In fact, we often spend much of our time and effort developing marketing campaigns that reduce the number of sales and leads. This is usually because many of our clients have an overload of untargeted leads that just waste call centre time without turning into sales, or are inundated with large numbers of sales that generate low profit margins or low output to input ratios.

This is why we spend so much time advising our clients not only about what works but ascertaining what efforts will generate the maximum return on investment.

Listed below are a few of the common marketing objectives that are worth considering before embarking on a spending spree.

 As much as possible 

For companies with large call centre capabilities and large marketing/advertising budgets, the objective of generating as many sales and leads as possible is definitely an option. In this case we tend to develop keyword strategies to generate somewhat less targeted and more expensive traffic. We find that Level-1 and Level-2 keywords tend to deliver excellent results.

 More Sales/Leads at the same cost  

Often, when we take over a search based or generic online advertising campaign from another agency (especially one that charges the client a spend commission) we spend our time developing strategies that deliver the same number of sales/leads but at a much lower price. This is easily achieved by shifting our keyword research emphasis to the more targeted Level-2 and Level-3 groupings. 

Higher Profits

Some companies who come to us find themselves drowning in low quality leads or sales from the low end of their product range and our job is then to target a different kind of market that will deliver a better quality sale/lead. Our strategy is often to research more targeted keywords, to define new niche markets and product niches and then to focus our attention on reworking all the client PPC and SEO creatives (titles and descriptions) and then augment this with a rewrite of any relevant site copy to reflect the needs of the more targeted and niche approaches and to keep the message consistent.

A Small Number of Good Sales/Leads

For clients with highly specialised or high cost products and services, usually targeted to the EMEA, enterprise, industrial, or commercial markets, where the lead time and investment from an expression of interest to sale is high, the objective is often just a few leads per day/week/month from the right target market. In this case, often the focus is on generating quality leads and the cost per acquisition for leads is very generous.

Our strategy is such circumstances is often to keep away from the mass-market and shopping channels and to target our campaigns at industry portals, together with long term niche penetration campaigns.
 

Branding

In its infancy, the online arena was largely about generating leads and conversions. As the online market matures, we are finding that more of our clients are including branding as an objective. While many of the better known search engine platforms (offering PPC and AdWords) are aimed at delivering shoppers, there are a number of other online platforms that are very well suited to deliver excellent branding for clients. Also, HTML mail campaigns that do not try to sell anything but provide support and assistance along the way are very good at strengthening the brand.

We generally suggest that our medium and larger clients include an element of branding in their online marketing objectives.