Beggars can be Choosers? »
Posted on January 29th, 2007 by Justin Seibert in Online Marketing | Leave A Comment

One of the great pleasures I had while working in Santa Monica was taking my lunch out to the cliffs overlooking the beach everyday (for the one month I took a lunch). Being broke and cheap and viewing the purpose of lunch as sustenance rather than an endorphin releasing activity, I took my lunch with me. At times, I would just take the amino acids – they said they were the building blocks in high school biology, right? – of lunch and make it on the park bench.

If you’ve ever been to Santa Monica, two of the first things you would have noticed are the incredible weather and the amount of homeless people. Had I no place to stay, I’d go where it was warm and they had good food lines, too.

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TAGS: contest, free consultation

Go Back, Baby. Momma Needs Drugs »
Posted on January 3rd, 2007 by Justin Seibert in Online Marketing, SEM | Leave A Comment

I was reviewing my blog posts recently and saw how often I mention something about my kids. I laughed thinking about how different this blog would look were Justin at age 25 - he who dressed in a poor man’s gerbil outfit and rolled around OU’s block party scene in a giant ball one Halloween night - writing it.

So in honor of Young Justin, I won’t discuss my youngin’s at all in this post. Instead, I’ll discuss Torri Roger’s latest edition to the family.

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TAGS: conversion rates, free consultation, landing pages, SEM

Wasted Marketing & Advertising Dollars »
Posted on November 13th, 2006 by Justin Seibert in Online Advertising, Online Marketing | Leave A Comment

Man I hate me some wasted advertising dollars. Like last night for example. My wife and I were discussing how disappointed we are with our cable television service and how we want to switch. I swear to you not ten minutes later we received a call with “good news” that some company is “installing satellite dishes in [my] area”.

So even though I was spending my once per weekday, very limited time with my kids before they went to bed, I decided to hold on the line for a sales rep. By the way, as much as everyone hates cold call telemarketing, this is the exact reason it’s still done - because it works.

I hang on the line for about a half minute and then hung up. The reps deal with people yelling at them all day/night long and the predictive dialer finally gets an interested party (me) on the line that’s late in the buying cycle and they can’t get anyone on the line to speak with me. Worse, I didn’t even get a call back a couple minutes later from a system that should have known it lost someone who wanted to hear more.

Unfortunately, wasting money on advertising is all too common. A lot of times it occurs because the business owner or marketing manager is swamped and doesn’t have the tools in front of him or her to know what’s working or not working. I meet with a lot of decision makers that can’t tell me whether various aspects of their advertising are breaking even with them.

For example, a lot of business owners will point to online usage statistics like visits and visitors - that they may or may not understand - as a way to measure how effectively their online presence is performing for them.

While those metrics are useful, it’s even better to look at what efforts are having a direct, measurable effect on your sales and lead flows. Many businesses, even ones that take traditional branding approaches, can utilize direct marketing techniques to look at just a few simple numbers (cost, leads from source, new sales from source, total sales from source, net profit from source) and know what’s working for them.

ROI, or Return on Investment, should be easy for decision makers to point to. If you don’t know exactly how effective your marketing efforts are and whether you’re actually making any money from using them, you need to do some research. Then give us a call at 1-800-979-3177 or request a free online marketing consultation to learn if and how we can make money for you.

 

End Note: If you read the description on
If I had more room,
“except for when they beat Tennessee”, which they did last

UT is on a losing streak to Vanderbilt in football and even if by
Now we just have to get McFadden in a Dores uniform.

TAGS: free consultation, roi