Coaching For Success
Posts tagged Marketing Campaign
‘Cost Per Action (CPA) – A Result Orientated Marketing Tool’
Jul 19th
Cost Per Action Marketing Gives You Control Over Your Marketing Budget
The Internet is a great tool for expanding a business. It provides lot of options to promote your products and services across millions of users worldwide. This way of promotion is often known as ‘online marketing’. Search engines are one of the most powerful channels of online marketing.
There are a variety of different business models available for promotion through search engines and you should try to get to know them. One effective method is the Cost Per Action (CPA) model. We look at what CPA is and how it works in this article.
‘What is CPA?’
‘CPA’, as mentioned earlier, stands for Cost Per Action also known as Pay Per Action (PPA) and is an online advertising pricing model, where an advertiser (your business) pays for specified actions i.e each time an ad is clicked or for a purchase, a form submission etc all of which is directly linked to the advertisement.
Many online marketers consider CPA the best way to buy online advertising, as you only pays for the ad when the desired action has occurred i.e such as a product being purchased etc. In any case the action required is determined soley by the marketer, CPA and affiliate marketing campaigns are publisher-centric. In essence you are paying to acquire something such as leads, new customers, sales and so on, CPA campaigns are usually low volume ones.
‘Importance of CPA’
CPA is an effective mode of online advertising. The value of CPA is high owing to the fact that its returns can be accurately measured to check for ROI. In such cases, the advertiser has the advantage whereas the publishing website bears the risk. In a way, it is a professional approach to online marketing. CPA results also give deep insight about customers. If you are getting lot of clicks but less converts, perhaps the customers don’t like your offering. On the other hand if you are not even getting enough clicks then you probably need to redefine your promotion strategy. So, CPA can help you to define your marketing strategy.
‘How to implement CPA’
Almost all the search engines and some popular search listings provide CPA and all you need to do is search out for the one which suits your requirements. Basically you place your business ad with a CPA agency like Google and your ad will begin to display as soon as it is added to the rotation.
Once your ad begins to display, it will be in the ad rotation process until the set amount of actions you have specified have taken place i.e if you require 1000 sales from your ad campaign, then your ad will continue to be displayed until you have reached 1000 sales.
Before you can do this you need to decide on a few factors first like what actions you are willing to pay for.To start with, you must first ‘define your target customers’ and segregate them into geographic and demographic segments. Remember, your purpose is to eliminate irrelevant clicks; and to achieve this you must develop the web content which contains the keywords specific to your business. Try to incorporate SEO in the Web content. You can add creativity by posting videos, discussion forums etc.
Once the Webpage is ready, the next step is to ‘optimise your CPA campaign’. You can use variety of optimisers available online like ‘Google conversion optimiser’. Then you need to test your campaign on variety of ‘Web sites’ or ‘email lists’ which might require some investment. You may also buy some ad spaces and publish some relevant portion of the Webpage to see how much returns are you generating. So, it is a series of testing and simultaneously improving your content.
Finally, you can go to the publisher with these results and ‘submit your ad’. It saves the time of publishers. CPA requires publishers to test the advertisement thoroughly as the burden remains with them always. If a submitted ad is not up to the standards of the publisher, then the publisher will ask for lots of rework to be done before finalising the ad. Hence it is very important for an advertiser to test the ad before submitting. Once the ad is approved and published you can now expect good returns on your investment.
‘Websites offering CPA’
The most popular affiliate website that provides CPA is ‘Google’ which has been offering tools like ‘Adsense’ and ‘Conversion optimiser’ to facilitate this method. ‘eBay’ also moved into CPA advertising with its ‘AdContext system’. Websites like ‘Snap.com’ have gone a step ahead in CPA by providing services to eliminate click frauds. ‘Jellyfish.com’ emerged as the first comparison shopping search engine to operate exclusively on a Cost Per Action (CPA) ad model. ‘AffiliateWindow.com’ works on a commission basis. ‘affiliateresponse.co.uk’ is one site which is highly performance oriented and operates in UK, US and some European markets.
It is said that CPA is for risk averse marketers however it makes complete sense as both the profit and losses are shared by publishers and advertisers. If you are not using this method of online marketing get more familiar with the process of CPA and start using it to your internet business’ advantage.
Understanding Offline Marketing Can Help your Online Marketing
Jun 1st
In today’s hectic, bloated online world where information overload is stifling creativity and trashing old school ideology it is refreshing to step back into the old world to drenge up the methodology of past glory and use it to create new online glories. When it comes to marketing this revival is both useful and warranted and can help small business owners to understand what is really take place online by using terms they understand from offline marketing for comparison.Most importantly if used properly it can increase client conversion.
OK so let us look at some of these ideas, offline when you are going to do a Marketing Campaign you will either get a marketing specialist or do it yourself in either case both should start by
1, Identifying potential customers, offline you may use surveys, the post office services or things like Dunn & Bradshaw’s directory to help you do this. These methods are still extremly useful and work very well in terms of targetting prospects – if you understand what service or product you are selling. Online there is no real difference in that you still should be doing this only this research can be done using deep keyword research or by finding like minded communities and forums both using search engines, blog catalogs and social media sites – Facebook have great tools which are supposed to be used for targeting a Facebook ad campaign can actually be used to tell you how to find your market inside Facebook without spending any money.
2, Placement of your marketing – offline you would not put an ad or run a campaign for a bakery in a car magazine would you? ( I hope not 
) by ensuring that the right type of prospect see your ad in the right offline mediums canhelp improve your businesses chance of obtaining new customers – online it is no different you in that you must make sure that the right people arrive at the correct landing place (targetted traffic) for the search query (keword) associated to that product or service and not another unrelated product.
3, Measure responsiveness- just as you would measure response for offline marketing to an ad, radio or TV campaign you should do the same online – measuring which pages or sites are working. Measuring responsiveness helps you to tweak, remove or change an ad and where best to position it for maximum effect – lets face it why spend money on a campaign that does not work , measuring allows you the ability to stop wasting moneye. Use freely available tools like Google Analytics and Optimiser to help you see what is working and also help you split test pages, if you do not know how find an internet marketing specialist to help.
Finally your best gauge of the success of your marketing campaign on and offline are your customers and also the people who you did not convert (yes I did say the people who did not convert) – the people who became customers by buying from you should be willing to tell you why they bought your product or service and how they would use your product or service within their offline/online business – this is no different online – think about testimonials these are just customers recounting why they bought a particluar thing.
Funny but the people who did not buy are equally if not more important as they are the people that for whatever the reason was, were not quite happy with your offering – offline you may ring them up or survey them, online why not find out why by showing them an exit screen offering them a discount for your product or service (some will buy with a discount – this is a proven strategy) but if they will not offer them a free report to tell you why they did not choose your service (do this as a quick survey no more than five multichoice questions or as an open comment box. This may seem an unusual stratergy but it can help you improve the quality of your offering so that you are losing less customers. Again here click path analysis can tell you online what information people are viewing and finding interesting on your site so you can further push promotion of these products or services or work on those not doing so well.
My personal opinion is that offline ideology and methods are as good as they ever were and understanding them makes it much easier to market your business product or service online. Do this simple test – Ask yourself – how does what i want to do online this relate to offline marketing? Which offline idea or method is this? If you cannot answer get an internet marketing specialist and ask them, if they cannot answer find a new one ASAP one who understands both online and offline marketing and will be able to help you maximise your businesses results both online and offline.
