Mastering the Art of Online Marketing

The Integrated communications model

#1 – Gaining customer insights

1. Three key insights we need to know about past customers (their names and emails are in a database):

   1. Place of origin
   2. Decision-making process

i.     How long before the trip do they decide to rent a bike

ii.     Where do they search for rentals

1. Which media do they read/visit as part of their travel, vacation, visit-decision process
2. Develop a questionnaire and email it to all previous customers with an offer for a gift when they complete it:

   1. This also reestablishes their contact with Erik’s House of Custom Bikes and refreshes their email addresses

#2 – Budgets, allowables, sales

In any transactional business, it’s imperative to get a handle on our acquisition costs. In general, most direct-response marketers use 20 percent to 25 percent of their sales costs. Taking 20 percent as an example, we would then have:

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We can afford to spend as much as $26 to generate each rental.

This will then get us into the budget itself. Not knowing (yet) what the conversion ratio is for this particular case, we need to make some assumptions. (The conversion ratio is the number of people who buy a rental from the total number of who visit the site.) Because we’re thinking about buying on a cost per click basis (CPC) , we then estimate that everyone who clicks on our ad lands in our site.

It’s important to be conservative in our assumptions until we have a firmer reading of the conversion ratio.

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So if you think that only one or even a quarter out of every 100 people who land on the site actually buy, you might want to bid anywhere from $0.13 to $0.26 per click. If you think that as many as five out of every 100 people who land on the site actually buy, you could pay as much as $1.30 per click.

This is why it’s key when buying online (or media of any type) to make sure that you’ll have the mechanisms to track results.

Armed with that model, we then examine the media platform:

#3 – Communications platform

Right off the bat, we should look at two vehicles:

• Google as a transactional tool (that is, people use it to actively search for bike rentals when coming to Miami, click on a link and go to the site in order to reserve a bike)
• Facebook as a way of generating leads or at least interest in the rentals (but not primarily as a transactional tool)

A quick analysis of Google, however, points out to the need to beef up the schedule.

We generated a short (very short) list of keywords that are relevant to the rental business in Miami:

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Next page: We then went to Google Adwords to do a quick check on traffic and costs