Generating Quality Leads Online Isn’t Easy, But It Can Be Done - Just Ask Pontiac.
Written by Jackie ODowd (contact - e-mail) -- April 28th, 2008 | Recommend ThisI’m still gloating about winning my March Madness pool – Rock Chalk Jayhawk! Yes, I was glued to the TV during all games… yet, I can’t remember one single ad that aired. It’s sad for marketers really, if I was in fact who they were trying to reach; a college sports enthusiast! Which got me wondering… How much is typically spent on advertising during March Madness?
TV Ad sales projected by TNS were to be around $545 million. “As a sports marketing event, the collegiate basketball tournament is part of a Final Four alongside the Super Bowl and the Summer and Winter Olympics,” said Jon Swallen, SVP of research at TNS Media Intelligence.
And who are the biggest spenders? Well, apparently General Motors has consistently been the top TV advertiser in the tournament, spending an average of $70 million annually during the past five years. So what did GM get for the money?
Using Compete’s Search Analytics Select we created a segment of people called “college sports enthusiasts”. We found that referrals from search engines (MSN, Yahoo!, Google) to Pontiac.com and Chevrolet.com for this segment did increased significantly in March…
Good. The advertising worked… sort of. Increased traffic to Pontiac and Chevrolet doesn’t necessarily mean that it was worth it for GM to spend all those millions - unless of course the quality of the traffic generated was somehow better than before.
Looking at how involved those college sports enthusiasts were on Pontiac and Chevrolet indicates that visitors to both sites were considered more ‘engaged’ in March. Engagement is defined as: use of one of the following tools - Locate a Dealer, Build Your Own, Request a Quote, or Payment Estimator. That being said, conversion, on both Pontiac and Chevrolet’s sites not only reached 13-month highs in March but also outpaced other manufacturers like Dodge, Ford, and Jeep.
What does all of this mean for GM? Well, it seems like the advertising did a good job of attracting people to these two sites. And the quality of the people visiting the sites was better than usual. All’s good, right? Well, for Pontiac at least.
According to Autodata, Pontiac sales were up 6% in March but Chevrolet sales were down 1%. Chevy’s decline was driven by the truck segment, which is being hurt by high gas prices, so there’s more of a story there, but enough for now….
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April 28th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Some people say that advertising is everything!
Regardless if you have a product, a service, a hobby website or just want to share pictures of your wedding, you have to advertise somehow to get the traffic to your site or blog.
But not all traffic is equal. There are services that can help you drive tons and tons of traffic to your site and it won’t do you any good at all because it’s not targeted traffic.
Take for example all of the many different ’surf for traffic’ or ‘traffic clicking’ programs that are out there. If you have a website that is about your hobby, say model airplanes, then what good is this traffic really going to do you? Who’s using these services?
Webmasters and marketers that want traffic on their own site.
So they most likely won’t spend any more time on your page than is required by the little timer these services use and then they are gone again. Even if your site is about these traffic services (this is about the only time you will see very much benefit from using such a tool) you will still have to spend a ton of time just surfing and clicking around to get a real benefit from these programs. Once marketers realized this they switched gears. They started promoting all the different programs to a lot of other marketers to get them in their downlines, so they could get some traffic as a bonus. This became their new focus. The problem is that everyone else did exactly the same thing, so not a lot of people were surfing the internet anymore.
Bottom-line is this. You need targeted traffic. So here are some tips on how you can generate exactly the traffic you need and bring the visitors you want to your website without having to chase after them.
1. Content
What is your website about? Do you just have a page with a lot of links and not much else?
If this is the case, think about adding some content to your website that will be of value to any potential visitors. You could write articles or find articles at one of the many directories that you can reprint on your site.
2. Talk about your experiences in your subject matter.
You don’t have to put up some kind of resume (although that can work too), but rather try writing about what you are doing, as it relates to your topic of choice. Let’s look at the model airplanes again briefly, you could talk or write about the latest plane type you built, how the last time flying your plane went, what challenges you run into or perhaps even post some pictures of your plane or of you flying it.
3. Forums and bulletin boards.
You could add a forum or bulletin board to your website where your visitors can interact with each other. There are a lot of free services available out there that you can use to either remotely host a forum for you, or even software you can install on your website’s server. To find some of these, just head over to your favorite search engine and you will definitely find plenty to choose from.
And while you are visiting the search engine, why not run a search for any bulletin boards and forums that are already out there for your chosen topic? You could visit those and interact with the visitors there and since many allow you to post a signature or a profile, you could add a little line about your own site with a link (just check the rules of the forum first so you don’t violate any of them).
4. Start a blog.
Blogs are very popular and search engines love them because they provide constantly new and fresh content. Your blog would be a great place to talk about what you are up to that day.
So if you spent some time today buying new parts for your plane you could write about where you found them, how much they cost you, why you chose those parts, anything really goes.
The really great part about this is that you can point links from your blog back to your website, so when the search engine stops by to grab and index your latest content, it will also stop by your website and you will start seeing very targeted traffic heading your way.
5. Write articles.
Writing articles isn’t hard and can be a great source of fresh, new traffic to your website. There are a lot of ezines on any topic out there and there are also a lot of directories where you can share your article.
Basically, what you do is write an article and then add a small resource box that links back to your website (just like a signature) and then let other ezine publishers know that you are allowing them to print your article in their ezine. And many publishers go to the article directories to find new content for their newsletter and even their websites. And since there are websites and ezine newsletters on any imaginable topic out there, you can’t lose. Write an article every couple of days and post it in the directories (even one a week or every two weeks will start getting you traffic). Very soon you will find new traffic coming from search engines, newsletters and websites.
Best of all, these 5 simple tips will bring targeted traffic, meaning the visitors are coming to you because they are interested in what you wrote.
So there you have it, 5 easy and simple ways to advertise and drive traffic to your website at absolutely no cost.
More FREE Information please go to http://www.2designawebsite.com.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Final 4 Online Advertising
If you watched the final 4 basketball tournament you would have seen 545 million dollars worth of ads that corporations spent to try to sway your attention from hoops.
If you are Chevrolet, you spent approximately $70 million to generate interest and …
April 29th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
oh that’s the great dark secret, the elephant in the room… NOBODY can remember any ad from march madness or from whenever…. but don’t tell anybody, industries would collapse
April 29th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
and sunni, go eat a goat or something
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:25 pm
targeted website traffic
Hello,
May 29th, 2008 at 10:17 am
That’s for B2C, but the same applies in B2B.
Lots of traffic and no registration.
Identify your website visitors by company name in B2B using a web service. Then qualify them as leads by the pages visited, time on pages and returning visitors.