These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find any ambitious and forward-thinking business without a website. The web is often the first place people go to in order to research a product or service and so it’s imperative to ensure your company has an online presence.
However, what we’re seeing is that many British SMBs are just investing in setting up a website and thinking that’s it – job done! But in today’s online economy, just having a website is no longer enough – you’ve got to promote it, to ensure it is visible and actively encourage people to visit it.
Research released today by Microsoft adCenter shows some 62% (2.79 million) SMBs who are spending on average £1,750 per website are collectively wasting £3bn by not investing in any techniques to drive customers to their websites. This is the equivalent of owning a side street shop and not advertising its whereabouts – in other words, you won’t attract customers.
Search marketing is one of best ways to get your brand in front of the people that matter – the UK’s 31 million online audience. One of the most common concerns of start-ups or SMBs investing in search marketing, is they’ll struggle to see a good return on investment and be competing with big international brands who are paying high prices for the best key words.
But by being smarter about how to market your business using search marketing, you can punch above your weight in the online marketplace, see a good ROI and attract the right people to your website with immediate effect.
To help small businesses get up and running with search marketing simply, quickly and easily there are a few key things to bear in mind:
1) Keep your ad copy short and descriptive, while avoiding empty promises. Every word counts!
2) Investigate what your competition is doing online (try a few searches)
3) Choose the right keywords – there are tools available to help you find other similar keywords to the ones you enter or which can reveal the typical profile of the people searching on your keyword
4) Make your keywords relevant – speak the same language as your customers. They will type in brand names when looking for products, such as ‘Hoover’ when they mean 'vacuum' or ‘Kleenex’ when they mean 'tissue'. They could misspell words, use abbreviations or try unexpected variations on the actual names of what you’re selling. Try to cover them all off!
5) Keep your keywords updated – raise your bidding on some keywords with a low position and delete poorly performing keywords or ads
6) Estimate the cost of recruiting a new customer (or the cost of losing an existing one) then set aside a fixed keyword budget and timeframe to assess results
7) Think about the seasonality of your business or the time of day/week when potential customers will be looking for your business
8) Think about the best time of day, day of the week and location to advertise in
9) Know your target audience – choose to up-weight your bids for certain genders, ages and places. For example, spending more on searches conducted by men over 25 during, say, lunch breaks in Birmingham
10) Add local keywords to the phrases you bid on – for example 'florist Newcastle'
Nigel Leggatt is marketing manager at Microsoft adCenter. To find out more about the Microsoft adCenter Keyword Generator and its Keyword Research Tool visit http://advertising.microsoft.com/uk/payperclickpays
