How to: Get you

marketing advisor forsmall and medium businesses

Christmas advisor is an initiative of Etarget advertising network incooperation with notable European specialists on internet market-ing. Our goal is to help (mostly) small and medium businesses to getready for upcoming Christmas season in marketing area.According to researches customers start shopping presents alreadyin the end of October. That is the reason why we prepared somechanges in Etarget advertising as well as this advisor.In case you like it, try also our blog, Twitter or Facebook. May youhave any questions, feel free to contact us atpavol.magic@etarget.eu or send an email to your local Etarget rep-resentative.We wish you merry and wealthy Christmas! The Etarget Team

7 tips from Jan Kareis1. Use multiple media and channels for promotion (Google, Etarget, Facebook);2. The performance of your campaign is connected with the quality of your web pages (make your web page user friendly)3. Notice, that you cannot measure all of your conversions online—up to 50 % of goals (orders) is made on different channels (phone, personal contact, etc.)4. Give some importance and financial resources to SEO as well5. Watch the trends = do not buy catalogue positions—they are significantly (in 90 % of cases) less efficient than PPC and SEO6. Communicate with your clients—use newsletters!7. Do not let marketers convince you, that the internet is the only way how to effi- ciently invest resources to Christmas campaigns :-) Jan Kareis, Association of Performance Marketing (www.avma.cz) & Clever Solutions s.r.o. (www.cleversolutions.cz)

Get Prepared for Christmas in PPCT he Christmas season is for most businesses the biggest season, which reflects all the efforts made during the year. Besides, online Christmas sales grow every year. Preparation and adjustment of PPC campaigns for Christmas is therefore something we should not forgetabout. Following tips can help you with these preparations.The basic preparation before running a Christmas campaign should be revision andupdate of your current campaigns. Are there any important products or keywords miss-ing? On the other hand—do we have campaigns running on products we don’t evensell anymore? During the revision we should add keywords and phrases related toChristmas and our products. If we—for example—sell bicycles, we should add “presentsfor bikers” or “presents for biker”. The Christmas topic should also be mentioned in ads.The best is to add special promotions into ads. The attractiveness of ads can be raisedby limiting the offer, too. Because of that it is good to know when is the last date fororders to be placed in order to deliver the goods before Christmas.Landing pages should also contain Christmas theme and we should be aware, that dur-ing this season the profile of our customer is quite different from the one we’re usedto during the year. It can be shoppers, who are not used to buy goods online, or they’remaking their first steps on e-shops. Thus it’s really important to make shopping as easyas possible.The importance of content campaigns before Christmas grows as well. People aresearching for information about different goods and they are browsing the internetmuch more. It’s good to make clear where will the people from your target groups goon your pages and adjust content campaigns to this knowledge.Do not forget, that customers buy their presents in advance and start soon. You cantrack the progress of searching for your goods or services on www.google.com/trends. Helena Papírniková, Dobrý web (www.dobryweb.cz)

How to Raise Your Christmas SalesF or most of the e-shops is Christmas season the Holy Grail of sales. Preparations for this hectic time of the year start when our future customers go on summer holiday and have no idea about Christmas. I’d like to show you few tips howto support your Christmas sales directly on your web site and alsomention ways how to raise your web traffic with offline activities.Christmas centreFavourite activity of major e-shops is to create special sections dedicated to gifts. Thiscentre usually contains gifts segmented by target group (gift for parents, kids, grand-parents, etc.). It can have it’s own URL like www.eshop-name.com/christmas, so you canshare the link easily. The content doesn’t have to be strictly gift list, but as well an ad-visor—how to choose the right gift. If it’s too complicated for you, try at least creatingChristmas design and a list of appropriate products on the home page.Articles, videos and competitionsPeople usually like to read advices and top lists. Try writing an article “Hits of Christ-mas 2010” or make a video with instructions on how to pack your gift. It is also quitecommon to make competitions to attract customers’ attention.Gift vouchers, bundles or something for freeCustomers are sometimes afraid, that when they will buy a gift for someone, they won’tlike it. That is the reason why you should offer various vouchers. Bundles of severalproducts are also very popular among customers, try offering them. Consider havingChristmas gifts delivered for free, if you already don’t. It can help you get more ordersand raise your sales.Offline promotionHaving Christmas centre, articles and fantastic bundles on your web, but not havingthe traffic means, that your effort was good for nothing. But how to get visitors? Firstyou should focus on your existing customers with special Christmas direct e-mail. Itcan be usual product mail, special Christmas promotion, or visually interesting e-mail

with reminder to shop early. You can market your current customers with Facebookpage, too, if you cared about them the whole year and build a strong community.Now it’s necessary to attract new customers. You can use Christmas “hubs”—specialweb sites, which aggregate the offer from several e-shops for a fee. Last but not leastyou should use PPC campaign both in search and content and if you have the budget,buying banner ad campaign on web sites where your target group is present. Michal Krutiš, H1.cz (www.h1.cz)

Don’t be afraid to experiment!S tarting the Christmas campaign early and finishing as late as possible paid of for me well in the past seasons. The best solution is to start all campaigns in early October and finish on December 20, if possible.Use the time until half November to experiment with different variations of text anddesign of the ads. Carefully evaluate not only the price and click through rate, but alsoreturn on investment (the ratio of cost and revenue on transaction).Be sure to save up to half of the budget for the last fourteen days of the campaign—your competition will be out of money and energy by then, but the biggest shoppingmadness will only start. Martin Kopta, analytik & UX designer (martinkopta.cz)

Christmas: Plan BI t is trendy to look for sources of alternative hedonism this year. Instead of going on vacation to see, flat and flatter TV and gift pack of Johny Walker Black Label we’ll keep on meeting those, who enjoy having a garden in the city, having the luxury offlexible work schedule or the privilege to be the house-hold with minimum carbon footprint.On one hand it’s—as I already mentioned—trendy and on the other it doesn’t cost a bitand that counts. For the Christmas period I can offer one—from todays perspectivespiritually quite exotic—form of alternative hedonism: trying to remember the originalpurpose and content of Christmas as the holiday of expectation, coming and hope. AndI’m not writing about hope that our wallets will open wide and we all will once againbreath in the anaesthetics of consumption. I’m writing about hope—without any partic-ular reason—for new beginnings, in which present is the reconciliation with past. Liketo scared shepherds the angels are coming to us in pillars of light to tell us something,that with the best will we can only understand only as the “voice of the greater power”,and not as utterance to ourselves and us alone. We are bathing in the potential ofhope and yet we still cannot sense the outlines of our personal story of hope. Nevermind. Maybe on this years Christmas you could instead of “3 for the price of 2” or“incredible New Years’ discounts in November” try enforcing a message about hope inyour company. It might work. Tomáš Hrivnák, Idealisti (idealisti.cz)

Measure correctlyT he charming part of online advertising is the ability to measure, well, almost everything. But do you know how to measure correctly?My Christmas advice is easy to implement, yet very important. Mark your URLscorrectly in all your marketing properties—emails, banners, contextual ads.You will have much better data if you do this step right.This is how the correctly tagged URL should look like:What does these parameters mean?utm_source=etarget—you can name your sources the way you like it. Ideally, tag yoursource as the web site from which traffic is coming, or by the name of the channel(Etarget).utm_medium=text—medium indicates whether your customer came from banner, textad or email, for example.utm_campaign=xmas-promo—if you tag your campaign correctly, you will have betteroverview of which of your campaigns perform correctly, and you can always comparethem to other campaigns. If you tag campaigns with numbers (such as 1,2,3), sooner orlater, you will be unable to remember what kind of campaign it was.If you know the value of each conversion (sales), you can make your future budgetingeasier for yourself. You will have clear statistics, and you will be able to attribute con-versions to the correct sources.Katarína Šavelová, RUonline (www.AreYouOnline.sk)

Think long-termE verybody is thinking about Christmas season these days. That is the reason why you should think differently.Imagine this:You are about to spend a lot of money on attracting new customers. They come toyour website, look around and never come back again.It is not because you are bad, or because your products are unattractive. The customerjust wants to give perfect gift, he has got an idea on his mind—and you don’t mirror allideas of all people. However, it certainly does not mean he can’t return in a month ortwo and buy for reason other than Christmas gift.I suggest to all entrepreneurs and marketers: Give a helping hand to all your futurecustomers. Make it easier for them to shop for your product in the future.Go get their contact details. Allow them to register, even if they didn’t buy anything.Picture your offer in the most vivid colours. What do they get if they leave you email?Free ebook? Interesting tips? Build the database of your prospects.Do not loose single potential customer once you paid for him. Use Christmas season tobuild your database.Once the Christmas frenzy is over, you can start building connection to your leads. Theyknow who you are, they visited your site. This is the way to reach new customers—forthe next year´s Christmas. Monika Jakubeczová, University of online entrepreneur (www.jakubeczova.sk)

Christmas is the right time to improveyour brandingB randing is not a rocket science. You just have to find something that you do really well, and no one else does, and communicate it clearly. It also has to be something that people are willing to pay for. And remember that you have to be able to maintain this position in long-term.Once you find your unique selling point, you have to move. Everything that moves isalive. Innovate, brainstorm. Make people know about your efforts. Remember who youare and keep focused on the direction you have chosen.My Christmas tip? This season is not only good for sales. Stop, reflect on your nextsteps. Decide what will you do next year. And the year after.Richard Mareček, Hospodárske noviny (www.hnx.sk)

Merry Christmas!

How to: Get you

by Etarget EU on Dec 01, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 139

Statistics

How to: Get you — Document Transcript