Social media marketing sites such as Groupon and Living Social are becoming very popular. Many small businesses are using these sites to drive traffic to their website. Given the high cost of using these services, mainly in ‘lost opportunity costs’, it is very important that small businesses, in particular, plan properly.

Unfortunately, social marketing services almost make it too easy. A fill in a few forms and it is done – just sit back and wait for the traffic. However, as with most things, a little planning before hand can greatly improve your selling experience.

However, the basics of all online marketing still apply. Whether you are using Pay Per Click or running social media marketing campaign you need do these four thing:

Create A Landing Page

Don’t send the traffic to your Home page and hope visitors will find the information they are looking for, create a new landing page targeted to the your advertising campaign. This is true for all online advertising, but is even more important with social media marketing campaigns. Each social media marketing site has a target demographic. Your new landing page needs to focus on that demographic.

Measure The Future

You are going to get a huge traffic spike at the beginning of your campaign. Very little percentage of that traffic will result in a sale. However, one other benefit of all that traffic is brand awareness. You need to be able to track how much of these visitors come back to your site.

Most analytics tools a have a method of ‘tagging’ a visitor to the website that will allow you to track if they come back to site in the future. If you are doing online sales this will allow you to give the credit for the sale to the marketing campaign.

Technical: While it is possible to do the ‘tagging’ based on the referring page, it is far simpler to just ‘tag’ visitors to the new landing page you created for this campaign.

Check Your Site

It is good a practice to continually check the state of your website.

Sites get hack!

There is nothing worse than going to all the trouble and cost of setting up a marketing campaign and finding that your now has a banner ad for buying Viagra online. It happens — more often that you might think.

However, the biggest problems are usually self induced.

• Is the information on your website correct?
• Have all the prices been updated?
• Is the contact information correct?
• Are there broken links or missing pages?
• Do you have the latest product images?

Prepare To Down Sell

Most online marketing campaigns target the high end of your product line. However, you may have similar products at a much lower price point. While you don’t want to feature them on the campaign’s landing page, they should be mentioned with a link to that page. Don’t rely on the site visitor to find them.

Contact us to find out how TIMR Web Services can help your business