Mail House Rock!

This post goes hand in hand with my "Direct Mail and the Internet - SEO" post, so you may want to read that one first if you haven't already.

Unfortunately SEO is not a magic bullet.  It takes time to get the rankings you want for the key words you want. 

PPC (Pay Per Click) search engine advertising helps fill the void while you work on getting better placement in the search engines, and helps fill in the gaps once you do have it.

PPC search engine ads are the ones that are listed at the very top and to the right of the organic search results.  When you place an ad here, you pay anytime someone clicks on it.  Depending on what keywords you are targeting, the cost can range from a few pennies a click, to many dollars per click.  So it's important that you choose your keywords wisely.  Design your ads to work well with your key words.  And create landing pages that also work well for those key words.

The reasons for doing this in conjunction with your Direct Mailings are the same as for SEO, so I'm not going to repeat them here.

But it is worth noting that PPC can go beyond just search engines, it can also be placed on many websites.  It will probably be worth testing that as well.  It may or may not be of value for you, but it's pretty inexpensive to find out.

If you build it will they come?

Having a website is one thing.  People actually being able to find your website is another.  Most people who are looking for what you are offering are going to use a search engine.  When they look at the results, more often then not they will click on the organic results.  Organic results are the ones in the center of the page rather than the paid ones along the side and top of the page.

If you want people to find you, you need to be near the top of the first page of organic results.

That's where SEO comes in.  SEO is Search Engine Optimization.  It's all about optimizing your web pages and your web site to be friendly to the search engines and getting them to rank you higher in the search results.

Some of SEO can be very easy to do, simple changes like fixing the titles of your web pages can make a big difference.  But if you really want top ranking.  You're probably going to have your work cut out for you.  Getting and keeping a top ranking is usually an ongoing battle that will require constant effort on your part.  There may be days that you miss having to write that huge check to Ma Bell every month for your yellow pages advertising.

Yet, I think it's probably one of the most rewarding forms of online marketing.  And, it is an important part of making your web site work well with your direct mail campaigns. 

For years we did mailings for our business and when new prospects called in we would ask them "Where did you hear about us?" the response more often then not was "In the yellow pages."  However, almost always, these were people we had mailed to.  Why were they suddenly looking for our services in the yellow pages, and why did they pick us to call?

Sometimes direct mail isn't as direct as we would like it to be.  If your piece was well written, you will have created some want for your product.  However your prospect doesn't necessarily react to that want instantly, sometimes it takes them a while.  But when they do start to look, you want to be there.  SEO is your best bet for that.

I'm going to start a new series of blog posts showing how the Internet can be used to bolster the effectiveness of your direct mail campaigns.  I've always been a firm believer that advertising works best when you coordinate multiple activities and use them in concert to bring new clients to your business.  I talked a little bit about this in an earlier post "Marketing: Active, Passive & PR."  In this series we will look at specifically how direct mail and the Internet can work together to make your marketing more effective.