This article is courtesy of Golden Financial Services in-house marketing team. 

When used wisely, small business loans create an excellent opportunity to establish or bolster your business-marketing platform.  Following the guidelines below will help your investment turn to profit through our proven and effective marketing plan.  As a special bonus, we have provided expert AdWords and PPC tips and resources at the bottom of this article for your business readership. 

To finance your marketing operation, you may want to obtain a small business loan through Golden Financial Services.  If you already have enough capital to fund your marketing then you should focus on implementing a comprehensive marketing strategy. 

You need to know what aspects of marketing you will be funding. Some companies have success with direct mail, newspaper, radio, and television advertising.  However, this blog post will outline a proven online marketing strategy that has proven to yield a very high return on small business investments. 

Don’t Use All Your Marketing Dollars in One Area.

–  Develop compelling and properly optimized content on your key website pages, your blog, and through guest posting.  You can hire writers and copy editors to work for you in-house, or you can outsource to a reputable online marketing company.  Your pages must be properly optimized for the keywords that are relevant to your industry and that have high search volume.  You can use the Google Keyword Tool to find the right keywords for your pages here.

This will produce free organic traffic over the long term, which leads to sales.  This must be incorporated into your marketing strategy.  We discuss this in detail below, and we will provide you with the key resources to do this.

–  Don’t Forget Social Media and Building a Community

Building a social media community allows you to share all of your products and services content.  Additionally, if your pages are properly optimized for high search volume keywords, then you will gain online traffic and benefit from organic sales.  Furthermore, spreading your funds to enhance multiple aspects of your marketing campaign tends to yield the highest return on marketing investment.  SEO Moz published an excellent page on building an online community here. 

–  PPC Advertising – This Option Provides You With an Immediate Return on Investment.

A business operating without PPC advertising incorporated into their overall marketing plan would be missing out big.  Just take one look at the Adwords Infographic below, and you will realize that Adwords and PPC advertisements are absolutely dominating the Internet!  However, with one mistake you can waste your entire budget or business loan on a few ads in this advertising arena.  Ultimately, do your homework first or hire a professional company to begin advertising here without worry.

Setting Up Your Online Marketing Platform and Basic Search Engine Optimization Tips

This area of marketing focusses on generating sales over the long term and is the most cost effective.

The goal is to generate organic traffic by optimizing your company’s key pages to come up in the search results.  To do this you need to hire content marketers or create your own in-house marketing team. 

Alternatively, you can choose both options and simply split your budget as necessary.

Golden Financial Services recently wrote a comprehensive summary for beginners to online marketing geared towards company growth.  This summary was tailored for our partner debt relief offices, but it can be used for virtually all business owners.  

Start reading where it says “We’re about to talk about REAL MARKETING”.  Here is the step by step guide for setting up a successful Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing Campaign including the best lead acquisition practices for 2013.

An Online Marketing Team

Your ultimate goal should be to build an in-house marketing team because this will be more cost efficient over the long-term.  Additionally, when you have your own in-house marketing team they will be right there in your office interacting with your other employees and sales agents on a daily basis.  This promotes a team-oriented atmosphere and leads to better sales and services results. 

For a brief word of caution, be very careful not to hire any random search engine optimization (SEO) company that you find online.  First, check the company out with the Better Business Bureau.  Make sure they have been in business a long time and they have a high rating.

Hiring a reputable SEO company allows you to also receive consulting from them.  Let the company know up-front that you are also working to develop your own in-house team and that part of what you are hiring them for is to consult your in-house employees.  

There are also local colleges that offer online marketing or search engine optimization classes.  Send a few of your employees to school.  These classes are usually only 3 days long and are well worth it.

With the added power of an in-house marketing team, SEO capability, diverse marketing strategy, and a Golden Financial Services small business loan as required, you can build a lead generating, sale producing machine!

Assuming you meet the qualification requirements for a business loan,

we can definitely approve you for one. 

However, we are ultimately here to help your business thrive with or without a loan. 

If you borrow money, we want to see you make money.

We have seen companies in the past borrow money for marketing and then waste it all on buying leads from less-than-reputable lead vendors that they find online. 

As a business owner, if you are developing your own in-house marketing teams then I strongly recommend you have them sign up at the SEO Moz Website or blog.  This invaluable resource is home to top industry experts that write educational marketing blog posts and release videos that include cutting edge SEO techniques for free!

Visiting this website on a regular basis is comparable to going to college for on-line marketing.  It is an amazing resource to those of us looking to grow over the long term with online marketing, and it is a free resource!

Use a Portion of Your Small Business Loan to pay for AdWords

The AdWords Infographic

Implementing AdWords into your marketing strategy will produce an immediate return on your investment, leads and sales.  

Here are a Few Tips for You to Follow When Setting Up Your PPC / Adwords Campaign:

• Once you set up your AdWords account, call the AdWords customer service and get free advice.  They help newbie AdWord users with getting started.   They have an amazing support team.
• To become a Google AdWords employee you must pass testing.  Potential Google employees are given access to a training library that teaches them everything they need to know about AdWords in order to pass the test.
• You can have access to that same library!  I recommend you going there before you spend any money on AdWords.  Here is the Google AdWords Training Library. 
  
• Select your keywords carefully using the keyword tool here.  For each ad group try to include keywords that are also on the landing pages that your ads are attached to. 
• Every few weeks look at the “Keyword Details Search Terms All Report”.  Find the keywords that are converting, add new keywords to your ad groups, and update your negative keyword list to help prevent irrelevant ad clicks. 

• Look at your competitor’s ads by doing a simple search on Google.  Now view the top search results and make your own similar ads.  For each ad group, test three to five ads and find out which ones are performing best.  Then constantly tweak your ads to improve their online performance.

• Start with a small budget for your campaigns to set a healthy and sustainable rate of expansion. 

• Begin with broad keywords in your ad groups.  This will allow you to find golden keywords that will be your moneymakers in the future.  As time passes, draw conclusions from testing identify and fine-tune your key words and phrases that dominate your ad groups.  This will ensure you have the highest volume of quality leads flowing in. 

• Keep each ad group relatively small; your goal is to have fewer than 10 keywords for each ad group.  Try to test about 5-10 ad groups and landing pages together. 

• Keep a close eye on your quality scores.  With higher quality scores, you end up paying less money per clicks, so if Google says something, then listen up!

• Set up your conversion tracking code under the tools and analysis section of your AdWords account.  I also recommend using Google Analytics to track your AdWords performance.  Don’t rely on just one tracking mechanism.  Utilize Google Analytics and Conversion Tracking that AdWords provides you.  Google Analytics also allows you to study and compare your organic vs. paid advertising.  To increase your marketing department efficiency, analyze all aspects of marketing, specifically paid, vs. non-paid marketing.

• Keep a close eye on your landing page experience, your ads, and your keywords.  Making little changes to your landing page and comparing one landing page to another can make a world of difference.  Don’t settle on mediocre performance.  Continue working to improve, test, improve, test, improve, test, etc…  

• Look at your ads and test different description lines.  Sometimes changing one or two little words can make a BIG difference. 

• Add appropriate site links.  Do not add site links to your ads that are irrelevant to the landing page.  The wrong site links can hurt your campaign performance.  Add site links to landing pages that will convert as well as your main URL connected to your ad.  The last thing that you want is for a potential customer to click on a site link that you have connected to your ad that takes them to a page on your website with a high bounce rate.  They will bounce and you will lose the lead!

• Here are some advanced AdWords tips to help boost your click through rate that I found in an article the other day. 

• 

  Do you want your company to show up in the search results with a review snippet?

Having a review snippet that shows up in the search results for regular AdWords Ads improves click through rate.   Here is the list of review sites that will lead to your AdWords Ads showing up in the search results with the review snippet like seen above.  There are probably other review sites that we don’t know about, but these have been tested to work.

1.  Resellerratings.com

2.  Epinions.com

3.  Ekomi-us.com

4.  Trustpilot.com

5.  Pricegrabber.com

Review sites like Google Places or Yelp will not lead to your regular AdWords Ads showing up with this snippet.  

Your company must also have a certain number of reviews for this to work.

Ultimately, your business marketing dreams are literally at your fingertips.  If financing is an issue, we can help you obtain a small business loan and take advantage of today’s ultra-low rates.  It is up to you to seize the financing and modern technology opportunities in front of you and make your business dreams a reality.

by