#2 - Single Campaign Optimization: You’re spending your time sequentially, one marketing campaign at a time, to sell a variety of goods and services. In today’s climate, your website will need to cater to multiple audiences simultaneously, which may require launching multiple marketing campaigns with highly specific targeting.
Weakness #3 - Catch-All Philosophy: The Design of your website and promotional messaging are a catch-all for multiple audiences. Ultimately, using a catch-all philosophy only “catches” a few.
In exploring your Conversion Marketing strategy, we will discover how to profile your target audience and increase your conversion rates. The common pitfalls listed above can be remedied with a Conversion Marketing strategy that identifies and caters to the needs of your target audience.
Before we go further, it is important to understand the fundamental building blocks of the Internet economy by understanding how money flows online.
The Flow of Money
Money is made on the Internet in 4 primary methods:
Method #1: Publishing
A fundamental building block of all commerce on the web is inherent in the Publishing business model. Publishing starts with the fundamentals which are essential for understanding how revenue is generated online. We can start with the most basic component of Publishing – traffic and attracting Visitors. There are distinctions to understand how a Publisher thinks about their audience. Here is a high level breakdown:
 | Visitors – A total count of how many times your website was visited in a period of time. |
| Unique Visitors – Unique Visitors is a culled-down Visitor number to help you understand how many distinct individuals are coming to your website. This number typically represents the core of a buying audience, as it reflects the all-important Repeat Visitor. |
| Page Views – Online publishers like to create a user experience encouraging multiple page views per visit. When a Visitor starts to click through the pages on your website, each new click to a new page is called a Page View. |
| Ad Views – Ultimately, online Publishing companies (MSNBC, MTV, NYTimes, CondeNet and Yahoo!) measure their success by how many ads they can display to each unique visitor. Back in 1995, the mantra for each Ad View was “nickel, nickel, nickel” as each ad displayed earned a nickel in revenue on average. The value of an Ad View is significantly lower today on average and is measured by a fast-evolving list of metrics that are explored in coming chapters. |
| Click-Throughs – Each time a Visitor clicks on a link or display ad. The overall performance of a Publishing website, ad or email is measured by how many Visitors click on on the ad. |
| Average time spent on website – Finally, online marketers like to measure how much time each Visitor spends on their websites in order to benchmark the level of engagement and/or appeal of content. |
Method #2: Advertising
As a Conversion Marketer, your essential job is to get your website noticed and products/services sold. This is true of whether you are working on a start-up company or for a mega-brand such as Google, Coca-Cola, Nike, Starbucks, Microsoft, Facebook or Estée Lauder. The primary methods which marketers use to get noticed can include advertising and promotion. Marketing is sometimes explained in terms of Above-The-Line advertising and Below-The-Line promotional tactics. Above-the-line marketing is defined as mainstream media advertising and is somewhat weighted to what marketers define as “Branding” activities. Below-the-line advertising is defined by activities such as promotional marketing or viral marketing (often called Word of Mouth advertising).
Above the Line Marketing
Marketers use many different types of advertising and marketing communications for Above-the-Line activities, which include running terrestrial advertisements on TV, radio, newsprint, magazines and outdoor advertising (billboards, stadium advertising or bus stops). Online advertising includes CPM (cost per thousand) banners sometimes called “display ads”, video interstitials (online video commercials viewed as you click-through to desired content), sponsorship, pay-per-click (PPC) and paid placement.
Below the Line Marketing
Below-the-line marketing means affordable yet efficient “call-to-action” marketing, reaching various target groups with promotional methods measured by the cost per response. Marketers can leverage their online advertising performance using Word-of-Mouth tactics such as viral marketing (which we explore in Chapter 5) to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.
Basically, an advertising budget will be divided up into “buckets” which target the four key areas of the purchase process listed here.
| Awareness: Generating product or brand awareness via advertising or a public relations push. |
| Consideration: Increasing active product consideration by engaging your target audience with relevant messages related to your products/services. |
| Channel Marketing: Sales channel coverage in retail stores, trade shows, managing distributor relationships or partners who represent your products in certain channels of distribution. |
| Call to Action: Closing the sale by getting the benefits of the product to hit home with your consumers, or what is called “Call-to-Action” marketing. Often, Call to Action marketing is referred to as Promotional Marketing. |
Method #3: Promotion
When you are planning your online Conversion Marketing strategy, the first exercise is to know your basic marketing parameters, or the Four P’s, in order to understand which tools to use to capture revenues most efficiently.
Parameter #1 – Product: First, knowing why people are buying your Product is essential. Create a clear description that communicates its benefits and features, leaving no room for misconception. Have a vision of your product’s utility to your audience firmly in your mind.
Parameter #2 – Price: The second parameter is Price. Pricing is an essential part of your marketing strategy. Pricing can be difficult to determine if you are introducing a new product to the market. If you want to read more about understanding pricing models, one good resource is The Irresistible Offer: How to Sell Your Product or Service in 3 Seconds or Less by Mark Joyner. Another excellent resource with innovating thinking on pricing is a book called Predictable Irrationality by Dan Ariely. I keep this book next to my desk at all times.
Parameter #3 – Place: The third factor is Place. The physical place of your product can also be
