Online Marketing And The Pareto Principle
Oct 26th, 2010
One of the things that happens to me quite frequently is a client or friend will contact me, tell me they are being hounded by a sales person from some organisation trying to sign them up for an online advertising opportunity. I will be asked if I have heard of the person and if what they are saying makes sense. Sometimes I have heard of the organisation, other times I haven’t. Do they add value? Should you sign up to their services? Well, answering that question is what I wanted to do in this post.
In internet marketing, the Pareto Principle holds true like it does no-where else. If you do the 20% priority jobs well, it will definitely have at least 80% impact on your online sales. The other 80% of things you can do will only improve your sales by the other 20% total. Each little opportunity will be a small contributor to that 20%. So they question about whether these opportunities add value is not the first question you should ask. You should first ask if the opportunity is one of the 20% jobs that will improve sales by 80%, or is it one of the 80% opportunities that will only have a minor impact. If it is one of the later opportunities, let it go until you have completed the 20% high impact priorities.
So what are the 20% of internet priorities to set up, test, refine and perfect for your online marketing efforts? I have listed them below.
- Website Performance – You need to make sure your website is set up to convert as many visitors to clients. 98% of business owners put NO thought or effort into this despite the fact that this is the first thing you need to perfect. You need to get this right first, or the traffic you drive to your website will be wasted as it will not convert to clients
- Search Engine Optimisation – No matter what “online advertising opportunists” tell you, Google organic results still drive 70% – 80% of internet traffic. You need to spend every cent of the online marketing budget you have, optimising your website for Google’s organic search results, until you are in a position you are happy with. You need to be in the top 4 positions on Google for your target search phrases before you spend a cent on any other form of online marketing. If an organisation tries to sell you otherwise, don’t deal with them, they are selling you their product dishonestly.
- Pay Per Click advertising – If you are happy with where your website is placed in Google’s organic results and you have budget left, you can try pay per click advertising. If you are just starting with this form of advertising, only use Google AdWords and FaceBook’s advertising platform. Test your campaigns, refine them and make them as efficient as possible. These two pay per click advertising platforms will deliver you so much more traffic than any other, it is simply not worth wasting your time on any other form of online advertising until you are 100% happy with the way these are performing
- Social Media marketing – Done properly, this should only cost you time, not money, unless you outsource the job. FaceBook first – everything else comes second.
The more successful you make your website with these four activities, the more opportunists trying to sell you their services you will attract unfortunately. Local search, local directories, banner advertising etc etc etc. Do they make a difference? You won’t know until you try them. Will thy make a big difference – not compared to the 4 big jobs above. So disregard these opportunities until you have taken care of the 4 big jobs above. If you do not, you will waste all you online marketing budget on opportunities that have marginal impact, missing the real opportunities.
If you are at the stage where you feel comfortable chasing the last 20% of online sales, here are some guidelines for picking the decent ones to try:
- Is the sales pitch honest? Unfortunately there are plenty of dodgy businesses out there, with pushy sales processes, high on hype, low on performance. Often they leave big hints for you though that all is not 100% legitimate, like claiming their services outperform Google’s organic searches, or they are tomorrow’s FaceBook. Just ignore these guys, avoid them. If they need hype to sell, it probably means the benefits of their offering are lacking. I mean, if they had real benefits, they’d sell you the benefits they are providing you and wouldn’t need the hype, right.
- Ask for proof of value or testimonials. Their opportunity should be making money for someone already, they should be proud of their successes. If they can’t provide evidence of historical success, do you really want to be their crash test bunny?
- Do they have a mechanism to track results? The whole point of online marketing is you can track everything, measure results and realise exactly what activities make you money. If there is no tracking mechanism for the opportunity, you will not be able to measure whether the opportunity is successful – you may as well put an advert in the local paper. I turn down any online marketing activity that does not let me track results. It defeats the whole purpose of online marketing.
If those 3 criteria are met and you have budget after the 4 big jobs, then yes test the opportunity. Be robust with your testing though. If there is no return on your marketing investment in the opportunity, don’t spend money on that one again. Test the next one instead.