesses larger and small don’t ask enough questions from their paid search person/company. Many companies hide what your CPC and CPA is and therefore you will never really know if your PPC is cost effective.
I tend to take issue with the first sentence in that it assumes that most paid search companies aren’t professional. How closely do you quiz your accountant, attorney, or any other professional service provider? That’s not to say you shouldn’t quiz them at times, especially when it comes to determining budgets and the effectiveness of the campaigns. It does come back to due diligence and ensuring you hire experienced and well recognized pay per click management companies.
The one area where we are in total agreement with the Search Engine Journal post is that paid search, when done correctly, can increase sales markedly. When an email marketing campaign is used to follow up sales, repeat business tends to be driven to greater heights. Paid search can be profitable; just be sure the people who are controlling your paid search are professional, experienced, and well respected in the industry.
There has always been a sad truth about marketers – they care little for ROI. This has always been the realm of managers, particularly finance managers. Their mantra is always – ‘how much will it cost and what sort of return will we get’? When it comes to marketers, they are always interested in how far and how well they have delivered their message.
Is there a meeting place? There should be. There is one startling fact that business managers and marketers should always have at the back of their minds – it is easier to sell to existing customers than it is to acquire new customers. So my question to you is simple – what are you doing with your existing customers?
For many businesses, a customer comes to their website, buys, and disappears, often never to be seen again. Online marketing has one special difference to offline marketing, a website is not in your face everyday. Offline, your store front is there. People walk past it everyday. A website is different. If your customer has not bookmarked your website, and can’t quite remember the URL, they will visit whichever website catches their eye the next time they want to purchase.
So I ask again. What are you doing with your existing customers? Are you capturing their email addresses for email marketing? Are you inviting them to follow you on any of the social media sites? If you are not maintaining contact with your existing customers, then perhaps your internet marketing strategy needs a review. Existing customers can be pure gold so if ROI is important to you, make sure you get the maximum return from every one of them.
SEO is not Internet marketing. In fact, SEO is just one link in what is an ever growing chain of Internet marketing options. There are some online businesses that are quite profitable, yet they have not done any ounce of search engine optimization, they have the other links to be profitable. So what are those other ‘links’ in the chain? Here are a handful of marketing options that should keep you occupied for a while.
Pay-per-click advertising. There are many businesses that prefer the targeted traffic that comes from PPC advertising. It can be easy to measure your ROI, and you have complete control of your spending.
Social Media Marketing. There are some niches that are more suited to social media marketing than others. Some businesses can survive by attracting customers through social media rather than search.
Email Marketing. Newsletters have long been a popular channel for marketers. Email marketing has proven to be highly successful for some online businesses, particularly those that are catalog-based.
Offline Marketing. Large corporations still use traditional offline marketing strategies. Online businesses are now finding that some of these channels are well suited for promoting their online businesses.
Blogs. Blogs are certainly not dead. In fact, blogs are becoming a favorite place for many that are researching products and brands before making decisions on where to spend their money. Blogs are also an excellent way for your online business to connect with the social side of the web.
Businesses, both online and offline, that can harness all of those links in the Internet marketing chain are going from strength to strength. That doesn’t mean you need to utilize all of them, but if you can determine which of those options are best suited to your niche, you can focus your attention on building your presence and building your business – to success.
Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, you need to take advantage of every marketing opportunity that is available. Email marketing is one such opportunity, and for small businesses it is one that can be conducted on a level playing field. The only advantage that big business may have is in their ability to acquire email addresses. However, over time, and with some clever promotional work, you can acquire a fairly large database yourself.
So why should email marketing be one of your marketing cornerstones? Consider these reasons:
- Email marketing is cost effective. Email marketing can cost as little as $20-$30 per month yet you can send newsletters weekly and/or updates daily (but don’t spam your customers). Compared to most forms of online marketing, email is one of the cheapest.
- Email marketing is easily assessed for ROI. You can easily track email marketing to determine ROI. You can also track email marketing using different formats to determine which produces the best ROI.
- Email marketing produces results. If you follow the double opt-in principle, then those are on your email list because they have some interest in your business, products, or services. This means they are more likely to buy than perfect strangers – and they do.
- Email marketing is social. Readers can respond to your emails, ask questions, and even make suggestions. While this social affect isn’t as public, there are times when you can republish what they have said. A newsletter that is well written feels more friendly than a catalog pushing the latest specials.
Finally, email marketing is very effective at promoting your brand and building your reputation, especially if your newsletter is filled with helpful tips. Of course, use email marketing to flood your customers and it could have the opposite effect, but then, that isn’t effective Internet marketing.
The current theory is that you have five seconds to convince a web surfer to click through to your content. That’s the average time it takes a web surfer to read your title and decide whether or not it’s worth going deeper. We often spend a lot of time talking about page titles on our websites or blogs, but that is only the tip of the iceberg.
Consider where you interact. Email, Facebook, and Twitter are social examples while pay-per-click marketing and search engine descriptions (either page or your local search listing) are important search marketing channels. Almost all of these channels have a size limitation when it comes to titles, descriptions, or content (Twitter, for example, limits your tweet to 140 characters), yet your marketing campaign (search or social) will depend largely on how well you can write them.
That will be the essential factor to successful marketing in 2011 – catching someone’s attention in as few words as possible. People receive a lot of emails in their inbox each day – your subject line has to convince them to open that email. The same is true of Twitter. Users are receiving hundreds of tweets each day, some hundreds each hour – can you catch their attention with 140 characters?
Being able to write short titles or descriptions that are catchy is not easy. At least, not if you have to do it every day. One approach that is now worth considering is to push less often, but when you do to make it really count with a great title backed up by better quality content. Offline marketing has often demanded the creation of something catchy in as few words as possible. Offline, the limitation was size for print media and time for audio/visual. Online, when it comes to social media optimization – it’s the first five seconds that can make or break you – be sure to use it to advantage.
Frank Reed (on Marketing Pilgrim) has a tongue-in-cheek look at the supposed future death of email and all that it entails. There are a lot of valid points in what he says, however, the online world is a roller coaster world with various channels becoming popular before falling from grace. In fact, email marketing has already been through one major downturn and has only just recovered and become acceptable again over the last year or two.
Is it doomed, though? According to statistics, most definitely. Our youth are not taking to email at all, preferring instead the instant gratification found in text messages, social media, and instant messaging. That, however, does not really signify the passing of one technology; rather, it will mean that in the future it may be harder to acquire these email addresses.
There is one side of the email/social media argument that always strikes me as odd – most social media sites require their users to have valid email addresses. At present, you can’t have social media without email. I am sure they will get around that in the future. Of course, having an email address and actually using it is another matter. I also wonder how many young people answer these surveys honestly – to them, it’s ‘uncool’ to use email, yet many rely on email to receive social media notifications.
If email marketing is part of your online marketing strategy and it continues to deliver results, then I wouldn’t be panicking just yet. Email has plenty of life left in it as has email marketing. In fact, for many businesses, being able to closely target their customers with preferred offers makes this channel a much more profitable one than many others.
Writing content can be a difficult job, particularly if you are trying to achieve a certain result. One of the mainstays of online marketing is baiting content so that it draws the reader onto your site, or further into your site. The philosophy is quite simple: write content that is informative while not quite answering the user’s question.
In fact, it goes a little further than that. Onsite (and with email marketing), you close off almost all other forms of escape leaving the user little option apart from following the doors you have opened, or closing the page altogether. If your content is well written, the user will travel the path you have mapped, without even realizing it.
Off site, for example, article marketing or social media marketing, you don’t have the option of closing doors. This means your content must be good enough that it blinds the reader to anything else – until they reach the all-important link back to your website. Creating a constant steam of content that achieves this goal is quite an art form in itself. If you can achieve it, then you will find that conversion from this material can be quite high.
Writers that can produce top quality material are in high demand. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t produce this material yourself. You can, with a little thought. The key is to write content that does answer the user’s question, then to edit it so that the full answer is missing but can be found by following a train of thought – and that is the link deeper into your website.
If you do bait your content, be sure there is an answer at the end of the line, and don’t make that line too long. If you do, your visitors will leave and never return. Provide some satisfaction, and your visitors will feel good about the experience and return for more. Baiting content has been a marketing ploy used for decades off line – it works just as well for internet marketing too.
Your competitors are full of valuable information and believe it or not, they just can’t wait to shove it down your throat. You can subscribe to their blogs through RSS feeds or email, or you can become a subscriber to their newsletters, and you can become followers or friends on any of their social media presences. The danger is that you’ll gain too much information.
Knowing what your competition is doing is a necessity and always has been. The best offline businesses are the ones that have always strategically placed themselves to best advantage – and you can’t accomplish that without knowing where you competition is, and what they are doing. The online business world is no different. What is different are the methods used to obtain some of that information.
You can research and spend some time spying on your competitors – or you can let them send you information. The reality is that you will need to do both. Your own research will uncover a lot of the un-publicized data ( such as keywords) – but that flood of information coming out in the form of blog posts and newsletters for example, can also help to build a picture of where they are at and what sort of threat they present to your business.
Internet marketing can be a two way street – while you are out there promoting your business, you need to be aware of how your competitors are promoting theirs. Are you subscribing to any of the information that your they provide? You should – it’s free and they can’t wait to send it to you!
