£500 a month to spend on Marketing so what should do? [Archive]

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stacks

9th October 2009, 13:40

SFD

9th October 2009, 13:55

I'd start off with a PPC campaign.

I'd use the profit I made to increase the PPC budget then once you are spending the maximum possible on PPC then use the data and recurring profit from this to fund SEO.

fleurhicks

9th October 2009, 14:01

I'd suggest social media - it'll get you exposure and traction (though i would say that!)

But seriously, it has the highest ROIs within marketing at the moment...

directmarketingadvice

9th October 2009, 14:04

I run a Home Interiors/Furniture company under the website www.moseyonline.co.uk

I just moved the site to Magento and need to push the business ahead and get it more visible because I only get up to about 150 unique visitors a day at the moment and that needs to be more like 5000.

I was considering getting listed on Mydeco but are there any better alternatives that I should be considering? I only really want to start off spending about £500 a month and if that leads to a decent return I would up that spend.

So, ideas please people!

If you know your current conversion rate and your average priofit per sale, you can work out your average visitor value.

(average amount of money you make when someone comes to your site)

Then compare that to google estimates of click costs using Adwords. They tend to be wrong, but usually on the high side. So, if the cost per click is around the visitor value, it's worth trying Adwords.

Hope this helps,

Steve

PS Whatever you do, do something that'll bring back a response quickly. That way, you will be able to reinvest the profits.

Ali-v-8

9th October 2009, 14:08

speak to steve about adwords
not enough budget for anything else to be done professionally

flamingphoenix

9th October 2009, 14:27

As mentioned above, you need paid search more than anything else, it's a pull type of sale rather than say a leaflet drop which is a push. People will be actively searching for your specific products and in the mood to buy. Therefore, yep an Adwords professional is your best bet.

stacks

9th October 2009, 14:32

So Steve, what magic could you work with a whopping £500 in month one?

Your right though, I do need an instant benfeit and I'm more than prepared to reinvest the profits into months 2,3,4...

I've only dabbled in PPC with very little success so feel free to look at the site and then PM me and we might do some business.

speak to steve about adwords
not enough budget for anything else to be done professionally

VinceSamios

9th October 2009, 14:33

Spent every £ of that 500£ on adwords -if you can get a profitable adwords campaign, it becomes a cash machine the profits from which you can re-inject into other forms of marketing & SEO.

Adwords is "the laboratory"

Chris Ashdown

9th October 2009, 14:56

I would spend £600 on the first month on SEO with OLDWELSHGUY and then following months spend on adwords, with maybe a small amount of further seo.

With products like yours you either spend a fortune on obvious keywords on adwords or find keywords that are very specific that don't cost the earth maybe 10p-20p

There was also a guy on here yesterday offering SEO on selected keywords for £35 so worth a punt

Whatever you do do not get SEO from one of the firms that cold call you, 99% they are rip off agents

VinceSamios

9th October 2009, 14:59

offering SEO on selected keywords for £35 so worth a punt

Whatever you do do not get SEO from one of the firms that cold call you, 99% they are rip off agents

1) no chance in hell, no matter what the keyword, for £35.....

2) never a truer word spoken

stacks

9th October 2009, 15:10

Thats exactly what prompted me to put this post up in the first place. Got a call from someone promising me top 3 positions in the sponsored section of google for 5 keyword phrases.

These were - Oak Wardrobes, Oak Chest of Drawers, Oak Beds, French Furniture, Oak Dining Tables

I would be in the top 3 links for most of the month and might be on the right hand side links but always on the first page all day every day for all 5 of those phrases for £500. I think his name was Derren Brown!

I would spend £600 on the first month on SEO with OLDWELSHGUY and then following months spend on adwords, with maybe a small amount of further seo.

With products like yours you either spend a fortune on obvious keywords on adwords or find keywords that are very specific that don't cost the earth maybe 10p-20p

There was also a guy on here yesterday offering SEO on selected keywords for £35 so worth a punt

Whatever you do do not get SEO from one of the firms that cold call you, 99% they are rip off agents

VinceSamios

9th October 2009, 15:28

Thats exactly what prompted me to put this post up in the first place. Got a call from someone promising me top 3 positions in the sponsored section of google for 5 keyword phrases.

These are scams - they charge you £147/keyword, then they bid on those keywords, but they only have the budget set at £1 - so yes, at some point you get a top listing in the paid listings, but they earn £146 and your ad only ever gets 1-3 clicks....

SCAM!

I wouldn't do SEO first up - in the early days SEO is just a money pit. If you spent £500 on PPC but can't get it profitable, you might still get £400 back - you can then re-invest that £400 to try new things and try to get the campaign into profits.

Once you have a profitable PPC campaign, go for SEO

This definitely isn't my recommendation for every business - not every business can get profits from PPC quickly - your business is the type that potentially can.

directmarketingadvice

9th October 2009, 15:53

So Steve, what magic could you work with a whopping £500 in month one?

Pretty much nothing. Half of it would be hoovered up by my fee, for starters.

With that sort of budget, you're better of trying it yourself, finding out if it's profitable, then going with a decent sized budget with a PPC manager.

Steve

Eonic

9th October 2009, 16:11

Hi, First post here, I feel i can add a little to this.

I take on many small companies every month on a similar budget around £500 per month.

We normally undertake some of the following practices in months 1-3 depending on what they are looking to achieve.

- Establish the type of customer you're trying to attract
- Research that type of customer and work out where you feel they will be searching for your product.
- If on natural and paid search engines then devise a simple and short keyword list consisting of around 10-15 two/three word phrases.
- Onsite content - ensure you have pages of relevant content on the website that will lead the customer into a sensible flow of action and then ensure the text surrounding that has the words in from your keyphrase list. Dont spam it and make is customer friendly, see below:
- Onsite Page Optimisation - optimise your web pages by order of importance by Title Tags, On page content (ensuring your H tags are in order), you can find many guides from SEOMoz etc on how to do this effectively.
- Dont get hung up on META Desc & Keyword tags, these are required but in no way massively important, just make sure they are relevant and in there and focus on your Title, H1-H4 tags, this will give best return for your time invested.
- Naturally ensure you have some tracking such as google tracking.

Now, after a several weeks you'll be in one of a few situations:

1, Your getting top position listing and 1000's of visitors per day. Your making money hand over fist and then you start talking to an agency about affiliate advertising and so much more. Lets hope you can stop reading here ay!

2, Or, You are getting top position listings for your chosen keywords and its generating some but not enough traffic to make enough sales. You can either, expand your range of keywords, or if there is no more keywords possible you maybe at the limit of what natural search can give you (this does happen).

Therefore you could to look at paid search, banner advertising etc to go forward (more later).

3, Your not getting any where with top positions and struggling to obtain decent SERPS. I would then suggest looking at inbound link building. This is where another website puts a link on there site to you with rich anchor text based around your chose keywords.

This can be done by approaching websites that are in your industry/vertical and negotiating why they should put a link on there website to you! This can be hard but persevere and it will work, you have to buy them a pint or two! Now remeber paid link building is not a recommended practice of google and you must be careful not to spam. Links should be as natural as possible and be on related sites to be effective. The more inbound links the better your SERPS can perform.

You can also get links by posting in forums, other blogs, twitter, press releases (see PRWEB etc) and other social network commentary. It is effective and works well if thought through and controlled.

---

Once your happy you have an effective natural campaign started, in the mean time you should look at PPC, specifically Google Adwords.

With adwords you can spend an industrial budget very quickly, get a lot of visitors and get no return. If I had a penny for each comapny that comes to me and says "i cant get ppc to work for us" i would be richer than google itself!

You should treat it like any natural search campaign, do the research and target the same keywords as your natural, use the instant data from your ppc campaign to decide whether the natural keyword you are targeting is worth it, and if you have a natural keyword that is converting then you should utilise that knowledge and increase the ppc to get more converting visitors.

There is too much to go through with Adwords here today, but PM if you have questions about it. My advice is start small say £10 per day, then build each day based on the previous days data. Attend to it 1-2 times per day and actively make changes to learn what works. Adwords is not set and forget by any means.

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Some other suggestions for your budget are mainly going to be along the lines of PPC, Social Advertising such as FaceBook ad's and possible banner advertising. You can use Google Adwords to distribute your banner ads in the same way it does for text ads and apply the same rules above with that.

Press release distribution would be a good start for you, campaigns on PRWeb can start at £120, if you do these once/twice per month it can add real value to direct advertising to customers and your inbound link building, but make sure what you are talking about is newsworthy and something people want to read.

You could also look at voucher coding, this can be a great way to go, but normally reserved for the larger e-commerce sites with room to play with margins.

---

Think about having a news/article section on your site, where you write relevant articles about what you do and how you do it, make sure it has some of your keyphrases in, stick a couple of links in it to areas of your site and do this 3-4 times per week to enhance the content of your website.

If you need an example of a someone I know this works well for then checkout: capitalspace.co.uk/Latest+News

This is proven, simple and easy way to both engage customers and add good quality content to your site.

PS. Make sure its unique and dont steal other peoples content, your users wont like it nor will Google!

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Round up

At this budget you are fairly limited to natural seo and a little bit of PPC. We advise our clients to start with natural at this level and after 4-6 months they then move upto spending 1k-15k per month with us, this as you can imagine starts us engaging in the following for them:

- Affiliate advertising
- Banner advertising (large scale)
- Content Writing & Distribution
- Email Marketing
- and much more...

I recommend like I use everyday, reading and subscribing to resources like EConsultancy and SEOmoz to keep aware of new strategies and tactics etc.

Naturally these are just my opinions based on experience, I hope you find at least some of it useful. I apologise for the example link (not a plug honestly!!)

I could add some more here but it's Beer O'Clock! Take care.

Regards
Anthony

david64

9th October 2009, 16:15

£500 / month for 12 months is a decent budget for SEO, but as those point out in the thread, you are not going to get a quick return on that. In-depth keyword research, on-site changes and text for that site could easily be a month's full time work - £2,500 gone.

Furniture is a really profitable niche. I did some work on a similar site that had a mildly established site at £400 pm and they had to get a new warehouse to handle the increased orders. However you are a few hundred links away from being able to put yourself in a position to pay to get those sort of sales.

Scott-CopyandDesign

9th October 2009, 16:24

I'd agree with the folks who have said PPC; great place to start getting them targeted visitors in ASAP. Putting some to one side for SEO is also a very worthwhile investment, but you have to weigh up the long-term viability of such a campaign. There's some strong competition out there and you need to have resources to get to the top rankings, not just halfway there.

Doing the PPC yourself is worth a shot. I'm in the process of setting up a site to sell a 2-hour Adwords DVD video tutorial but it isn't up yet. There's plenty of free help out there though to get the basics pinned down.

eventdomain

9th October 2009, 18:35

campaigns on PRWeb can start at £120, if you do these once/twice per month it can add real value to direct advertising to customers and your inbound link building,

As someone that has appeared in the media (the proper media that is), cheap press database sites DO NOT work. Journalists are busy people, and don't have time or the inclination to visit these press release databases - you will never be found by these.

Instead, hire a proper Press Agent to do a phone call blitz to the category of media, as this works brilliantly and you'll get results this way provided your business story is newsworthy. But not all businesses get massive press like the Million dollar homepage, so keep this is mind. You can blow a ton of cash if you don't know what your doing, and PR websites are one of the ways to lose your cash quickly.

SEO is probably the best idea for long term. But don't pay over £1000 for it.

Social bookmarks are great for building links, but not for sales. Most people on facebook etc are little kids/teenagers, and aren't buyers of furniture - well think about that one, no job, no house/business, what do they need furniture for, they live at home right :rolleyes: so pointless going where the customers are children.....

PPC IS a good idea, but takes a bit of practice to get right. Like most things webby, if you can do it yourself as you can burn a lot of cash on PPC services and SEO, Copywriters etc - have been there, and now do everything myself as much as I can. Might not get amazing results, but the results work and I don't blow thousands into the bargain.

PPC is easy, as its a numbers game, like sales - it's all about numbers and not magic. The more people you get infront of, the more you get seen, bookmarked, and the more sales you make.

Lets take a look at how each is done well:

SEO

For this you need:

Keyword tool - Use Overture's for this.

You want to pick 10 keywords, and each keyword is placed into tool, where tool gives you list of top 50 (or whatever) where you select the ones with high clickthroughs each one generates. You give these to a web designer, who puts them into your website, along with title tags and meta descriptions.

Copywriting

No need for this, as any salesman knows it's about the benefits - so list them and what makes you stand out. Don't use the sad 'emotion' or panic tactic, it's cringeworthy trust me.

Just list what you do and what the customer gets for their spend. If your offering is good, you'll get sales. If what you do is different, then list that as a benefit.

Simples. hmmm, I wonder why that TV advert makes people repeat that word so much ;);););)

PPC

There's a mountain of info on this, and its not that difficult to create a few adverts..This can be done at low cost - every single time. Suggest you use 2nd tier keywords and not the most popular ones, unless you like paying £2.00 a click :eek:

sirearl

9th October 2009, 19:49

I run a Home Interiors/Furniture company under the website www.moseyonline.co.uk (http://www.moseyonline.co.uk)

I just moved the site to Magento and need to push the business ahead and get it more visible because I only get up to about 150 unique visitors a day at the moment and that needs to be more like 5000.

I was considering getting listed on Mydeco but are there any better alternatives that I should be considering? I only really want to start off spending about £500 a month and if that leads to a decent return I would up that spend.

So, ideas please people!

First question how are your sales now.?

2nd have you researched demand for your products.?

3rd have you researched competition.?

Earl

stacks

11th October 2009, 13:05

Scott-CopyandDesign

11th October 2009, 13:17

1. Sales right now are no where near good enough with about a 1% conversion rate, which based on 100-150 visitors a day is not breaking the bank but I can see that more traffic will help because the profit margin per sale is quite healthy. I also need to work on upping that conversion rate at the same time.

For that you're going to need a copywriter and someone who can optimise sales conversion rates. There's a surprisingly large number of tiny changes which influences the number of sales you'll get out of your traffic. Also of course, the quality of the traffic plays just as important a factor. You won't convert visitors into buyers who aren't remotely interested no matter how hard you try.

1% is decent, but there will be room for improvement. When I look at the site there's a lack of focus and a lack of funnelling the visitors to where you want them to go. There's some large design issues which may cause visitors to accidental skim over very important parts of your site, and there's no compelling copy on the front page which tells the visitor what you sell, why it's so good and why they should buy from you.

The copy on the product category pages are a good attempt, but they won't compel anyone very well.

Basically, the site has to be mildly re-structured and re-focused so it grabs the attention of visitors, leads them where they want to go and makes your furniture too good to resist.

WPsites

12th October 2009, 11:17

You can do quite a bit of this internet marketing stuff your self but for the best/quickest results I'd hire someone who knows what they are doing. Preferably someone who can sort out your conversion rate, pay per click and search engine optimisation

I would definitely get a PPC campaign underway first. That way you can trial various search terms and work out which ones are profitable. Then you know where to target your SEO efforts.

After the PPC campaign has been running for a month or so split your monthly marketing budget 50/50 between SEO and PPC.

I would be willing to take on such a project.

Setup a £500 PPC campaign and run it for a month. Then split your budget between PPC and SEO. £250 per month for SEO and conversion rate optimisation should be enough to get things off the ground and show an improvement month after month. The more you invest in SEO, the more can be done in terms of building your websites link profile and optimising your website.

PM me if you'd like to talk about this further.