Economic crisis: Paying for effective marketing only

Source: Internet
Author: User
Keywords Pay effective marketing
Tags business click company economic economic crisis economy forced google
The tough situation has forced an online retailer to revamp its marketing plan.  Dictation: James Bullock: Malika zouhali-worrall Translator: Sophomore (Fortune Sgt Business)--in May 2008, I almost collapsed--not without a reason. 5 months ago, I invested heavily in inventory for my company, toyrocket.com--, an online toy retailer. I also signed a new warehouse lease for a period of 5 years. Then the economy suddenly slipped. Sales on our own sites plummeted, as did Amazon and ebay. I felt I couldn't cut enough to keep the company that had been in existence for 7 years.  It looks like my wife and I will have to declare bankruptcy and lose our house in the process (some of our debts are guaranteed by individuals). So I negotiated a payment proposal with our suppliers to buy time, which gave me a breather until the end of the year. I also studied our expenses. Employee pay is one of our biggest expenses, but our employees are mostly friends, so there is no chance of layoffs.  So I studied our second biggest cost: marketing-the discovery of serious waste. First, we also pay for Pay-per-click Advertising (pay-per-click) marketing on search engines and shopping comparison sites. Search engines like Google AdWords Click paid ads to ask us to specify words or phrases, such as the "Incredible Hulk," which will make our ads appear in search results. Then we enter the maximum amount that we would like to pay for each click. I soon discovered that shopping sites were also bidding on Google and Yahoo, which meant that our ads appeared in web searches through their websites.  We spent two dollars on the same thing.  I also learned that those who bought our Pay-per-view via online ads brought us 65% of the business, but they were less likely to come back to our customers than those who had found us in the organic search-the main part of Google or Yahoo's search results. We have to change our marketing strategy. First, I removed all of the company's products from the shopping comparison site, which reduced the monthly marketing cost by 6000 dollars. Subsequently, I cut the search engine marketing budget, and instead worked to attract more loyal customers through organic search.  To my horror, toyrocket.com failed to appear on the first three or four pages of organic search results when I entered the name of our best-selling toy in a search engine. With the help of our IT manager, I started to reinvent the company web site. New content attracts the attention of search engines. So we created a sitemap--a map that included all of our pages--through which we could generate a name XML (extensible MarkuP language, Extensible Markup Language-a concise content log of the feed. We point the search engine to the feed so they can scan it once a week and record any new products on our site.  We have also added a website feature that would like to offer advice to shoppers as they browse our site, we also offer coupons and generate regular email updates announcing recent promotions. These changes took months to effect, but by the time of the holiday, our organic search rankings were significantly ahead of schedule. This has greatly stimulated our website's sales growth in November 2008 and December, up 25% from the same period in 2007, to about $400,000 trillion – while reducing the 30% per cent of paid online advertising. We have never seen so much growth without increasing pay-per-click AD Marketing inputs.  Still, we expect 2009 revenue to be flat as we have lower sales on Amazon and ebay. I paid all the suppliers ' money. More to my delight, I have learned my lesson. When the business is good, I have no research effect on the Internet marketing to smash money. The grim economic situation has forced me to do what I should have done long ago: to spend every dollar as the last dollar.
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