Chapter 2: The Air Intake

Pulling People In

Learning objectives:
1. Understand the numbers game of web marketing.
2. Learn at a high level the many ways of reaching potential
customers on the web.

Without People, Your Engine Stops.

In the jet engine analogy, human beings are like the air particles floating around in the atmosphere around the airplane. There are a lot of them, more than your web engine could ever suck in, and that’s a good thing for you!

Web marketing is essentially a numbers game. You will design your web engine to suck a certain amount of people in, and those people make the engine work. Without a constant flow of people to your website, it doesn't matter if you have the richest jet fuel (expert content) in the world. You won't be going anywhere.

As a business owner, you know your business metrics. In web marketing, there is really only a single metric that you need to think about, at least at a high level. That metric is the conversion rate. The conversion rate is a measure of people that go from simply visiting your website to responding to a call to action on your website.

The whole point of your web engine is to get people to do something:
Make a phone call.
Send an email.
Give you their email address.
Sign up for a service.
Buy Something.

These are all responses to calls to action. When you set up a call to action on your site, some people will perform that action, but it’s likely that the majority will not.

**The conversion rate is the number of people who perform a target action divided by the number of people who visited the site. **

It is a measure of how well you can get people to 'convert' from simply being passive visitors on your site to active visitors who are willing to take their relationship with your business a step further.

The Numbers Game

So, how does the conversion rate help you?

If you know that your conversion rate is, say, 0.5% and you have a financial goal for how many customers or purchases you need to make a certain amount of money, you can calculate how many people you will need to visit the site in a given window of time in order to achieve your goals.

Let’s look at an example with some real numbers.

Say we have a product we are selling, and we make $10 profit for every one that we sell. We have a goal to make $50,000 per year from selling that product and we know that we convert, on average, 0.5% of people who visit the site into purchasers.

$50,000/$10 = 5,000 purchases

This is the number of purchases necessary to achieve our goal. If we convert at 0.5%, we can find out how many total visitors we will need over the year.

5,000/0.5% = 1,000,000.

1,000,000 visitors are needed in one year, so each month we should aim for a little over 83,000 visitors. Knowing this number is essential because getting people to your website is where the majority of your marketing costs will be. This allows us to budget based on how many people we need to attract.

If you are intimidated by the large number of visitors that you may need, realize a couple of things:

The web is an incredibly rich atmosphere for finding visitors. An audience of 1M people is actually pretty common to achieve these days.The conversion rate is essential for your profit margins. If you can increase the conversion rate, you can pay less in advertising to get the same number of purchases. This increases your profits.

The math is pretty simple. The tricky part is getting the conversion rate where you need it to be.

One effective strategy is to lessen the gap between people who visit the site and your ideal demographic. Put another way, the more people who visit your site who are already likely to be interested in your product or offerings, the higher your conversion rate will be. This comes down to knowing your demographic and being able to effectively suck them into your web engine.

Tools of the Trade

Some people use billboards, bus stop benches, print media, etc. to promote their websites. This is only useful if your target demographic is hard to find online and you are trying to get them to your website.

Think about online advertising the way you think about billboards. It drives people to your website, but online advertising is much less expensive and allows you to reach a large audience. In addition, billboards advertise to everyone who passes, regardless of their interest in your product.

With online advertising tactics, you can instead target your specific demographic and be much more efficient with your capital.

Let's talk about a couple of specific digital marketing strategies that can be used to get traffic – the right kind of traffic – to your website. These tactics should fit in to your overall marketing strategy, targeting the people that you want to reach.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Think about the last time you used the web. Where did you start? Probably a search engine, and more than likely it was Google. Most of your potential customers will start there. SEO is all about setting up your website in a way that is most accessible to search engines so that your website shows up appropriately in the search results.

This is known as showing up “organically”. When someone searches for 'Dog Goggles', your website with articles on how to put goggles on your dog will be found in the search results. If you have set up your site correctly, and have unique related content, it can show up on the first page, which is essential. Most people do not read beyond the first page. And if you are wondering if Dog Goggles are a thing, they sure are.

You still, however, have to play by Google's SEO rules, which are subject to change at any time, for any reason. It's not a static game. You could invest 1,000's of dollars into tweaking your SEO strategies, and many people do, but then the rules change the next day and your investment is gone.

That said, there are some simple SEO tactics that are a breeze to implement on any website and will get you 80-90% of the way to an SEO strategy that will work for the long term. These are things that we, at Hyperion, build right into every website automatically.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Another strategy is to simply pay to be put in the search results, and to show up on relevant websites. This is called Pay Per Click (or PPC). Instead of showing up in search results organically, you can pay for your advertisements to show up everywhere that Google exists.

This is called the Google Display Network and includes YouTube. When you pay to have ads on the Google Display Network, or GDN, you are leveraging an incredibly powerful ad system. It takes some work to do it correctly, but this is the equivalent of putting billboards in front of all the right people all over the world for pennies on the dollar.

PPC starts with identifying key words that people use to find what you offer – both those that are obvious, and those that are not. For example, ‘dog goggles’ is an obvious key word, also called a short tail keyword. ‘How to protect my dog’s eyes from the sun’ is less obvious and called a long tail keyword. At Hyperion, we can help you to identify the most effective short and long tail key words, and to use them advantageously.

Tip – The most common key words are the most expensive for PPC. Long tail keywords can be a better value and bring a higher conversion rate. Both, however, should be utilized.

Social Media

Another way to pull people in is to engage with them on social media. This takes work! You have to constantly post and engage people in conversation, which takes a team of dedicated people, and if you are like me, you may not find social media that appealing personally. It's certainly its own animal.

Just like with PPC on Google, however, most social networks have PPC available and this lets you leverage a demographic that may be on a certain platform without having to have an active social media engagement strategy. You can simply pay to have your ads appear on the social media networks. You have to choose the right networks to do this on, based on where your target customers spend their time.

To get maximum social media results, you should do engagement campaigns, and social media PPC.

Tip: Use PPC on Social Media as an alternative to running complex social media campaigns. For maximum results, do both!

Conclusion

These tactics are designed to pull people into your web engine. They are the big players, accounting for 95% of all online digital marketing, or as we call it, ‘people pulling’. In the next section, we will talk about what people find when they get to your website, and how and why it matters.

One part of this is Content Strategy – what information does your website offer? At Hyperion, we prefer to implement an Expert Content Strategy as the foundation for bringing customers into your engine. This is what we refer to as 'Jet Fuel' and is so critical to your long-term success that we have a whole section coming up to talk about Expert Content Strategy. For now, though, let’s talk about what happens once we pull people in - we have to impress them!