To better communicate your unique offering, start by reviewing the core benefits of Google Adwords..
“Reach people actively looking for information about your products and services online”
and make it real for your business offering. For example:
If I were a photographer with an online photo portfolio who wants to attract a bride/mother-in-law looking for a wedding photographer for her wedding day, I would write..
Reach brides who are actively looking for a wedding photographer in Orlando Fl market.
By specifically writing the type of visitor and what their goal is when they visit your site, you can write much more targeted adverts and direct them to specific landing pages on your site..one page could target brides and the other could target mother-in-laws.
Call to Action is the focus for each advert. Otherwise the ads become a type of branding campaign. A sample of ads and their corresponding call to action or not is presented. Tell the visitor what you want them to do. Learn, Review, Compare, Watch, Sit, Run…
Focusing on two primary tasks which are generating traffic to a website and decreasing the cost of online results whether its sales or leads. But is website traffic everything? Not if you are missing the management of the machine..traffic can be generated hundreds, maybe thousands of ways from pay per click, organic search, social network referrals, participating in forums, etc..but all that changes each day as more and more companies enter the Internet to compete and win the hearts and minds of their prospective customers. Managing the costs of all Internet traffic sources and the corresponding revenue is crucial to success. The core lever is conversion rate…How many of my visitors can I convert to a customer. I will prepare a post specifically breaking out the impact of raising your conversion rate and the impact on cost per conversion and the how your maximum cost per click can change dramatically.
The question is a rather odd one: “What’s your conversion rate?” The correct response would be another question: “Which conversion rate?” What most people are really asking is how many sales have you made? But the sales process – in almost all cases – takes more than one step.
Fact is, every step in between can be viewed as a conversion. And each of these micro-conversions can reveal interesting information about your sales path and how well it is functioning.
When you get to this level, it’s easier to determine the conversion rate because a sale has occurred. This is the one conversion rate most people rely on. As you can see, however, all the steps beforehand are vital to getting people to this moment in time. If one is out of sync, the process can potentially shut down.
When you test your copywriting, take it one conversion point at a time.
After reading an excellent post by Karon Thackston, I wanted to add that many clients only care about the final figure when they are evaluating month end results. Managing each conversion event is crucial for website optimization and the selling process but too many times clients want the bottom line figure.
Most companies I work with only mention the direct competitors. That is only a slice of the competitive landscape. There are many types. Imagine you walk to the bazaar on a hot and sunny day and yell ice cream. People would obviously look up and wonder..Is he offering free ice cream, ice cream on a cone, ice cream in a bowl, diet ice cream, cheap ice cream, gourmet ice cream…only to find out, he has ice cream cups…so keywords without qualifiers will allow each person to determine their own interpretation? I ran a search for the phrase “crm software” and here is screen shot of the various website offerings responding to the request “CRM SOFTWARE”. The point is there are more types of competitors than you would think. Writing specific ads including qualifiers is crucial for online success.
CRM Software Listings across Google, Yahoo and MSN
Are long sales letters and mini sites similar? Yes in the sense the communicate to the visitor. No in the sense of the goals of each. The goal of the sales letter is to take you sequentially through the buying process with benefit statements, testimonials, images, hypnotic copy and in the end, pull your credit card out and buy something. A micro site is suppose to do the same thing except its not a sequential process and the micro sites take the information and create categories/menu system making it very easy to find the appropriate category to research and break the sequential top down approach to buying. In the end being able to clearly communicate your offer trumps persuasion. If you are interested in copywriting, Stephan Dean does a great job of teaching sales page copywriting.
