Google is a Marketer’s Best Friend

I love Google as a marketer. Do you?

Google is indeed a marketer’s best friend.  Since 10 years ago, Google has consistently risen in popularity among web users. Google is a classic example of how to cater your products or services to meet consumers’ needs and wants. With ever increasing quantity of websites online, Google is a boon when it comes to understanding what we are looking for when we search the web. So marketers should really leverage Google’s expertise and dominance on web searches.  Here are 3 reasons why:

1) Google has 83% market share of the global web search engines. It is dominant in almost every country, except in China and Russia, where Baidu and Yandex reign supremacy. Google also dominates web email with its Gmail. Gmail wins with its huge email space offered, where most users do not need to delete any past emails. If you have not realized by now, Gmail offers ads based on your email content. Seriously, with 83% of global market share in search engine, do you need to advertise in other search engines?

2) G00gle searches dominates as the most ‘intelligent’ so far, beating out others such as Yahoo or Bing. Google can fathom what the searcher is thinking about pretty quickly, giving them search results that are accurate. Similarly, Google is able to offer web users the most relevant ads for their searches, ensuring quality clicks for advertisers. Google is also strict about advertisers’ contents, giving favor to advertisers that best meet users’ needs. Advertisers can track their cost per click closely, giving very accurate ROI analysis.

3) The other secret weapon of Google is the ownership of Youtube. Youtube owns 44% market share of online videos watched, many times greater than the other competitors. Youtube now offers pre-video short ads, allowing advertisers to customize ads to their target demographics and most importantly, the advertisers can get assurance that their video ads will be watched by Youtubers. With the integration of Google Account among Gmail, Google+ and Youtube, advertisers can target their consumers pretty accurately.

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7 Great Online Marketing Ideas

Online Marketing: Reach your Target Consumers with More Efficiency, Less Cost

Without further ado, here’re the 7 great online marketing ideas:

1) Use Google Alert to check out your own business’s online reputation, and what competitors are doing.  You can also find out what businesses that target your consumer demographics are doing.  This provides fantastic marketing ideas that you can model after.

2) Email marketing is not dead.  With Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn hogging the limelights lately, you would have thought that email marketing is dead.  Nope, it is not.  Email is like direct mail, only far cheaper.  Everybody likes to receive personalized emails, so it is still a profitable marketing tool.

3) Post videos about your niche.  If you are selling swimming pool cleaning products, create videos relevant to this topic.  Find out what your customers’ questions are, and answer them with videos that you upload to Youtube or Vimeo.  You can also have video teasers.  Upload a couple of videos, and then direct the viewers to your website for more educational videos.  And on your landing page, put a compelling sales letter to sell your products, or get leads (contacts) from the readers.

4) Get your partners, suppliers and customers to spread your name.  Offer to give them the same exposure in return.  Or promise them a gift.  They are your best salesmen!

5) Do not overlook mobile phone marketing.  Now with better technology, cell phones can access the web readily, and view pictures easily.  One caution though.  Do not buy random lists and spam those in the list.  Only do ‘opt-ins’ before you blast marketing messages to them.  People are less tolerant of short messaging spam compared to email spam.

6) Re-examine your web url names.  If you have hard to remember or hard to spell names, strongly consider changing the name to something memorable and shorter.  If you can’t change your company name, you can still use a name that reflects your niche, such as ‘bestspeaker.com’, or ‘tastiestcakes.com’.

7) Use Twitter for regular connections with your customers.  Offer to retweet often.  By using klout.com, you can find out who are the high influencers among your followers, and offer them business opportunities to tweet on your behalf.

10 Tips to Better Google Adwords

With investments in traditional advertising decreasing worldwide, digital advertising, especially Google search advertising is getting more popular nowadays. Here are 10 tips to better Google Adwords:

1) Use traffic estimator to estimate the keyword costs. You can better choose your keywords then within your budget.

2) There are 2 ways to fit Google Adwords into your budget. Use Google adwords with low cost keywords, or set low daily budgets. The preferable way is to use Google Adwords with lower cost keywords, rather than restricting your time to only the first few hours everyday. You would want adwords to be on and be seen by your target as much as possible.

3) Group keywords into different groups. Don’t lump all keywords into one campaign. Different people may have different needs or usage for your products, so segment these consumers with different campaign, with different group of keywords.

4) Always set up negative keywords for words that you do not want. This increases the click through rates.

5) Do split test for ads. They are cost effective, and moves you one step to better marketing ROI. Forget about focus groups, where respondents may not tell the whole truth. These split tests tell the whole truth.

6) Always try to foresee what the consumer wants and is thinking in her or his head. Buying an expensive car may require details about the engine and performance, but ultimately, the buyer may buy it as a status symbol.

7) Read magazine headlines for ideas on how to write a more attractive headline for your google ad.

8) Always list benefits fist, followed by the features. This improves click through rates.

9) Be simple, clear and straightforward. No razzle dazzle please. You are talking to real people who needs solutions to their life’s problems.

10) After you have mastered Google Adwords, go on to master the following to further augment your marketing:
SEO, yahoo/msn, email promo, affiliates, banners, social media, PR, direct mail, print ads.