I operate an ecommerce site that specializes in business presentation materials (e.g. PowerPoint templates, diagrams, charts) and business strategy documents (e.g. business frameworks, business templates, financial models). All the products are digital.
Currently, I am relying almost entirely on organic search traffic. Through this, my monthly sales have increased fairly steadily month-over-month – except for the past couple months. In fact, sales this month has been rather dreadful (compared to my expected sales).
I am now looking for more direct online marketing methods - i.e. advertisements on targeted sites. I’m finding most relevant sites are big name sites (e.g. Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, Booz & Co’s Strategy+Business), which aren’t economical for me. These sites seem to cater more to brand advertisers, whereas I am looking to make an immediate return. I figure I need about a $0.30 CPC to turn a profit. Is this rate not realistic anymore?
In the past, I’ve also tried AdSense, LinkedIn, Facebook, and BusinessWeek’s self-service advertising solutions.
My ideal customer base is mid-management to executives at large companies.
Looking for suggestions on how best to market a site like mine. Would appreciate specific suggestions (e.g. advertise on site X).
Before you spend a dime I’d encourage you to take a look at your competition and try to reverse evaluate them. I say this because it’s critical in understanding the market barriers you’ll be playing in – $0.30 isn’t an unreasonable for search in general but is on the low side for b2b. The reason is often your model… if you sell one product, one time and your competition sells multiple times, they’ll keep you out of the game. The great misnomer of direct marketing is that it can all be about immediate returns; the truth is it’s about immediate sales but works best when you can keep/ bring back a customer to get a higher life time value.
With that said, your audience sounds pretty straight forward to reach.
They’re searching for terms related to your business when they want that service. This is the immediate terms to push competitively on.
They’re searching similar terms when they’re not quite sure what they want. That’s the broader terms to associate around.
They’re on linkedin from time to time looking at connections and idea to inform/ drive over to your site through careful demo targeting.
They may be in select review sites, communities or other smaller sites looking at information on your sort of services. Those are the new sites you need to identify out.
Once you startup your campaigns it’s really going to be a matter of testing. Do different market segments convert at different rates? By traffic source? By offer? By landing page?
In organic search the same principles apply but since the traffic is free we don’t tend to optimize the details that much and it’s hard to control flow to even try. With paid efforts it really is about checking what works and removing assumptions that a demographic is your target until you see that they really are [perhaps the entire group is a good fit but only one slice is ready to buy quickly].
Also consider your long term strategy… an immediate sale may not make sense but you may be able to get a lot of leads [emails / contact profiles] to keep marketing too, or get engagement with a free starter trial to upsell from. Alternatives can be a good way to boost conversion and not scare off the audiance letting you bring them in over time.