Why web campaigns?
Web campaigns are a fast, easy, and very cheap way to increase revenue.
What can web campaigns do?
IMMEDIATELY:
- Generate qualified leads
- Tap into new markets
- Increase traffic to our websites (indirect sales)
- Test new ideas or products cheaply
- Create free, permission-based email marketing lists for targeted audience groups
- Generate general interest in what we do
LONG-TERM:
- Increase rankings of our websites
- Generate research for new product development
- Research and address new markets that to generate more qualified leads
- Create new opportunities that emerge from analysis of campaigns
Why do web campaigns work?
Unlike traditional advertising, web campaigns revolve around a persona, not a product. The ad is persona centered by first acknowledging the persona’s context (e.g. apathy) and suggest a specific experience (e.g. Do you just not care anymore?). The rest of the ad copy expounds on the experience to create resonance with the persona. Then if you can show how your product or offering addresses or redresses the persona’s experience, you are more likely to convert the persona into a customer.
How do web campaigns work?
A web campaign has a couple components: 1) A stand-alone microsite that is usually composed of only one page. 2) And text advertising through services like Google Adwords, or Yahoo’s Overture.
The microsite communicates ideas and products that are specific to the persona. The aesthetics, graphics and copy must speak to the persona.
The text advertisements show up during specific keyword searches that fit in with the persona’s context. For example, for an apathetic persona, any searches on Google for “apathy, or apathetic? would display an ad that directs the person to your microsite.
Since the ad shows up in specific searches (or context), we already know what the audience is interested in. This makes this type of advertising passive, and somewhat permission-based. If the text ad captures their interest, and they click on it, only then do you actually pay anything. This type of advertising is called Pay Per Click (PPC). You’re paying for the leads the advertising generates. The PPC on a keyword can vary anywhere from $0.01 to $15.00, and depends largely on the number of competitors bidding for the same keyword.
What is required to make web campaigns successful?
Any web campaign is ineffective and risky without some basic technological functionality to assess your return on investment (ROI). The ROI for any web campaign is easy to track. Only two things are needed, 1) a way to track the number of conversions, which are the number of sales that come directly from the leads generated, and 2) the dollar amount of product (or of every sale if it can vary).
For example:
Let’s say your PPC is $0.10 and you have had 600 clicks (or leads) for one month. Out of those 600 clicks, you have 30 conversions, and each buys a $200.00 product.
Your ROI would be:
(200 x 30) [your sales] / (0.10 x 600) [your advertising costs] = 100% ROI in 1 month
There is enormous value in being able to monitor and track your text ad campaigns using information about PPC, traffic, and conversions. You can pull bad campaigns out within weeks, or even days, and strengthen or tweak ones that show promise to increase qualified leads.
You can further improve your web campaigns with other technological tools and functions. Like split page testing allows you to compare and track conversions off two different pages. You can assess your copy or aesthetics and find out what works best to capture your different personas or audience types. Also implied in this type of testing, is the awareness and knowledge this gives you in the design of future products, and marketing materials. Another tool like email capture and some level of sophisticated mailing list management (e.g. automatic opt-out option), can help you build and market to lists of context specific audiences again, and again for free.
Now imagine…
You create 10 context (or persona) specific web campaigns, all for one product. You extract out different aspects of the product that address each persona specifically.
Let’s be very conservative with some estimates …
And pretend that on average each of your campaigns gets 10 clicks a day, and your average PPC is $0.15. Therefore, you have 3000 clicks a month, and you are paying $450.00 per month for your advertising. And for our conversion rate, let’s estimate only 2.5% of the 3000, giving us 75 conversions. In other words, each qualified lead costs you $6.00 dollars. Anything you sell with a profit margin higher than $6.00 means that your advertising is successful. And this doesn’t even include the potential revenues from returning customers.