The best Online Marketing strategies are the ones where marketers have a deeper than average knowledge or insight into how social networks behave.

A common and simplistic view on social media marketing, for instance, is that the larger your fan base and the wider your audience, the bigger your marketing impact is going to be. People who have a grasp of social network dynamics understand that this is at best a simplification.

The truth is that most members of your network or audience are ‘frigid’ or passive. Only a substantial few are active and highly connected to others within the network. I like using a model where the most important members in a network are divided into three basic types: The innovators, the connectors and the opinion leaders.

The innovators are those who come up with original and interesting ideas or content but most of them may be at the ‘fringe’ of the network with very few connections to others in the social network. The connectors on the other hand are people who are very socially active, well connected to others and tend to share a lot of content around. They are the heavy tweeters or Facebook users who are sharing content all day long. They are the ones who pick ideas from the disconnected innovators and push it mainstream inside the center of the network.

Some connectors can also be opinion leaders and this means that they have a lot of influence and social clout. They are the trendsetters that basically turn those weird or innovative ideas at the fringe into a trend.

A very strong Social Media strategy is therefore one which targets those opinion leaders in your online community. They are the powerful few which can make your content go viral. The pertinent question is “How do we identify these opinion leaders?”.

Luckily there are a few tools which can help you do that. One of them is Klout. In short, Klout uses a series of algorithms and data analysis under the hood which as a result give you a ‘Klout score‘, a score from one to hundred indicating the overall online influence of a particular individual or brand.

Say for example one of your Twitter followers, @typicalcustomer, replied to one of your tweets with a praise or a complaint. You can input his username or nickname on Klout and a score of 68 is returned. This score will tell you about how influential that individual is. 68 would mean that he or she is highly influential (this is important to know in Social Media marketing and reputation managament – it might save you from a PR disaster or allow you to turn a loyal customer into a brand ambassador).

Certain metrics are used to evaluate this Klout score. One of them is ‘reach’, or how far does the content of the individual spread across Twitter or Facebook. Another is called ‘amplification probability’ or in plain English how likely it is for the individual’s audience to engage and interact with the content. Yet another factor is Network effect and this measures how influential is the audience of the individual in question.

Another similar tool is Peerindex which again gives you a ‘PeerIndex score‘ or a score which indicates the online authority or trust of a particular member in a social network. As in Klout this authority score tells you how much of an opinion former is this particular member of your audience.

A different set of metrics than the ones used in Klout are used for measuring the PeerIndex. Basically it evaluates how much your audience is listening and responding to your social updates, how active you are in the community, your ‘realness’ (as against bots I suppose) and other related factors.

All in all both Klout or PeerIndex will help Social Media marketers understand more about their online community and go beyond quantities and numbers such as number of followers, Facebook likes, retweets, etc. Such tools can give them the added insight into identifying and targeting opinion leaders as part of their overall marketing strategy. This is an important lesson in social media marketing – it’s not about numbers but about connections and peer influence.

Anyone involved in marketing knows very well that the preparation involved at the prelaunch stage of a marketing campaign is ultimately the most important ingredient for success . Simply put, you need to get the prelaunch right. Banner campaigns are certainly not exempt from this maxim.

A lot of businesses do the mistake of overlooking the prelaunch stage of their banner campaigns or simply don’t get all the steps right. This is the reason why serious marketers always follow a check list of items they would need to tick off before a marketing campaign begins. These items are critical and determine whether a campaign will effectively work and bring about the desired outcome. It will certainly determine the degree of success – whether it will be a barely successful banner campaign or one that is highly targeted, bringing tonnes of high quality traffic and conversions.

I will show you a simple but powerful check-list you can use before starting off your banner campaign. The list is ridiculously simple but it will change any lame campaign to a rock-star one that will guarantee your bonus check and a solid ROI to your business.

Here it goes:

1. Ask the obvious question: Is a banner campaign the ideal marketing channel for my product or service? Yeah I know it’s pretty obvious…but is it? You might be surprised how we fail to see the obvious. I am a great advocate of ‘ask the obvious questions first’ because I know that we often get unconsciously ‘locked-in’ certain preconceptions without ever asking the obvious. Biggest failures usely arise from this and the smartest choices are the result of challenging established ideas.

Banner advertisement is not always the ideal marketing channel for a particular business. Many think that banner advertisement always works to some degree. This very much depends on the buying and decision-making pattern of your product’s customer base. If you are selling B2C a fast-moving product then a banner campaign is definitely your thing. If on the other hand you are selling B2B some specialized or high-cost product or service then display advertisement might not be the perfect candidate. There again it depends where you are displaying your banner and what is your expected outcome. It could be you are after leads and you are displaying a free webinar, report or white paper on a highly related site. In that case a banner campaign would suit fine.

2. Set your goals for outcomes before setting the budget: Quite often marketing executives start off by allocating a budget to a particular campaign without fully defining the goals or the expected outcomes. The process should be made in reverse. You first need to define what is expected from the banner campaign. Is it simply more traffic? leads? sales? brand awareness? dowloading a trial version of your software? And what is the context in which these outcomes fit? off-season promotions? product launch? pushing a slow moving inventory?

You get the idea but why is it important? Because knowing the quality and quantity of what you are expecting will allow you to set realistic budgets and realistic budgets are often accompanied by better planned tactics. By having your goals and expected outcomes defined you can clearly filter out the noise and be focused and specific about the right steps to take for your banner campaign – for example which niche or online source to place your ads on or which banner format, design or creative content to use. Unsuccessful banner campaigns are usually the result of unfocused and half thought plans because of poorly defined goals.

3. Check out the media buyer/agency you are using: Before choosing a media buyer or agency to have your banners placed on sites or ad networks, get some background info about it…Google it and see what other people are saying. I find it quite funny how as personal consumers we spend time searching for reviews or feedback before buying something online but as an organization we sometimes spend big budgets without doing so. Not all media agencies offer the same product. Sometimes agencies work with a particular ad network or group of sites and use such sites for all clients irrespective of the product or industry. This can result in having traffic sent to your site which is not targeted to your selling proposition. If you are analyzing your traffic you will immediately notice this from very low conversion rates, high bounce rates and very short average time on page.

4. Talk with the media buyer about the details: In relation to the above point it is very pertinent to discuss before hand with the media buyer/agency about details such as which sites your ad will appear. Ask them to give you a list and check out the sites to get a feel whether it has relevance or relation to your product. Also ask for typical click through rates from clients in your same industry.

5. Url tracking: A very important part of your banner campaign success or any online marketing campaign for that matter is tracking and analyzing its performance and success rate. Using web analytics tools such as Google analytics is a good start. You can track your online campaigns and monitor metrics such as traffic, conversion, ROI, bounce rates and average time on site. However tracking and analyzing banner campaigns comes with some preparation too.

Ideally you would want to tag each of your banner and/or campaign so you can easily identify it and segment it later in your web analytics report. Google has a free tool called url builder. You input the url of the landing page plus other variables you would need later in your report most importantly campaign name (for example UK online campaign), source (Telegraph online) and content (Christmas special offer £29).

Once you have all your campaigns tagged you can then sit back and track them as traffic starts pouring in.

6. Take notes from your past banner campaigns:  Online marketing is a constant learning curve and past failures are not just failures but lessons for the present and future. It is always a good investment to look back and see data or feedback you had about your past campaigns. What was their success rate and ROI? What was the typical Conversion rate?

By the way, these golden nuggets of information can also be a valuable input when defining your goals and outcomes.

7. Make sure to optimize your landing page before sending traffic over: This is the last item but it is certainly one of the most important ones if not the most important one.

Before starting off a campaign it is indispensable to check where you are sending traffic to. If your creative was showing a particular special offer, or product be sure that it will be the first thing they will see. Your landing page has to match the expectations of your customers when they clicked on the banner, This is crucial since it will define your conversion rate and ultimately the ROI of your campaigns.

Good luck!

So you have your online marketing thing rolling on or perhaps you are still setting things up as you go along. You learned a few things about SEO, you setup a pay per click campaign on adwords and your website traffic is building up steady.

You are also gaining some momentum on Facebook and Twitter and have recently thrown in a competition to gain some likes and following. You might even have someone look into Google analytics for you to monitor how things are patching up. That’s all great stuff and you know that you are following popular online marketing strategies by the book.

But allow me to be a little bit of a wet blanket here….how much do you know of the people you are trying to reach through your online efforts? Or rephrased in another way…do you know who your target audience is? And if you sell a mixed line of products and services…do you know which product or service matches which target audience?

Forgive me for perhaps being a little bit provocative but from my experience I know that this is by far the most common mistake and biggest oversight that companies do when doing online marketing. Big money and opportunities are wasted down this path. Unfortunately it happens even in large enterprises who have a whole e-commerce department with a staff complement of clever online marketers.

But why is it so important?

Online marketing, and traditional marketing for that matter, is in its crudest and simplest form the art of matching or aligning customer needs with how, when and where you place your products.

Now, the more you know about your customers and their needs, the more you are able to match those needs by, for example, knowing WHICH online channels to focus on (example which combination of blog posts, PPC, Display, SEO, Social, Mobile channels?). Or you might get to know better HOW to address your customers (which type of content and language? Personal, corporate, visual, schematic, etc?). If you are launching products or event campaigns then knowing the mass behaviour of your audience can give you information on WHEN to launch it (holiday, events, mobility trends, etc). You get the idea.

Now the most important point is this: You can press all the right buttons in online marketing and throw in hard cash but unless you know who your audience is, your efforts and spending will not be optimized. On the other hand the better the knowledge you have of your online audience, the more effective your online targeting is going to be and the higher your return on investment (ROI).

Start simple. look for the data in your own home turf first:

Customer insight is more about synthesizing rather than analyzing. What this means is that you collect small pieces of data and build the big picture out of it. This is good news since it means that even small pieces of evidence can lead us to a better understanding of our audience.

For example, if you have some sort of sales reports available you can use them to get a better understanding of how and when your product is sold. The more detailed the information is the better since you can extract more insights out of it – such as how product sales varies by region, area, sales channel, day of the week, season, etc. These can be little gold nuggets that help you start getting a better idea of how your product sells (even through offline channels) and how it responds to price, time and market.

Another priceless source of insights is a customer database if you have one (I know this is obvious but how often do you look and use your customer database?;). This could be a simple one such as a contact list with name, address and other contact details.

You might be surprised what one can do with a simple customer database and a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel. You can summarize your customer data by demographics – that is gender, location, age (if available) and whether he or she is a repeat customer. Why is this important? Well for starters you get a ‘feel’ of how your customer base is composed. Is it tilted towards more female buyers or males in their 30s or whatever? Secondly a customer database with demographic details can be used to segment and target your audience with more focused marketing campaigns (think about using different content in your email campaigns for different customer segments)

Another very often forgotten pot of gold is your own staff (if you manage a department or company) – especially the front line staff who interact and listen to customers on a day to day basis. The natural born marketing or sales people will make it a point to talk to front line staff and take mental notes on what people are saying, lack or want.

Research the wider landscape:

Looking at your own data is a sound first step to gain insights into who your audience is and how they behave. For some online businesses it can also be sufficiently adequate. If your business and markets are more dynamic then you need to look beyond your own waters and keep notes on what’s happening in your industry and extended business circles. You need to look for industry trends and possibly emerging customer behavioural patterns. I’m sure it’s no news that customer wants and needs change all the time and are influenced by a wide variety of factors.

This is where market research comes in. Having a longstanding background in market research I know that some people shy away from market research because they are not always confident on how to use it and because it can be costly (depending on which project and who is doing it). What most people don’t know however is that market research can be customized to your needs whether you are a fortune 500 company with global presence or a greengrocer down the road.

If you are on a low to medium budget you can do your own in-house market research or if you don’t have the time then you can engage freelance people like myself to have it done customized for your needs. Either way the objective remains the same – understanding who your target audience is and how its needs are changing in different market environments (essential knowledge for product innovation).

Sources of information can be varied such as doing online research and looking into industry reports and white papers. It could be putting up an online poll on your blog or facebook page. It could be doing an email or web survey to understand customer perception on a particular issue, their attitudes and changing habits. If you have an established online community such as a blog or social network you can also invite members to participate in an online focus group.

Brainstorming:

This can be a follow up of the previous two approaches or can be done independently anytime. It’s also a good way to have more staff involved and share ideas which may otherwise remain unsaid due to busy routines. Brainstorming is excellent for putting together customer insights because it is based on synthesizing ideas and piecemeal knowledge into the bigger picture.

Concluding remarks:

There is no doubt that much of your online success depends on knowing your target audience. The lack of it is a very common knowledge gap that can leave your online presence unfocused and not optimized for success. Since online marketing is increasingly becoming a personalized conversation with your audience rather than a public broadcast it is even more important knowing who you are talking to. The bottom line is that you can sell your products and services remotely, through online channels, but you cannot sell them blindly.

This should be obvious (but often is not) to anyone who is doing online marketing hands-on. If you do SEO, who are you optimizing for? If you are writing email or PPC campaigns, who are you writing for? If you are adding content on your web, social or mobile channels, who are you addressing?

PPC campaign management can be overwhelming if you are not simplifying matters and monitoring & tweaking what really counts.

If your task is to manage a company’s PPC account with a medium to large budget, the complexity of managing it effectively can grow exponentially. You might be facing multiple campaigns, each of which with several ad groups, hundreds of ads and thousands of keywords running simultaneously.

If you get confused over which numbers to follow you can get pretty lost. There is a problem with not knowing where to keep your eye fixed. If you start putting under consideration all metrics – clicks, impressions, Avg. CPC, Avg. Position, Click through rate, Conversion rate, Cost, Cost per conversion, etc – you will soon realize that the only thing going always up is your stress level.

Don’t Panic! You need to simplify and focus your efforts where it will leave most effect. Here is how:

ROI – The Prime Number

There is only one number to spot before the others – margin or return on investment (ROI). ROI can be selected as a metric if you are using Google Analytics (or any other web analytics software) to measure your PPC campaigns which is basically the goal value (revenue from sales) minus Cost divided by Cost.

If you are not using Google Analytics you can instead measure direct profit or loss margin by subtracting your total goal value (number of conversions*your average sale price) with your ad cost. So for instance let’s say that the overall number of conversions for a campaign were 100 and your average sale price is $50 then your total goal value for that campaign is $5000 (your total goal value is automatically calculated if you are using the adwords conversion tracking and inputed a goal conversion value). You had 1000 clicks at an average CPC of $0.50 so your total costs was $500 (again this is a given in adwords).

In other words you spent $500 for that campaign and sold $5000 worth of products. Hence your margin is $5000-$500=$4500. This may be a quick way of measuring the profitability of your campaigns, ads or keywords. You can take this a step further by calculating the real net profit – that is subtracting the advertising costs from the profit margin of the products instead of their sale value.

Taking the same example above, let’s say the sale price is $50 but the net profit margin for each sale is $10. Hence the total profit out of the 100 sales is $1000. The real overall net profit margin is then $1000 minus the $500 in advertising costs = $500 return after ad costs.

Note: the profit margin for each sale ($10) can always be inputed as a conversion value in Adwords instead of the sale value ($50) if you prefer. This will enable you to measure net profit directly from each campaign or ad.

Break down the problem into simple manageable parts

If any of your running ad campaigns are flagging a negative ROI you can start by troubleshooting the problem into easy to follow ‘logic gates’. I find this method to be a very simple, effective and systematic troubleshooting procedure which avoids leaving you with more questions than answers or fuzzy loose ends.

Negative ROI can mean one of 2 things (or rather one thing stated in 2 different ways): Either the Cost per click (CPC) is higher than the revenue per click (RPC) or that the average cost per acquisition (CPA) is higher than the margin of the product sold.

In either case it means that CPC or CPA are untenable because of one or all of the below:

1. Keywords bidded for are way too competitive to get substantial return

2. Your Conversion rate is low due to inherent problems in your landing page or product

3. The margin of your product is too low to balance the cost of this advertising channel

Deconstructing the Core of the problem: CPC & CPA

The beauty of this approach is that it deals with as little metrics as possible. It simplifies the optimization process. In other circumstances you can easily be led astray by too many problem-solving paths and factors to consider. What this approach offers is a clearly signed map.

It focuses on dealing with the core of the problem directly by looking into CPC and CPA. In case of a negative ROI, both metrics need to be lowered.

CPC can be lowered if you:

1. Bid for keyword phrases that are not so competitive but can generate potential traffic

2. Improve CTR through better ad copy (attractive headlines, Keywords in title, call for action in copy, etc) – Split testing is a good way to improve on this

3. Manually reduce the bid price to a point where it still generates traffic/conversions but total costs are lower than revenue earned

CPA can be lowered if:

1. Conversion rates are improved. This is achieved through keeping those keywords with high conversion rates (good keyword research essential), discarding the ones with low conversion rates and improving your landing page (more user friendly, good copywriting)

2. By lowering CPC (see above)

Essentially another way of seeing it is that by lowering CPC and CPA you are increasing your ROI.

So in a nutshell, the most important metric to monitor at first glance is ROI then follow action by improving CPC and CPA. This of course should be a continuous and iterative process.

Traffic as a Time Factor:

Traffic (or number of clicks) is the variable to use to measure the urgency to action. Let me explain.

If you have a campaign, ad group, ad or keyword that has negative indicators – let’s say a negative ROI because of a high CPA or a high CPC – but you only had 20 clicks in all it’s not a matter of urgent concern. Secondly you cannot base a decision on such little traffic. It might be the case that more traffic comes in and the indicators change for the better.

However if the same campaign, ad or keyword is getting in 300+ clicks per day it would require immediate action. If it has a negative ROI, costs and money loss will be incurred very quickly by the hour. If on the other hand it has a positive ROI but there is room for optimization then you would also be losing opportunity fast.

This is how I see traffic flow as a time factor and it can be expediently used to gauge priority to action.

Over the last few years Organic Search engine optimization (SEO) has become a core concept in online marketing circles not to say a source of constant concern and worry. There are different views and discussions on the role and importance of SEO but there is general agreement that good SEO can funnel in a lot of high value traffic and boost online sales.

One very common question I often hear and read about is “what is more important – optimizing for Organic search or optimizing for social media (or that is people)?“. Now this may seem like a dilemma for some marketers who would like to know where to focus their strategy but it need not be. I believe it only sounds problematic because it is not put in a wider framework.

What is Organic Search Engine Optimization? (yep…it’s healthy to ask basic questions from scratch)

Let me take two steps back and skim over what is meant by optimizing for search and optimizing for social media. Search engine optimization in its narrowest form is having your website content and structure developed in such a way that it is easy for search engines to get your content pages indexed in their search results and rank high for the particular keywords you are trying to optimize. The latter is the ultimate goal of SEO

For example, if one of your product pages is optimized for the keywords/phrases ‘outdoor sports gear‘ and ‘adventure sports equipment‘, it means that if the organic search optimization is done well your page should appear in the first few results returned by that search engine whenever those phrases are searched for.

As most of you probably know very well hands-on, this entails doing some keyword research (using the keyword research tool of your liking) first to find out those keywords that best fits your product page, which also have a substantial monthly search volume and which preferably are not overly competed for (otherwise it will be harder to rank for those keywords).

After choosing the keywords you want to optimize your content around, you strategically insert those keywords in your meta-tags, title, body and even alt-image tags. This is what is called ‘on-page optimization‘. Going back to the dilemma, this is where the wrong turn can be taken. Some people may be very tempted to overdo this on-page optimization and have their content twisted around the keywords instead of the other way round. The result is low quality content at best, jibberish and garbage at its worst. Here is where the question of ‘writing for search bots or writing for people?‘ comes in.

At this point if you had to ask me again what is more important, I’d definitely tell you optimization for people and target audience. I’d rather have content that is of good quality, helpful and which resonates with the reader’s likes and needs.

An article, page or blog post that ranks high in the search engine but is almost unreadable is worth little if anything at all. On the other hand a piece of content which doesn’t rank on search engines but is of high value to whoever reads it will be very readily shared or discussed thus giving it the potential of going massively viral. Don’t forget that Social Media is an ‘emotional eco-system’ driven by people and not machines.

Content that is optimized for people means content that is consumed, sharable and easily linked to.

Really good SEO= Content Optimized for People first

Looking at the wider picture, good SEO is also good optimization for people. First off if when searching for keywords in your niche to write interesting content about, you are already planning to write what people want to read, hence optimizing for a particular audience. Makes sense?

Moreover if we look beyond the narrow definition of SEO as I described above, we find that real search optimization can also mean aligning people’s needs with your content.

For instance, I was lately analyzing the website of a medium sized enterprise when I realized (through Google Analytics) that a moderate but consistent amount of traffic was coming from a keyword in Italian. When I typed in the keyword in Google search, I was given the main homepage in English in the results. This means that those potential customers who were looking for the Italian version of the page could have been turned away by not matching the content with their expectation. This is an SEO problem and it was one of the things I suggested in my SEO report.

The bottom line is that both optimizing for people and optimizing for search engines are important as long as one doesn’t interfere with the other. Understanding how people interact with and consume content is crucial to understanding the how content should be optimized from a strategic point of view.